Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  My grandfather died in 1984 of heart failure. As I’d gotten older, I’d begun to appreciate him more. And then he left us. This played into my scenario that everybody close to me ultimately gets taken away. All these events caused me to start looking for root causes and cures for any symptoms I had. I was a walking symptom of something. I didn’t find any answers until I looked for myself, did my own independent research. Things you finally know and directions you finally go in are often not the things you are told to do, but things you find out for yourself, through living, and through, somehow, not dying.

  So it was the combination of things—the wreck, leaving the Bureau of Corrections, and Granddaddy’s death—that made me realize that I needed to take control of my life. I was the only one in my family who had been given a reprieve when faced with certain death. I had been miraculously delivered out of the clutches of “Who would be next?” and I was intent on finding out why I was saved.

  CHAPTER 10

  Answers from Within

  I began to try to learn if my problem was me, or something inside me.

  I didn’t know what was going on with me internally, from a medical/chemical and neurological standpoint. I was disabled and tortured by something, all through those years since I’d been born to Mother as her “battlefield commission,” delivered in post-traumatic stress syndrome. It hadn’t been just the bombing when Yoki was less than two months old, it was bomb after bomb: those churches and residences in Montgomery after the success of the bus boycott; Uncle A.D.’s house in Birmingham in 1963, when he was ministering there. The bombers didn’t rest on their laurels; they bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four little girls in Birmingham, and they kept bombing or burning. How many small rural southern black churches were burned in the ’90s? Thirty? At times, in the ’50s and ’60s, it seemed they wanted to bomb us back to the Stone Age.

  Izola Ware Curry had stabbed my father in the chest at a book signing in 1958; there’d been a trumped-up income tax evasion trial in Montgomery; stress on stress until my parents moved to Atlanta in 1960; conflict between my father and grandfather over the direction Dad should take, whether or not we should live in Vine City; presidential politics of 1960; turmoil before Dad’s being jailed; how he was jailed, sent to Reidsville State Prison.

  Mother endured all this. After delivering me in January of ’61—because I was premature and on the advice of the doctor, who was concerned I would not get enough nourishment—she took a shot to stop the flow of milk, so I wasn’t breast-fed. Doctors didn’t know to recommend breast-feeding over formula then, although Mother could handle it. She had breast-fed Yolanda until the house in Montgomery was bombed, then they moved so much and there was so much stress that she went to the bottle. Martin was breast-fed for months then supplemented with formula. I was a straight formula baby, all formula all the way. So was Bernice. No mother’s milk at all. Some things you can’t overcome. Not without help. We need what Mother Nature intended to give us. Later, I’d suffered undiagnosed problems, physical ailments, maladies—you might call them shortcomings. I had food allergies, environmental allergies, a cornucopia of ills.

  I knew I had issues in terms of health and wellness as it related to my moods changing. I just subconsciously chose not to do anything about it. I’d known since Mother took me to the sleep disorder clinic in Memphis when I was twelve. We went to Memphis Baptist Memorial Hospital, where they wired me up. I had wires coming out of my head, out of my neck, my chest, the EKG, the brain-wave monitors, all that. Almost from the minute I fell asleep, I entered the REM stage, right away I was dreaming within fifteen minutes—not normal for most. Most people enter the REM stage much later. I experienced rapid eye movement almost immediately. They couldn’t figure out what it meant. It’s one thing to fall asleep and go into the REM stage immediately. That might be an exception; but I’d go to bed at night when I was six, seven, eight, nine years old, wake for breakfast, eat, and a half hour later, I’d be back to sleep. Even though I’d just slept eight hours, I could fall asleep again after breakfast and enter the REM stage.

  What developed was this pattern of dreaming all the time. I’ve told you my dreams were fun and engulfing and engaging—and often about my father. It’s almost like I didn’t want to wake up because when I was in the non-dream state, things weren’t as pleasurable or secure. I would get upset when I was rudely awakened or disturbed, because I would feel like I was being pulled away from my dream.

  Then as I got older I had problems deciphering, concentrating, focusing, sitting for any period of time. Not until I was twenty-eight were my troubles diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; people like me can read a thing over and over and still find it hard to comprehend. Even when I’d kept rereading, it wouldn’t sink in because I couldn’t focus. I’m not sure when the doctors became able to diagnose it. I know they couldn’t in the 1970s, when I was twelve and thirteen and having the sleep problems, the concentration deficit.

  In my younger years I had whined a lot; the whining seemed to be a need for attention. I’d ask repetitive questions, the same question over and over again: “What did you say? What did you say?” We were visiting cousins in Louisville and they broke me of this habit by putting me in a blanket and running me up and down the hallway until I stopped. “Aunt Naomi,” I’d repeat the name, “What did you say, Aunt Naomi, what did you say?”

  These experiences, and that of my cousins calling me “Count,” as in day-sleeping vampire, not making it through Morehouse College; not being able to hold classroom concentration—were all tied up together. Triggering much of it were food and chemical allergies and environmental factors.

  Now, once you accept that this malady exists—and it took a while for me to accept it—and when you research the people who experience this, you find that their diets, certain foods, certain metals, products, food coloring additives, affect them. For me it was a host of things, from dental materials in my mouth to my favorite foods. But I didn’t know I had an illness. Today they call it the “invisible disability.” Somebody’s got one leg shorter than the other, people can see it, you allow for it. This is something where people say, “Oh, it’s all in your head. You’re making it up.”

  Environmental toxins aren’t made up, neither are those unlucky people who react or who are sensitive to them. Environmental toxins and allergies can do bizarre things to you.

  I was walking in the wilderness. Back when I grew up, they really didn’t know how to address those kinds of things. They’d just say, “Those are bad kids.” There was a welling up of shame in me when I found out. But it’s just a learning disability. I’ve been told that public relations mogul Jerry Della Femina told Modern Maturity magazine in 2000 that as a youth he couldn’t read a map, do simple addition, subtraction, multiplication. He compensated by being creative, seeing things differently. When I heard that, I knew it was what I’d been feeling for years, was why I loved working with music so much, but was never able to say—I guess because I didn’t know it was all right to say it. It was hard for me to focus and concentrate, so I had ups and downs. I tended to be attracted to things that didn’t require a lot of attention, but that wasn’t a firm rule, because when I was working in public safety, it required focus, and for whatever reason, I was able to maintain it. So I went through periods where sometimes I was able to manage it better than others, but the real turning point was when I went vegetarian. For good.

  The change finally came, or started, when we were sitting in the reviewing stand of the King Day Parade in Atlanta, in January of 1988. I had to leave and go to the hospital because of an acute headache pounding away, throbbing, there on Peachtree Street.

  I left there with what my maternal grandmother would call “the blind staggers,” a headache so debilitating you can hardly open your eyes. The emergency room physician told me the only thing they could do for me was give me painkillers and a decongestant. He said if it didn’t work they’d have to drill a hole in my sinu
ses to drain them. That did not sound like fun. I said, “I have a better idea.” I remembered something I’d heard from Dick Gregory, who wasn’t one of my old “uncles” from childhood but rather a figure we’d met and befriended. He’d said something about diet, sinus, dairy products, things that cause mucus and buildup and sinus congestion. I said I was going down to Dick’s place in Florida, Fort Walton Beach. I was in bad shape. The pain was so bad I’d been given Tylenol 4 and it didn’t help. So in near-desperation I went down to Dick Gregory’s for two weeks. The first week, I stayed in bed and fasted. Juice and water. Within five days, the sinus condition subsided. I regained strength, felt different. Once Dick got there, we talked. It was like a retreat. He met with me, talked to me about diet. From that day forward, I made a commitment, I was only going to eat raw foods, preferably vegetables. I could only sustain it for about a month at that time, but I felt so good not eating cooked food that I didn’t want to mess it up. I felt better— euphoric, clearheaded. I wanted to stay on that plane.

  I learned to have faith in holistic methods; maybe the efficacy of any system is believing in it. The traditional system was just going to further medicate me, or drill holes in my head, not deal with the problem, but only the symptoms. All this came full circle on January 30, 1988, my twenty-seventh birthday. I became a strict vegetarian. And from that day forward, I started learning and evolving more and more, health-wise. I learned as I met with alternative health practitioners, dealt with spiritual counseling, and delved into other aspects of holistic alternative health care. And I finally began to learn about me.

  I found I have a neurological chemical reaction or chemical illness that affects me from time to time. It was worse when I was younger, but today my altered way of life makes it manageable. Traditional medicine doesn’t have a clue as to how to address this “invisible disability”; a lot of the ADD kids you hear about today are called Ritalin kids. Doctors tried to put me on Ritalin as a child. Mother wouldn’t allow it. Some medication is worse than the symptoms.

  I developed a passion for health and nutrition. My unconventional, nontraditional, unorthodox approach raised questions. People looked at me funny. I’d hear, “Brother from the South talking about he don’t eat no meat? He’s crazy.” Some think “vegetarian” means you don’t eat red meat. No, it means you don’t eat chicken or fish either. I’m a strict vegetarian. My diet consists of fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes only, and has for the last fifteen years now. Back then I also began to take blue-green algae supplements. Blue-green algae is a sea vegetable—like any green or vegetable except it grows underwater; it’s very nutritious, has all of the minerals and vitamins. It’s considered a whole food complex, which means that it has all of the nutrients that I would get if I ate a meal. Our American diet is devoid of a lot of enzymes and vitamins and nutrients that help the system fight off disease.

  Now, as Americans, we’re so brand conscious that we don’t even read ingredients. I began to read every label of everything I picked up. I wanted to know what’s in it, because nine times out of ten if there was a word you don’t know, that’s something you don’t want to put in your body. I got a book on additives and ingredients so I could look up things. I happily, joyfully turned to eating raw vegetables. Finally, something that could be done to help bring me focus. I felt myself getting fitter, less congested, more alert. Alive! I’d eat fruit, but too much fruit wasn’t good for me either; sugar made me lightheaded. I didn’t want to risk this new-found clarity.

  When you’re born, the foundation you get from breast milk is key. I didn’t get the foundation laid properly. But the human body is so magnificent that it will overcome deficiency. It might not end up as strong or as resilient as a body that got it all early. I had to compensate. I didn’t know this until I did my independent research.

  All that time before then, I was physically and mentally foundering. Before, people didn’t know; they just said, “Dexter’s lethargic. He’s in a daze. He’s off in the ether. What’s he on?”

  An American diet is so full of things that our bodies weren’t necessarily meant to handle. Having a weak foundation in its ecosystem, my body wasn’t fighting things well. My tooth enamel was compromised, partly from the formula I’d been fed. I’d get cavities, craved sugar, sweets. Once you get that sugar in your system, you’re corrupted. You always want it. We’re an addicted population. Again, some people can handle some unnatural things better than others. My body craved naturalness. I didn’t choose vegetarianism to make a statement. It was survival. I was going downhill fast. If I had not become a vegetarian, I might not have made it this far. It was through alternative medicine that I found answers. The compassionate part of me wants to enlighten people, but there is a conflict: I’ve seen what happens when you try to change not even a whole society, but just one person. Though my lifestyle has much to offer, I can’t put it out there as a cause that I will champion. It just simply has saved my life.

  What bothered me the most about Granddaddy’s death is that he still had a sharp mind, but his body gave out. It gave out because of conditions most think are typical, expected in the aging process. What I learned in my research is it’s not a given, not absolute: you can affect aging. You can grow old and not be in pain, not suffer. Diet, lifestyle, stress, and emotions must be managed. If Grand-daddy had tried the diet and lifestyle I adopted, he might’ve lived longer.

  My mother is a strict vegetarian. Has been for many years. I brought her into it. It was like pulling teeth getting her to change, at first. “Look, if you change now, you won’t have those problems later,” I said. “Hmph,” she replied. At first. Her dietary changes have significantly improved her health. If my grandfather, with all his wisdom, along with a lot of other great elders in our society, had only cultivated better dietary habits so they could have been around longer, who knows what they could’ve accomplished? We say “prime” is one’s youth, but it’s later, I think. We put our elders out to pasture because their bodies break down. I didn’t get a chance to share my dietary revelations with Granddaddy. As I’ve said, we lost him to heart failure. But I could help Mother. My maternal grandmother in Alabama, Bernice Scott—her mind left, but her body was still there. Good country living helped her have a better physical ecosystem. Alzheimer’s took her mind. She died at ninety-one. My grandfather Scott died eventually, at age ninety-nine. So maybe Mother will be around awhile too. We need her.

  CHAPTER 11

  Legacy

  It was 1985, the year after my grandfather died, that we prepared to celebrate the first national King holiday in January 1986, which, after much effort and acrimony, was signed into law by then-president Ronald Reagan on November 3, 1983.

  I wanted to give my own special gift to my father and his legacy. I felt that if it involved music, my passion, I could hopefully take his message to younger generations. I decided to produce a record. I called Phil in New York.

  He had the musician contacts, he was a talented composer, he could help me pull it together. Phil agreed, and immediately started getting together a group of artists—rappers, initially, which at the time was very avant-garde and controversial. But we believed that rap and hip-hop would become very influential in our culture. We felt it was the crest of a new wave and that if we could do something cutting-edge like this with the song, kids would listen and maybe even hear the ideas of my father. The first person we approached was Kurtis Blow. Kurtis got excited, wanted to involve other people.

  These were the beginning days of “rap,” initial stages of the whole cloth of hip-hop as a new culture. We went to a young music entrepreneur named Russell Simmons and got some of his artists involved, including his brother’s group, Run-DMC. It just snowballed from there. Initially, it was to be a rap song, but once the New York artistic community found out about it, they wanted to get involved. So it evolved to a rap/vocal/R&B song—really a chorus, with rap. Every day a new verse was written to accommodate another artist who had agreed to help, wh
ether it was Stephanie Mills, Whitney Houston, Tina Marie, or New Edition.

  We had to turn down LL Cool J, which I regret in retrospect. We didn’t have enough room. He was just starting out. Today I can’t believe some of the people we had to turn away. We had fifteen or sixteen acts, doing it on a shoestring. Studio time was donated.

  We got various groups to help us until a record company picked it up. We jumped out there on faith. At the time I was the director of the office of special events and entertainment at the King Center. It seemed like the best place for me to continue to nurture my love of music and the arts while still attending to the serious mission of Mother’s life after my father’s death. The King Center is the embodiment of the work and sacrifices of my family, and my soul needs to support it. But my heart always dreamed of a life in music.

  I was by then viewed as the black sheep of the family; this project didn’t reverse that perception. I don’t mean I was viewed in a bad way—I wasn’t a rebel, it was just that I was more out there than some thought I should be. I was visible socially—informally versus formally. I didn’t follow the path of being groomed, accredited, blessed. I’d moved toward the King Center, toward the legacy, for the first time with this job. I didn’t want to let down my family, but I still wanted to be me.

  This record project helped to raise money for the King Center and to create awareness around the new King holiday. It was exciting, going into the studio, recording these artists. Until this day, when I see Michael Bivins, or any of the former members of New Edition, they remember. Ricky Martin was in Menudo then. It was like a “We Are the World” production. We had many of the hottest young artists, and the music video was financed entirely by Prince. Music industry veteran Clarence Avant served as our senior adviser and contributed financially. Polygram eventually picked up the record for distribution. However, we soon realized that we had set up the deal in a way that did not provide enough financial incentive for the record company to aggressively promote it. In hindsight, we would’ve been wiser to have structured it so that everybody got a little bit of something, profit-wise; that would have been more of an incentive for them to push it through the channels, and onto many more radio station airplay lists.