King carries message of father’s dream
PULLMAN – Nearly 40 years after Martin Luther King’s death, his eldest daughter remembered both the father she knew and the leader the country has come to embrace.
“My father was a buddy daddy,” said Yolanda King, as she waited to take the stage Wednesday night at Washington State University’s Beasley Performing Arts Coliseum. “My memories are full of a lot of love, a lot of laughter and a lot of fun. He was a real cut-up. He was a big kid.”
In an animated performance in front of a crowd of several hundred, King paced across the stage for 60 minutes, reading poetry, acting out characters in the civil-rights struggle, and reciting her father’s words.
“He said on many occasions, ‘Everyone can be great because everyone can serve,’ ” King told the crowd.
King’s visit was the first in a weeklong celebration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Saturday will mark the 76th anniversary of King’s birth in Atlanta, Ga. While King’s performance ended in a message of hope, she emphasized that “the dream for which he died is still just a dream.”
It was only after her father’s assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., that the country truly embraced him, she said.
“Dead men make such convenient heroes,” King said. “It’s far easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”
Today, King said, she tries to convey to people the struggles of the civil-rights movement – from her father’s jailing in Birmingham, Ala., to protest marches where crowds were attacked with fire hoses and police dogs.
“They all seem like misty images from a horror story we may have read about or seen on our television,” she said. “It was not a mirage. It was live and in living color.”
Mike Tate, the university’s vice president for equity and diversity, remembered being a teenager in Detroit, Mich., watching the images of King flicker on the television. He said he saw Yolanda King once at a march in Atlanta, decades ago.
“I remember a lot of dinner-table conversations,” Tate said. “There was such great respect not only for her father, but for countless men and women, both black and white.”
In a brief press conference with local reporters, King spoke of a growing divide in the country, spurred by increasingly partisan politics.
“I do have many political differences with the current administration,” she said. “There are two camps now in this country. I hope as time goes by we’ll begin to heal.”
The crowd gave the actress and writer a warm welcome, and dozens waited in line afterward to receive autographs and buy copies of King’s latest book. King said her father had such a lasting legacy because he forced the United States to look honestly at its laws and the treatment of its citizens.
He had, she said, “a voice that even a cowardly bullet could not kill.”