Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  Some months after the trial was over, in March of 2000, we as a family got a good public thrashing in the pages of TIME magazine. A columnist who did not attend the trial wrote an opinion piece called “They Have a Scheme: Can Martin Luther King’s Heirs Handle the Truth?” In this article, he stated that the Justice Department was completing its review of new evidence coming out of the Jowers trial, and was about to conclude that my family’s “allegations” were not “credible” and provided no basis for criminal charges. “In other words, they are hogwash,” he said. He described it as “a wild-goose chase to satisfy a tragically deluded family.” He called the civil trial in Memphis “a fiasco,” said Jowers changed his story so many times “it ought to come with a version number, like computer software.” He then for some reason also impugned the character of Judge Joe Brown: “Ballistics testimony was provided by Judge Joe Brown, the TV judge, who has no expertise in the field.” As for the jury verdict ordering Jowers to pay $100 in damages to the King family, he continued, “King’s younger son Dexter exulted that the verdict was ‘the period at the end of the sentence’ as far as the King family is concerned, it’s their story and they’re sticking to it no matter what DOJ says… The real mystery is why King’s heirs, who more than anyone should want the truth, prefer to believe a lie.”

  Did this columnist believe that Ray was the gunman? Why was his tone bitter toward us? Were we making it harder for him, somehow? Why did those who’d only written about the Civil Rights Movement believe one thing, while Rev. Lawson, Uncle Andy, and so many others who actually lived the Civil Rights Movement believe otherwise? And, last but not least, if it had been the columnist’s father who had been murdered, would he be so utterly dismissive, so protective of the status quo?

  After the trial I was on a high. Mon Ami felt like she might get the man back she originally fell in love with, not the baggage of the past three and a half years. Don’t know how it ended up going toward questions of commitment again, but I guess, after all, that’s where it always goes. After the trial we went on retreat to the Four Seasons Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. I went through a lot of emotional changes, but the thing that made me open up to her was also the thing that made me withdraw. I’d created a wall around me and my emotions. I suppose that it’s been a real sob saga for me.

  Finally she said, “This is it.” I looked at her and said, “Fine.”

  After the trial I started to smile, to be more carefree. That’s when she started talking about whether it was a good idea to be committed. I knew Ami wanted more. She said, “I’m not going back to the same thing. Been there, done that, read the book, saw the movie, heard the CD.” It would be four years we’d been seeing each other in April 2000—four years, off and on.

  I told her I wanted and needed to move out to L.A., to be alone to clear my head and heal, live out there for a while, to see if I wanted to live there permanently. Six months. Then I could make a move. I’d been drawn to the West Coast when I’d stayed with Michelle Jenkins in Pacific Palisades, back in 1992.

  Mon Ami looked at me and said, “Oh? Is that right?”

  I was moving to L.A. to start the new millennium. She said she’d help me find a place. “If that’s what you want to do, go on with your bad self,” she said. There was something about the way she said it. This is where she got off my merry-go-round. “We’ve come this far, but if you don’t feel we can commit yet, that’s cool,” she said. “I support you, when you’ve got an issue I’ll listen, if you ever feel you’re ready, you call me and if I’m available, I’m available. But I would doubt it…”

  There had been periods of time when we broke up before— when the Ray meeting was coming up, where I didn’t want her along for that. I said I’d call her afterward. Four months later she still hadn’t heard from me. One time we were going off on vacation to an island. I was telling her to play it by ear two days before the plane took off, because I was all tied up with Pepper and all these other things. I asked her to call one day at five, and she did. I was going through something and barked at her, “I can’t deal with this and you right now,” and hung up. Yet we always hooked back up. Those days were gone. Frankly, after the trial, and the resort at the Four Seasons in Arizona, things threatened to get more serious between us. I talked to Mother and my siblings about it—about what would they think if I ended up asking her to marry me. She tried on engagement rings. The whole bit. But I kept saying to her, “I need the time away—in L.A.”

  “After what I’ve been through with you, I guess I do too.”

  Every couple of days early in January 2000, Mon Ami would prod me, even though she knew I was thinking of going away. “So are we still committed?”

  “Um. Yes. We’re committed to each other’s well-being, for sure.”

  “How does that feel?”

  No answer.

  “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m doing okay with it… feels… good.”

  “Okay, then.”

  In a few weeks, as my deadline for moving out to L.A. approached, at the end of January 2000, I said, “Ami, I’ve been thinking hard about this. I still have issues within myself I need to resolve. I don’t want to put you through any more hurt or pain; but I think I just need to make my move and follow this other thing and—”

  “Where are you going right now?” she asked.

  “Right now? Home.”

  “Home? What home?” she asked.

  That stung. I came over to her place the next day. Had a basket of flowers, this big bottle of wine, good intentions, standing at her front door. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “People are staring. Please let me in,” I said.

  She let me in and said, “You can sit over there.” She sat across the room.

  “Dexter, do you think that what we have is not normal?”

  “… I don’t know.”

  “The very thing you think you can’t have—you have it now, you’re living it, and when you’re not thinking about it, you’re doing good at it. Dexter… I love you.”

  “… I don’t see why you would.”

  “Because for some reason God has given me the ability to see not what other people want me to see, not what other people have told me, not what you want me to think about you. I see who you are and I’m hoping somehow I can help you let that out. I don’t know if anybody knows what they deserve. People know what they want. If L.A.’s what you want, so be it. Uncover the ghosts within yourself. You need to be okay with yourself in order to be okay with being with anybody else, or you will never see what you have in me, because you don’t truly see all of who you are.

  “I don’t know what the future holds,” she said. “But I think what this has done is help you find a key to unlock a door that was closed a long time ago that can never be closed again. You can never go back. At the King Center, there is a centralized system now, things move quicker, easier. More corporations are involved. If the properties are sold, that’s only land. What the Center does can never be sold, because what you do is preserve the legacy. You have put together a structure to bring the state holiday commissions under your leadership. There are King Centers around the world that should be tied here. The future is good if you communicate the message. You have to be the one telling the story, if you want it told right. So, that’s it.”

  “Ami, I’m going out to L.A. to live. Give me six months…”

  Mon Ami looked at me levelly. “I ain’t gonna give you six seconds. Oh, I’ll go out there with you, help you find a place, help you set it up, always be your friend, but as far as waiting here for you— the hell with that. You ain’t getting six seconds after that, let alone six months. Let me tell you something else. You have gotten all that you are going to get, because I have given all I have to give to this particular type of relationship. I love you, I’ll always be there for you, as a friend, but I ain’t giving you six seconds if you move to L.A. You want me to wait another six months while you… what? Are you out y
our mind? No. No. No. It will not happen. No.”

  “Well, then… Ami… I… no… It’s a shame you can’t be more understanding.”

  “Now you’re really trying to get my goat, Dexter King,” she said. “You can’t sell I’m not understanding to anybody that knows our situation. You can’t give that away. If you move to L.A., Dexter, then you ain’t getting six more seconds from me, let alone six months. But know what? It’s okay. Because you will have lost the best thing that happened to you. Proverbs are full of stories about that, you fool. You would have lost the best thing that has happened to you, but that’s okay, because you know what? We’ll still be friends the rest of our lives.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Free at Last

  Free at last, free at last… but free to do what? Go where? And with whom? I get off the plane and enter into a brilliant blue day in L.A. I find my place easily. It’s a place on the beach. I sit in the sand with my pants legs rolled up. I listen to the roar of the waves breaking in off the Pacific. They’ll always be there. They’ll never stop. As long as there’s an earth, a sun, a moon, and the tides. I walk along the beach at the ocean’s edge, getting my feet wet, thinking, “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.” I know what sinking sand feels like. Feels like— this. I see a boy of six or seven. We resemble each other, I think, as though we might be related, although I don’t see how this could be. But he looks at me expectantly, as if he knows me, or wants to ask me something. I try to ignore him. But I find I really can’t…

  Later I meet with the Man from CBS. His name is Leslie Moonves, head of the network. We are meeting about the CBS case. The estate lawyers won a reversal before a federal judge. “We could keep paying lawyers,” I said. CBS has deep, deep pockets; we do not. They could take it all the way to the Supreme Court, I remember what one once said. Copyright and intellectual property are the real estate of the future. I am about to repeat this to Mr. Moonves. But I wait. He is smiling.

  I say nothing. We will agree to agree today. He is a nice and pragmatic man. He is in a good mood. He has authorized a show called Survivor. And it has done very well for CBS, soundly beating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. At the time, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on the ABC network, was not only the number-onerated show—it was four of the top five shows. ABC was riding high, and heads hung low over at CBS. Ratings are important because they dictate the rates the networks can charge advertisers. Leslie Moonves decided to green-light Survivor on May 31, 2000, after two previous denials. It beat the pants off Millionaire. Survivor had been getting 25 million viewers—1.3 million more viewers than all other broadcast networks combined. Leslie Moonves was therefore happy. And I was getting there.

  A few months later the CBS case is settled. Mr. Moonves and I have dinner. His Survivor is still going strong, outdrawing everything but Super Bowls. He’s ecstatic. We discuss prospects. He turns reflective; the first Survivor ends in September. I wanted to tell him I wish his version of Survivor could go on forever. I don’t tell him that I’ve waited all my life for my version of Survivor to end.

  I go to Los Angeles Lakers NBA basketball games. They are the playoff games, conducted with a great intensity. The games are held near downtown L.A., at the Staples Center. The Philips Arena in Atlanta has better sightlines. But here at Staples Center, I feel I am in a better seat.

  The Lakers, with young stars Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, are going for the NBA title. I’ve been invited to the game by producer and television personality Byron Allen. We’ve hit it off. He is smart and savvy. He owns the TV shows he is involved with as a personable host. He has innumerable contacts. He hears buzz. All the buzz. He’s been talking to this hot African American female screenwriter about Mother’s book, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. Byron says he loves it. I love it too. Hollywood people are good at agreeing. It is a fairly new experience for me.

  We sit near Paul Allen as the Lakers play the Portland Trail Blazers. Paul Allen, he of Microsoft wealth, owns the Portland Trail Blazers. Steven Spielberg sits near him. Spielberg nods knowingly, spreads his mouth in a smile, and cocks his head in artistic appreciation when one of the Trail Blazers makes a play, even though he is a Lakers fan. Paul Allen is one of the primary investors in the DreamWorks studio run by Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is also present. Mr. Katzenberg says something wry about “knowing who to cheer for.” I shake hands with Mr. Spielberg. He seems a nice man, and, on balance, a good man. He was given an NAACP Image Award, came to get it, spoke well. Maybe things will be all right in America. Maybe…

  Many stars are at the Lakers playoff games, stars so big the world knows them by first names only—Dustin, Denzel, Arnold, Jack. I get lost in the crowd. No one pays me much attention. The anonymity is like a warm blanket. I go back home. Out here I can do what I want, maybe even be whoever I am. Why not? Michael Ovitz was also at the Lakers game. He once ran the Creative Artists Agency, and served as the president of Disney for a short stint. In the early ’90s, Michelle Clark Jenkins and I talked with him about prospects for a movie about my father. He told me he was recently on a podium with my brother, Martin, said Martin spoke before he did, wowed the room, left a tough act to follow. I smile…

  Funny how it broke down—Yoki and me, child No. 1 and child No. 3, in California, in “La-La Land,” trying to make our way, Yoki as an actress; Martin and Bernice, No. 2 and No. 4, in Atlanta, in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, August 26, 2000, at the “Redeem the Dream” rally, on the Mall, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, almost thirty-seven years to the day from the March on Washington, where Daddy gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. He wanted his children and all people judged by the “content of their character,” not the color of their skin. Thirty-seven years later, Martin III, gray-bearded now, told the gathered crowd, estimated at 100,000, that the dream hadn’t been fulfilled—not when an unarmed black man named Amadou Diallo could be shot forty-seven times by a group of five New York policemen who emptied the clips of their automatic pistols into him for holding up his wallet in the foyer of a Bronx apartment building.

  The “Redeem the Dream” rally was organized to protest police brutality and “racial profiling,” the bad habit of many law enforcement jurisdictions of stopping and harassing motorists because of skin color. The March was co-organized by the SCLC, of which Martin had been installed as president—it is the activist arm of what could gently be called our father’s legacy.

  Earlier in August, Martin had written a letter, as president and chief executive officer of the SCLC, to Cedric Dempsey, president of the NCAA, National Collegiate Athletic Association, requesting that the NCAA move three of its basketball championship game sites from Atlanta, because Georgia uses the Confederate battle flag as part of its state flag. The current governor of Georgia, Roy Barnes, said, “It’s a difficult issue, about which discussions are ongoing,” and then I thought back to past Georgia governors, from Lester Maddox to Ernest Vandiver to Jimmy Carter. They all had to react one way or another to three men who had been named Martin Luther King. “The right one got the name,” I thought. I’m proud of my brother Martin Luther King III.

  On the Friday before the rally, Martin and Rev. Al Sharpton had met with Attorney General Janet Reno at the White House to both ask and demand that the federal government withhold funds from any police department or state highway patrol agency that practices abysmal and often deadly “racial profiling” or shows a pattern of brutality. For example, the Prince George’s County Police Department, in the year leading up to the rally, had shot twelve people, killing five of them, and two other black men had died of injuries incurred while in police custody. A black motorist was five times more likely than a white motorist to be stopped “on suspicion,” or general principles, on the New Jersey Turnpike, and on a stretch of I-95 in Maryland, African Americans, who constituted 17 percent of the motorists, were 56 percent of those stopped and searched. My older brother, Martin, said that we were all “
still awaiting the day when we can raise our children to respect police first and fear them last.”

  The loudest reaction at the rally was reserved for two women named King on the podium. Bernice, her face a study of burning concentration, got the loudest ovation when she spoke. She has the Way, a knack, the voice, power, the deep spiritual conviction my father had. She was the one who got that best. She introduced our mother to the crowd: “She helped etch my father’s name in the consciousness of the nation. While raising four children, she helped raise a nation.”

  Words on a page do not do Bernice’s oratorical power justice. I hope you get a chance to hear her sometime. Somehow, I think maybe you will. Hearing her brought tears to my eyes as I watched these serious activities from three thousand miles away; I called up Yoki, for comfort.

  Yoki not only comforted me. She also steered me into acting. It was something I had always been interested in but never felt free to try, being a “son of King.” I was approached by the producers of The Rosa Parks Story, about an acting job, portraying my dad. It was a CBS TV movie, with Angela Bassett in the lead role. The whole experience of it was a real treat.

  When I first got out to L.A. I met with one of the producers, Howard Braunstein, and the writer, Paris Qualles. At the time they told me they were developing the story and the script was being written, was almost completed, and would I be interested? Would I consider playing my dad? The person with the expertise was Yoki. I asked her, and she said, “Well, why wouldn’t you?” Before she said that, I was ambivalent about it, torn. They came back to me later and said they had gotten the green light and they really wanted me to consider it. They wanted me to portray him. Nothing big. Mostly it was a speech scene, and a couple of other scenes. But I would have to act. Yoki said it was a good opportunity to test the waters, see if it was something I wanted to do. She didn’t say “to see if it was something I could do.” She assumed that if I wanted to do it, I could. Good kind of sister to have. Initially I had reservations because I never wanted it to appear that I was seeking to portray my dad, didn’t want to seem like I was putting myself on some kind of pedestal, having critics saying and thinking I was being self-serving in some kind of way, just still very sensitive to some of the negative criticisms of the past. Finally I gave myself permission to do it, to explore my options in life like other people do.