Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  Some of the buddies I had were Isaac, Vernon, Ralph, and John Carson, James “Chip” Carter, and Clarence “Bumpy” Cox III. I do know there were not many people I could really be “down” with at Morehouse. With Phil, I was down.

  The summer of his graduation, we went into the studio to produce a record. This was the first production where we hired the artists, we hired the musicians, we were producers. And I felt… right. I felt alive. Just maybe I had found my calling.

  We were at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1980 when Phil’s mother passed. She committed suicide. I’d seen and met her at his graduation—an attractive woman. Her name was Loretha. He remembered that she cried over the TV in 1968 when my father was assassinated. She was an alcoholic. An angel when she wasn’t drunk, Phil said, a biochemist who’d been trained at Meharry. But she was sometimes attracted to violent men. She was violent with Phil when she got drunk. Split personality. He didn’t even know he was being abused. When she wasn’t drunk, she’d tell him how much she loved him.

  At the convention, Granddaddy gathered us in a circle, and we held hands and said a prayer for Phil’s mother. Loretha had done the same thing with him when my father was killed. He said, “This is my family now.” I could relate. My grandfather brought him into the family prayer circle and prayed for Phil, so it was memorable and tragic at once, and formed a bond between us that will last forever.

  That next fall, I was on my own again. School was not working out. While my father could argue the relative merits of philosophers, I could not; but I could tell regional differences in musical preferences among the school enrollment. I took advantage of my rep as the person to work with for music. It got to the point I was so busy deejaying I had to hire out help; in some cases, had three parties going on at one time. I had mobile units I’d send out; two other guys who worked with me, plus Isaac. One is now a federal law enforcement agent, and the other is a dentist. But they all worked for K&F Sound Productions and were dedicated and loyal. We had a thriving enterprise.

  In the summer of ’80, we auditioned a couple of female singers. We even flew one girl in whom Phil knew from his earlier days at Morehouse. She’d been at Spelman a year, and had gone on to become an Ebony Fashion Fair model. We had songs written, hired the studio, engineers, musicians. The song went nowhere. This was before Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Antonio “LA” Reid, and the music industry descended on Atlanta in the ’90s. We learned the hard way. You can have the talent, the song, the arrangement, a good product, but it’s held against you if you do something independent. You’re penalized for not going through normal channels; if you’re outside the system, the system keeps you outside. It was a learning experience; same in politics, same in music. We never took no for an answer, but eventually Phil went back to New York. The next time we got together on a serious project would be years later.

  My problems with school worsened. I would try to read something, and I would struggle to comprehend it. I would have to keep trying over and over again, and even then I had trouble retaining it. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the reason why. I was guarded about admitting this challenge; I still am even now; guarded because of early recollections in ’72 when I was at the Democratic convention in Miami, as an eleven-year-old, and saw Tom Eagleton stepping down as vice-presidential nominee because he’d seen a psychiatrist and had electroshock. I thought, “Man, I’ve got to deal with these issues. People will say I’m nuts. Mother will be shamed.”

  I was in a catch-22. I needed help, but I couldn’t afford to be seen as needing help. How could King’s son be less than perfect?

  At that time, Morehouse’s administration asked students to choose a major at the end of sophomore year, as a part of the liberal arts education process. I had more episodes where I couldn’t focus, buckle down. Going to class, following up assignments, schmoozing the professors—the basic functions of college academic life seemed to throw me. Some of my professors were concerned and wanted to help, but others were happy to heap the incompletes on me, and others simply gave me F’s even when they knew I was in the process of completing assignments, or trying to. No matter what their reaction to me, everybody saw clearly that this particular King communicated well, could tell you what he thought, seemed intelligent, ran this successful K&F Sound operation, yet they couldn’t pinpoint why he was not following up. It had gotten the best of me; it was increasingly difficult to accomplish anything, and the shame of it, the shame, as Martin Luther King’s son. Hey, I had problems just getting up in the morning; chronic fatigue, where I would just sleep. I might sleep twelve hours, no problem, and always had a hard time waking up.

  Those professors who didn’t take the time to really talk to me were offended and insulted: “Well, who does he think he is?” I even had some people tell me, “Look, if you think you’re going to get through because you’re King’s son, you better think again.” But I didn’t think that. Scholastically I was bad all on my own. Figured they’d already made up their minds about me. I couldn’t articulate why I was having problems, felt embarrassed because people were comparing me all the time with my father, comparing me to this singular great finished product.

  How could I get up before children and say, “Get an education,” if I hadn’t completed mine? Even in high school, periodically I’d have some academic problems, but for whatever reason I was able to manage them better. Maybe because of the physical activity, the high school sports in some way helped me mentally, helped clear my mind. I was a walking illness without activity. Maybe that was it. I’m sure there was some practical reason why I couldn’t sustain in academics.

  I got a party-boy reputation to go along with the black sheep hook. People knew I wasn’t performing in class and they also heard, “DK’s deejaying tonight.” People couldn’t reconcile it. It wasn’t that I was dissing one for another. Deejaying paid, and academics it seemed I could not do. It was not ability for one as it was lack of capability for the other. The music was more fluid and did not require any textual analysis. The classwork required a connection between analysis and execution, a thought process. Deejaying was sensing what you and others were feeling inside.

  I enjoyed the latter because I had to learn about the different cultures too. D.C. people wanted to hear a certain kind of music— go-go music played by the godfather of go-go, Chuck Brown. The New York brothers by then wanted to hear Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, or Kurtis Blow; Chicago and the Midwest wanted to hear house or dancehall; brothers from L.A. wanted to hear the solar sound. Then you got into different styles of rhyming, early hip-hop, the stage being set; there was a connection between it and me—it was exciting, thrilling, cutting-edge, inspirational. The classroom seemed cobwebby, constricting, strangling by comparison. Music permeated me; I could read the crowd and see, “Okay, tonight I got a lot of brothers from D.C., so I’m going heavy on the go-go”; or “I got some brothers from New York, so I’m going house.” Or, “Hey, the rhyming…”

  Whatever the flow was, I felt it, I was always alert to it, you couldn’t plan that far ahead of time, so you didn’t have to read up on it. No homework. It required only reaction, a sense of what you heard, of what was going on around you, a sense of what was “out there,” in the streets, in people’s faces, in their hearts, what they responded to. You couldn’t script it out and you couldn’t learn it in a class on Western civilization. In class, it was all numbing regimentation—numbing to me, anyway. I disliked the distance of the subject matter from the culture at hand, and from my own personal history. The music made me feel good and useful, somehow, as if… as if I was making a thing right that needed making right. The only place I had problems was with the structured environment of a college classroom. I asked myself why, why did I have this problem?

  I got plenty of “Well we are very disappointed in you, young man.”

  Everybody approached it traditionally. They saw me as a failure. I always felt my symptoms and knew my problem, I just
didn’t know why. Nobody could tell me why—why I didn’t do well at Morehouse. Why I didn’t finish. Maybe this is another reason why the music, the Sound, meant so much to me. I wanted music to be worth it. I wanted to be worthy.

  CHAPTER 9

  Wrecked

  I went to work in 1982 for the Atlanta Police Department. I started out as a community service officer, poised to become a police recruit, then changed to corrections officer, all under the umbrella of the Department of Public Safety. My motivation for joining the police department was that I thought I could help people who were victims of the criminal justice system and pay my dues in public service, which I felt was a prerequisite for any elected office I might pursue in the future. I was still dealing with Morehouse too. I took some time off from school to get established in public safety, but I still had the intention of going back.

  I’d been wanting my own place, so Ralph Abernathy III and I became roommates.

  Ralph had been living in the Kappa house, I’d been in a good old dorm. We moved into a renovated duplex in the West End, on Beecher Street. Ralph initially went to Benedict College in South Carolina before he transferred to Morehouse. My mom had said, “If you don’t want to stay on campus, I’ve got a house here that’s paid for, you can stay here. But if you want your own place, you pay for it.”

  Cool, I’ll get a job. I still had K&F Sound Productions, but with me not really being at Morehouse anymore business wasn’t coming in like it used to. So my mother was saying, “If you want your own apartment and a car, I’m not going to fund them. Particularly when you’re not a great student.” What it forced me to do was go out and look around at options. The police department was hiring. They had a program called “Community Service Officer,” kind of a prerequisite to recruits if they wanted to go on into the department. I started out there. The pay was decent, you worked for the city so you got “bennies,” benefits. It was consistent work, and you didn’t have to have a college degree.

  I was intrigued with law enforcement as a child because I’d often been exposed to it; growing up, there was always a police presence, always somebody providing security, looking all tight, precise, competent, calm, responsible. When I was younger and we’d go places with my dad, there were these police escorts. I played with plenty of sirens in my day. Like that last little tour we took in Georgia, in the last week of March 1968, me and Dad and Martin. The cops might take me out and show me all the gadgets in the police cruisers.

  Meanwhile Isaac was becoming a political animal, working in different campaigns, like Walter Mondale for president, the Andy Young mayoral campaign, helping Uncle Andy get elected in 1981. Uncle Andy was a veteran of the system now; I also wanted to help that process.

  The man heading the department at that time, J. D. Hudson, was in the group of the first black policemen in Atlanta, which my grandfather was instrumental in making happen, so there was a connection. When I stood on the carpet before him, he was anxious to take me under his wing.

  But he never let on then. “Are you going to shape up, Dexter King?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes sir.”

  * * *

  I started out as a police department community service officer assigned to the identification section/crime scene unit working in a support role for those who were photographing and lifting fingerprints from crime scenes. I was then reassigned to the SIS (Special Investigations Section), which included the organized and vice crime unit, the intelligence section, major crimes unit, and narcotics. As a practical matter, I later decided to switch from the Bureau of Police Services to the Bureau of Correctional Services, which was a relatively simple administrative change in that both were under the Department of Public Safety.

  The police investigator who was doing my background check seemed befuddled—“You’re Martin Luther King’s son?” He didn’t get it. A lot of other people had that look on their faces too. “What’s the motivation here—what’s your story, King boy, like you think you can just come in here and get a job here because of who you are? You here to blow the whistle, wear a glass shield?”

  The investigator turned out really cool in the end. He overdid his job in terms of talking to neighbors, friends, and everybody. They gave me no special treatment. If anything, it was the opposite. After he went through the background check, I think he gained a newfound respect because he saw I was serious, wasn’t looking for any favors. I was ready to cut it, do the job, go through the rigors of whatever that meant I had to do. Eventually my cousin Vernon started working as an officer too, assigned to court detention.

  The academy was near the prison farm. The physical training was no problem. I’d played sports. The training we went through for corrections was not nearly as intense as for police. We had to go through it only as it related to arrest techniques and firearms training and awareness of laws and basics. It was not the full-blown extensive training that a police officer goes through, but I’d just started out on this other road. I wanted a taste before a bite, before I went the way of the late Tom Bradley, former police officer turned mayor of Los Angeles, and joined the regular force. A lot of it had to do with J. D. Hudson being supportive, working with me.

  I started off on late-night watch. I don’t care who you are, how famous—whatever as a rookie, you work graveyard shift. It so happened that I got a nine-to-five assignment soon after that, working Monday through Friday; I couldn’t ask for more, but from the grumbling I heard secondhand, some of my coworkers could. I was “J.D.’s famous boy,” they said. King’s son. Coon’s son. I heard it all, one way or another. It crossed my mind that resentment might make an officer slow backing me up. I didn’t dwell on it. Just do the job.

  It got to the point where I’d done all I could do there; the next step was to pursue promotion to superior supervisory officer, like sergeant, lieutenant, so forth and so on, and maybe I could have risen through the ranks. But as far as change to correct some of the systemic injustice, I saw ceilings. That had to come from a political or legislative standpoint, from someplace beyond me.

  But it was good exposure. Corrections was run like a paramilitary organization, like any law enforcement and public safety agency. I learned chain of command, discipline, process. It was the closest I could get to military training without being military, which would’ve been opposed to what my dad was saying. I’d always had a curiosity about the military. By exploring a career in law enforcement, I’d decided to act on my own curiosities for a change. It had a cost. I’d come by the King Center on Auburn Avenue after work, still in uniform, sidearm on, to see Mother. Some people, board members—on one occasion in particular, Gerry Allen, now deceased—would say, “How can you come in here, in this building, with a weapon?” I thought about the plastic toy guns, and Daddy.

  This happened not once, but time and time again. Some people seemed to take pleasure in repeating the same line with the same grave tones and the same half-hidden smug smile.

  For whatever reason, I was able to separate that this was a job; it didn’t make me not my father’s son. That’s always been a subconscious consideration of each of my adult acts, although I’m not clear whether I’d faced that reality then. I never had to use my sidearm. I was trained to do it, and I didn’t see it as diametrically opposed to nonviolence, as long as the greater good prevailed.

  Sometimes an inmate would step up to me and say, “If you didn’t have a badge and gun…” Typically, once they understood that I didn’t hide behind a badge and gun, the inmate changed in demeanor. Many officers did hide behind that badge and gun. Made them tough guys quick. I saw it happen. And sometimes you had to be tough. Make no mistake.

  Working in that environment did much for me in terms of learning about the criminal justice system, seeing society through that lens. When you were going to a crime scene or to a domestic situation, you were learning how to communicate, developing skills to use. When criminal, near-criminal, or violent things are happening a
round you, you have to be up on your toes. You have to think quickly; what do you do? A lot of thinking on your feet. Ultimately for me, the streets weren’t the answer. I ended up at the Bureau of Corrections. I was assigned to the prison farm, then the jail, then ultimately to the transportation unit, which handled mostly prisoner transport. It was interesting, instructive, especially when I was in the prison or jail bringing in offenders. I took on another personality, dimension, and dynamic with my coworkers and with the prisoners. The conversations I engaged in were from both sides of the bars, from a crazed inmate who challenged me for “screwing up my world, got King’s face looking at me from the other side of these bars,” to some bystander at the King Center who said, “Aren’t you Dr. King’s son? Why are you wearing that uniform and badge, carrying a gun. Don’t you preach?”

  A fellow officer once asked me, “Why are you here? Trying to take my job? You a spy?”

  Funny thing was, the prisoners were supposed to be the enemy, but in more cases than not, they were my defenders. They saw I wanted to be fair. If a real crazy came into the lockup and started cutting up, and stepped to me, the prisoners would most often take care of it. “Don’t want to mess with him, fool. He looks out for us.” I was firm, but fair. Even if the guy was a lunatic, they would “sane him up,” as they called it.

  One crazy they didn’t manage to “sane up.” This hostile inmate almost bit my thumb clean off. He was strung out on drugs, had shot his girlfriend. I was transporting him from court over to jail; he barricaded himself in a corner, and it took four or five of us to get to him. Dope had turned him into an animal. The way he was acting, he wasn’t on heroin or cocaine, it was methamphetamine or crack, probably. I reached down to lift him; he growled like a dog, his neck snapped his head toward me like a striking snake; next thing I know, I’m in Grady Hospital with an IV in my arm for a week. The doctor said, “If a rabid dog had bit you, we would’ve given you a shot, sent you home. But a human bite is the most deadly there is.”