Dating was difficult. Basic things. Girls would not be shy, but rather were wary, not because of me, but rather because of what— and who—I carried with me. There was one girl I kind of fell for. If there is such a thing as love at first sight, this was it. It felt natural once I started going out with her and getting to know her. Her parents were in the ministry. Her father was even a prominent minister; it was in keeping, I thought, in light of Granddaddy and Big Mama. Actually her parents were friends with my grandparents. I thought that was even more natural. I was on a high every time I was with her. It was all perfectly innocent. Then she told me she felt like she wasn’t good enough for me. She cut it off. This crushed me internally. I pretended not to care.
After that I held back. A lot of girls I liked never really gave me the time of day anyway. One said, “You’d make a good husband, but not a good boyfriend.”
What?
Another girl said, “Nooo, I don’t want to go out with you— no thank you. The FBI may be watching.” Or the girls’ parents objected on similar grounds. One father said, “I’m not burying my baby because she was standing too close.” People were afraid, or intimidated, or superstitious. “Your daddy may be looking down at us.” If it was bad for me or Martin, I can only imagine how much worse it was for Yolanda and Bernice. Just another step along the old tracks of our tears.
These experiences made me realize that no matter how much I tried to blend in, I was never going to ever be able to do it. It was part of our legacy. Some of the rejection I took personally; maybe the girls really didn’t like me. I went through that for a period, but then I realized, no, that wasn’t really it, what they said is what they meant. Some of those girls, as I got older, made a beeline back to me, because as worrisome as the whole thing may have been, the girls later realized that the idea of being with me wasn’t so bad after all. My response was, You didn’t want me then, so why now? But in truth I said it to protect myself from future rejection. I was just still numb, a jumble of contradictions.
Uncle A.D.’s daughter, cousin Darlene, died while out jogging in 1976. She vomited and choked on it and suffocated. My cousin Alfred died similarly in 1986, while jogging, of a heart attack. Darlene’s death was another chunk taken out of my grandfather—out of all of us. In the back of our minds we could not help but think, Who would be next?
Where the King Center is now on Auburn Avenue, there used to be an open lot. As a kid I played in this open lot, which was on the east side of Ebenezer Church. This is where the King Center now stands. The King Center was constructed in phases. We watched it all come up out of nothing—the reflecting pool and arched, covered walkway known as “Freedom Walkway.” Next the administration building went up, then adjacent to it, Freedom Hall was constructed. The construction of the center was rewarding to Mother, because it was her insurance that her husband’s message and spirit would endure. There were people, well-intentioned people, who thought it could never happen. Even Uncle Andy had talked about how he didn’t believe it could happen. Building a multimillion-dollar anything is going to be difficult, whether it be to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memory, or not. Many Americans— white Americans—were still trying to figure out if Dr. King was friend or foe.
It wasn’t hard for me to figure.
Jimmy Carter, along with Henry Ford, helped galvanize the effort. Granddaddy King was pivotal in raising funds for the King Center.
CHAPTER 8
This Little Light of Mine
My college training, especially the first two years, brought many doubts into my mind… I revolted too against the emotionalism of much Negro religion… shouting and stamping. I didn’t understand it, and it embarrassed me. I often say that if we, as a people, had as much religion in our hearts and souls as we have in our legs and feet, we could change the world.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Some people are fine doing the routine, following a tradition. They are capable of it, fulfilled by it, and the circumstances on which their routine or tradition was built do largely remain the same. Such was not the case for me. I think of Bernice and Yolanda and Martin, and each, in his or her own way, was fine and good following traditional steps. I was not. If it reflects badly on me, I can’t change it now. I can only go on from here. I use the comparison of the sacrament and the ceremony. To me, sacrament is what’s in your heart; ceremony is what people expect you to do about it. A wedding is the ceremony, but the love that you share with your companion is the sacrament. You do the ceremony for others, not for you; society, the world at large, needs to see proof to feel it’s validated. In God’s sight, you’re there anyway. I wanted to find a connection to something inspirational. I looked for it in a book, in a classroom, but didn’t find it there.
The fruitless search was never more evident than in my years at Morehouse College, a place of wonderful traditions, mostly. There’s no great disappointment where there’s no great love. If I was an actor like Will Smith, a hooper like Kobe Bryant, a ballplayer like Hank Aaron, a producer like Quincy Jones, I wouldn’t even have needed high school; you just go on to the next thing you’re good at, were meant to do. But being the son of Martin Luther King, Jr., put extra oomph into my feelings of failure when I didn’t follow his exact footprints.
I didn’t graduate Morehouse, but I did matriculate there. Had I been named Dexter Smith or something, and school hadn’t worked out, then I would have just left. Being who I was, I couldn’t just leave. I still felt like I’d accomplished something by the time I left Morehouse for good. It isn’t like I hate the memory. It was more a good feeling, actually. At least I knew what I wasn’t.
It started with graduating from Frederick Douglass High. That year, 1979, there were three graduations in the family. Martin graduated from Morehouse. Yolanda graduated from NYU, the MFA program in theater. “We’ve arrived!” I can still hear her chortling. She was not the same Yoki after our father passed, but she could still be exuberant.
I couldn’t join in her feelings. People were telling me, “Oh you got no choice. You’re going to Morehouse.” Great-granddaddy A. D. Williams was in the Morehouse class of 1898, the second graduating class of its existence; Granddaddy M. L. King, Sr., was class of 1930; Daddy was class of 1948; Uncle A.D. was class of 1950. Pressure never came from within 234 Sunset, yet despite that everybody assumed, “Your mom and grandpa won’t let you go anywhere else.” Sure, Granddaddy King wanted me to go to Morehouse. But he wanted Dad to do a lot of things he didn’t do either. Mother said, “Son, you don’t have to go there. But you must go somewhere.”
I had at least three football scholarships. I almost ended up at the University of Southern California. If I’d chosen USC, I could well have had a minor pro football career. The coaching and recruiting staff at USC didn’t exactly hound me, but the offer was there if I wanted it.
If I stayed in Atlanta, I reasoned there would be some obvious advantages. Football didn’t interest me that much after high school. I thought I was interested in electrical engineering.
People always ask young people, “What is it you want to do?” And in my opinion, all but the very lucky are thinking, “I don’t know, what do you want me to do?” In high school, I was in a club called JETS, Junior Engineering Technology Society; then there was also being the handyman for Big Mama.
Morehouse, like all the colleges in the AU Center, had dual-degree programs where you could take classes at AU Center and Georgia Tech. In five years you’re out with two degrees—sounded good to me. I chose Morehouse. I said, “If I stay here, I’m not going to play sports, because as far as football goes, Morehouse isn’t that well-known for it, so I figure I’m not going to waste my time fooling around.” So I got into the engineering program and quickly realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’d heard of young people who started off in engineering and ended up in law school, for instance. I didn’t feel bad about it. There was plenty else to feel bad about.
My brother had a collection of jazz LPs, vinyl, in his
campus dorm room; and he had every reason to escape to them via headphones. He took the first wave, the brunt of expectations at Morehouse for the sons of the school’s most famous alumnus. The pressure on Martin, being Daddy’s namesake, was enormous. My first exposure to Lonnie Liston Smith and contemporary jazz fusion came because of Martin at Morehouse. I hung out in his room, getting my mind expanded by Lonnie Liston Smith, vocals by his brother Donald Smith, doing “Expansions” and “Give Peace a Chance” off the Visions of a New World LP. Music lived and moved and grooved and grew inside me. I didn’t concentrate on it. It just was.
In high school, I believed if I didn’t go to Morehouse, it would be scandalous. Jet editor emeritus the late Robert Johnson; Ebony editor Lerone Bennett; Maynard Jackson; Julian Bond; Olympic gold medalist Edwin Moses—all went to Morehouse; and in attendance there at the same time as my brother, Martin, was a guy named Spike Lee. I didn’t notice him a lot, but I’d seen him. Always thought he was somehow different. Everybody did; it was an impression we all had; Spike was kind of ahead of his time. I think the word is “innovative.” Not a Big Man on Campus type. His persona was more tied to coming up with creative pursuits. Because his was not a mainstream type of persona, he had a cult following— his troupe, if you will. Always had people hanging out with him, kind of an entourage. I think he still works with some of those people till this day. I never really got to know him in terms of working in that inner circle. I was on the periphery, a high school kid, the kid brother of Martin III. I didn’t stand out. I don’t think anybody knew he was going to be the Spike Lee he is today. At that time, who was thinking that far ahead?
I was going over to see Martin at Morehouse, hanging out, picking up the campus vibe, deejaying parties still. At one point I had two or three mobile units; people working for me. My first memorable encounter with Spike was when he was directing the Morehouse homecoming coronation, like in his movie School Daze, only this was real; I helped do the sound, audio engineering, even though I was still in high school. Spike Lee finished Morehouse as I was about to enter freshman year.
I noticed the barrier still existed, even at Morehouse; the barrier was that people didn’t know how to relate to me and Martin, whether to be down home, or serious, or more formal. I didn’t know how to be with myself, after always having to deal with “What does the family of King represent?” We don’t have royalty in this country, as African Americans. Don’t have it or need it. But maybe, like most people, secretly we do kind of want it. We want our version of it. We need positive myths; all people do. One thing that got through my thick head at Morehouse was that some of the students and faculty needed to see Martin and me as scions of the royal King family. But that also meant that those people didn’t really want to see or get to know the real us, two young men trying to figure out who we were like every other college student in America. I tried to do well, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Or maybe it wasn’t in me. Better to have people think I didn’t try hard than the alternative—that somehow I didn’t have the equipment.
College life was still fun. Even I knew that. I managed to be less inhibited, worried less about the responsibilities of being Dr. King’s son. I wanted no part of it. I’d seen what it got you. And so I became the black sheep of the family. Didn’t fit the mold. Doing my own thing and being unconventional. Deejaying, and a preacher’s kid—PK, that’s one name I got called at Morehouse.
Isaac came to Morehouse a year after I did. I never went to him specifically with any of my frustrations. We were always in each other’s heads, so I didn’t have to. His situation was similar to mine. After all, his mother, Aunt Christine, taught at Spelman. Seemed as if we both had to live out other people’s ideas. We were constantly talking through things because we were dealing with some of the same issues. Some people seemed to be successful at college and yet became what we called “professional students”—there were a number of them at the AU Center schools, who, for one reason or another, wound up staying in undergraduate school five, six, seven, eight years. Not that they were stupid; they liked being there—the three squares, the casual academic environment, the new batches of coeds every year, the safety of the college campus and the avoidance of the workaday world. They were in their own way institutionalized. Others may have bright minds, but the regimentation of academia, for one reason or another, doesn’t reveal their strengths. I don’t know why, but academic regimentation didn’t reveal me. I did know that. I wasn’t the first one in history. I happened to be the first in my immediate family.
It was not the best idea for me, to follow the family male scholarly theme in the first place. We—Isaac and I—should’ve gone away to school. Maybe to the army. But the armed forces weren’t options for me. The son of the prince of nonviolence, an infantryman? Wouldn’t do. Then I was constantly being asked, “When are you going into the ministry?” Or “Pre-law? Hm?” We come from five generations of ministers. Granddaddy’s mother and father had been functionally illiterate; when he first came to Atlanta, there was not a high school or library where blacks could go. Like most black southern families, mine believed vehemently in education, believed in it because for so long they were denied it, in some cases they could trace back only a generation or two privileged by it. It affected Martin III at Morehouse. He was called out as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s son lots of times, but with the piano playing of Lonnie Liston Smith consoling his ear, he made it through.
Aunt Christine was on the faculty at Spelman. Granddaddy had served on some of the boards of the institutions in the AU Center, namely Morehouse and Atlanta University. Since Daddy’s death, there had been plans to build a bronze statue of him in front of the Morehouse administration building. Eventually the memorial was built.
Maynard Jackson had been mayor of Atlanta. Now Andy Young was gearing up for a successful run at being mayor. Contrary to what segregationists always said, Atlanta was still there after integration—not only was it there, it was also bigger and better than ever.
In 1981, my third year at Morehouse, Uncle Andy ran for mayor and was elected.
I had always thought that I might pursue a career in politics; maybe even become Georgia’s first black governor. I was interested in the arena, and it would serve the family legacy. But later, I saw how my brother got treated in politics. He was a Fulton County commissioner in 1986. Isaac was his campaign manager. I helped on his campaign by organizing a fund-raiser that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., attended at which the singer Jennifer Holliday performed, at the home of Michael Lomax, the chairman of the Fulton County Commission. Martin did get elected and served two terms. I admire Martin. I know deep down he wants to help humanity. I know he cares. But I saw how he got dragged through the mud because he wasn’t Daddy. I said, “Not me.”
I did have a need, as my father did, to be understood and gain understanding. I had trouble getting it out of books, as my father did. He didn’t do it so much at Morehouse; he was an average student there, didn’t take off academically until he went to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. I can’t fathom how he did it, analyzed and translated philosophers like Immanuel Kant or G. W .F. Hegel or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard or Henry David Thoreau or Reinhold Niebuhr. He had done it.
I wanted—needed—to contribute in life. Like most young men, I had not yet found my mission and I didn’t have the same interests Daddy had. By the time he was twenty-five he was ready to pastor; by the time he was twenty-six, political machinations or not, back door or not, his idea or not, he was the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, and everybody from Mahalia Jackson to Kwame Nkrumah to Dwight Eisenhower to Jack and Bobby Kennedy to Richard Nixon was in his sphere of influence. I needed space to experiment and figure out who I, Dexter, wanted to be. But this need seemed to always put me at odds with a society, and well-intentioned people, who wanted me to be what they wanted: the second coming of a King. Outside of the family, I didn’t even have a friend, let alone a best friend.
I thi
nk there were only a few people that Isaac and I bonded with. One was John Carson. He was from Stockton, California, a town outside San Francisco. His plan at the time was to follow in his father’s footsteps. His father was a doctor. John was like me— didn’t make friendships easily. Another person with whom I bonded was Phillip Jones. I met him in the spring of 1980. There was a girl I especially liked. He was dating her, only I didn’t know it. I was trying to date her. He didn’t know that. I’d frequently visit her at Spelman. As I was coming out of my campus dorm one day, this guy approached me. I didn’t know he was coming to read me the riot act. He said, “Say, what’s up with you? Do you know you’re trying to talk to my lady?”
I took the initiative.
“Hi, I’m Dexter King. And you are?”
He told me later the way I did it was disarming. Said he couldn’t bring himself to even say anything about his girlfriend. We hit it off, became friends instantly, spent almost a twenty-four-hour period nonstop hanging out, though he was a senior and I was a freshman. The girl was from Tennessee. Very attractive lady. Don’t know what happened to her. Phil and I spent the day and night talking and walking around. We went to the music room and he played some of his songs on the piano, asked me what I thought of them. We hit it off because our interests were aligned; we were musically inclined. We could talk on any level; that impressed me because there weren’t many I could do that with. He seemed to warm to my interpretations in the field of music. It’s funny, I can say that and see it clearly now, but back then, I didn’t even think of music as an option of what to do with my life because I knew people would not have found it “acceptable” for King’s son. It was not an academic discipline as I had approached it. Phillip was a musician, a good composer, and I liked that we could talk about issues, politics, growing up, hanging out; there was substance, but also an ability to have fun. The fun was important; the seriousness was draining; there’s a side of me, a little boy that wants to play, wants to be expressive. Being around Phil, hearing him, watching him, helped that side. There’s a process of composing that teaches you about life. I wanted to learn about life.
Growing Up King Page 12