Son. Brother. Husband. Father. Friend. Reverend. Activist. Revolutionary.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fulfilled many roles during his 39 years of life. His wife, Coretta Scott King, his children and close friends continue to uplift his legacy.
As commemorations honor Dr. King and his 96th birth anniversary on Jan. 15, The Final Call presents memories and reflections from those who knew him and those who admired him.
Humanity and humor
Many of Dr. King’s close friends and family remember the visionary for his great sense of humor.
“We often wish that … [the] masses of his followers could know him as we knew him. He had to be very serious in public, and people get the impression that ‘you’re always serious and meditating.’ But Martin was just so human,” Coretta Scott King said in a 1978 interview posted in the archives of Chicago’s PBS station.
When Dr. King was outside of the pulpit, “He could be as playful as a six-year-old child,” she said. He loved people, and he kept people laughing.
In a March 2017 interview with the media organization Life Stories, civil rights leader and Black broadcast pioneer Xernona Clayton described her good friend, Martin, as “the funniest man alive” and a person who always wanted others to feel comfortable.
Former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young and Dr. King were both in their 20s when they met. Mr. Young described his friend as easygoing and humble.
“He was a good basketball player, because he was very quick, and he could shoot with either hand. But he grew up in the Y,” he said in an interview with journalist Andy Serwer in August 2022. “The YMCA in those days had pool tables and ping pong tables, so he could shoot pool and he could play table tennis. He was just an all-around good guy, and he got along with everybody.”
Coretta Scott King acknowledged the various sides of her husband, the humorous King but also the serious King.
“He had that serious moral bent, and he could only go so far in the direction of doing wrong because he was constrained to a point. And I think that there’s no question that Martin was God’s gift, again, to America and it’s too bad that America has not yet appreciated that,” she said during the 1978 interview.
Dr. King was determined. His son, Martin Luther King III, board chairman of the Drum Major Institute, described him as someone who never gave in. To MSNBC in April 2023, he said his father taught him how to navigate through conflict without being destructive.
“He taught us how to engage, how to disagree without being disagreeable, and we’ve got to reintroduce that in our society,” he said.
In Part 23 of his 58-week lecture series, “The Time and What Must Be Done,” the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, described Dr. King as a “bold preacher who confronted the reality of White racism.”
“Martin Luther King, Jr. was marching toward a goal. He was evolving toward a goal and was assassinated before he reached it. Where would Dr. King be today, if he were alive, to walk among us?” he questioned.
His last year
Hardship defined the last year of Dr. King’s life. He was ostracized and harassed after delivering his April 4, 1967, speech, “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” at the Riverside Church in New York City. Ms. Clayton described that speech as Dr. King’s darkest moment. After the speech, people stopped supporting Dr. King.
“He would say to those of us who were close to him, ‘I cannot understand this. I don’t understand why and how people who knew me didn’t quite understand that I can’t condone killing in any form,’” she recounted.
Though Dr. King knew his stance would be controversial, he did not expect so many to oppose his view.
“I know for certain, because he talked to me, that it had bothered him deeply that the nation had turned against him. As a matter of fact, I can say now that he never got over it, because this was January that we were talking, and he was assassinated just a few months after that. And I always tell people he died of a broken heart,” Ms. Clayton added.
During a meeting shortly before Dr. King traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. King complained of a migraine headache. The Reverend Jesse Jackson remembers him saying, “I don’t know if I can go any further.”
“He said, ‘Maybe I should just quit, give up, stop.’ And I said, ‘Dr. King, don’t talk that way.’ It was such a solemn thing. Then he said, ‘Well, maybe we can turn a minus into a plus and go on to Memphis and on to Washington and have sit-ins to end the war in Vietnam,’” Rev. Jackson said during a May 2019 interview with journalist Graham Bensinger.
Former Ambassador Young recalled the evening Dr. King was shot. Mr. Young had returned to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis after getting permission in court to march with the sanitation workers. Spirits were high, as Dr. King laughed and joked around. He started teasing Mr. Young and threw a pillow at him.
“I never seen him that kind of playful, so I threw it back at him. And everybody picked up pillows and they started beating me down between these two double beds, and it was like 12-year-olds,” Mr. Young said.
Shortly after, Mr. Young and others waited outside the motel as Dr. King prepared for a dinner. Then, the shot rang out. Mr. Young ran up the steps to see his friend lying in a pool of blood.
“He talked about death all the time, and he was always joking about death. And he said death is the ultimate democracy. I don’t care what color you are, how rich you are, how poor you are, you’re going to die,” Mr. Young said. “He had no fear of death,” he added.
His legacy
Family and friends attribute the continued legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his wife, Coretta Scott King.
“I call her the architect of the King legacy,” their daughter, Dr. Bernice A. King, CEO of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, said in a January 2022 interview that aired on FOX Soul.
In an interview with Atlanta’s NBC-affiliate station in January 2024, Martin Luther King III commended his mother for founding the center just two months after his father’s assassination, for her work in making “Martin Luther King Jr. Day” a federal holiday and for keeping and maintaining historical documents.
During a Roland Martin Unfiltered episode, Mr. King III spoke out against the way society has sanitized his father.
“There are hundreds of speeches of dad’s that people have not dissected, and certainly between the latter year ’65 on, Dad was hated. He became the darling once he was dead and couldn’t lend his voice.
Then everybody, ‘Oh, we love Dr. King,’ but in his life, people hated him, including people in our own community,” he said. “He wasn’t killed because he was organizing folks to be able to sit in the front of a restaurant and go to a movie. He was killed because he talked about a radical redistribution of wealth.”
The radical King is not talked about, and “we are afraid of the revolutionary King,” he added.
His sister, Dr. Bernice King, lifted similar words at the commemoration of her father’s 94th birth anniversary in January 2023. She described how many people quote King around the holiday and perform acts of service, but most refuse to live King 365 days a year.
She criticized the narrative of a “comfortable and convenient King” that allows people to ignore unjust systems and the triple evils of racism, poverty and militarism.
“The convenient King is easy to embrace because it requires no fundamental change on our part. But to live the true and comprehensive King is inconvenient,” she said. She urged people to transform into reflecting the spirit and heart of Dr. King.
Minister Farrakhan described Dr. King as an evolving giant. “To reduce his revolutionary development to ‘I have a dream’ is to kill the idea that was ingrained in Dr. King that he kept evolving toward, where we are today.
Dr. King was killed not because he had a dream, but because he opposed the war in Vietnam and saw the hypocrisy of those saying to Black people that we should be non-violent toward White people and then let them send us to be violent in Vietnam against a people who did not do anything to us,” he said in an October 2004 message at Morgan State University.
“When he started to use his celebrity—which they created for him—to work against their ideas, then they decided that he had to be killed,” Minister Farrakhan added.
Dr. King’s legacy lives on in his granddaughter, Yolanda Renee King, a 16-year-old activist and daughter of Martin Luther King III and Arndrea Waters King.
“My wife and I are instilling values in her. She may decide I don’t want to do this, but the hope is that she will be willing and want to take up the mantle, just knowing who she is,” Martin Luther King III said on the Roland Martin show.
“I’m not concerned about the legacy being preserved, because I’m sure Yolanda Renee—and she’s going to develop a cadre of others to work with her—is going to do her part to make sure that her grandfather and grandmother’s legacy lives eternal,” he said.
Last year, at age 15, Yolanda released a book titled, “We Dream a World: Carrying the Light From My Grandparents Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King.” She joined CBS’s program last January to discuss the book and her path.
“From a young age, my parents never made me do this. Obviously, they told me about my family, the glory of my family and the work and my grandparents, but they never forced me to do this work and they never forced me to follow his legacy,” she said. “From a young age, I’ve always been concerned about these issues. I’ve always wanted to do something.”
She expressed how the work of her grandparents “serves as a blueprint in the eradication of poverty, violence, discrimination and racism.”
“Now with that information, we have to do something,” she said. “I think we have all the resources. Now we have to do the work. Now we have to take action.”
