Tag: Bernice King

Three former U.S. presidents, civil rights leaders, family, and members of John Lewis's staff all gave speeches during the funeral service before Lewis was buried at Atlanta's South-View Cemetery.

"Go home," Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms implored Atlanta protesters. "I cannot protect you out in those streets."

On Sunday, Congressman John Lewis announced that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. On Twitter, colleagues and fans expressed their support.

Tyler Perry marked the opening of his new, 330-acre Tyler Perry Studios at Fort McPherson with a gala that brought a monumental number of stars, including everyone from Oprah to Hank Aaron to Beyoncé to Andrew Young.

Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, two missionaries, traveled south to educate newly freed people after the Civil War. With the financial help of John and Laura Rockefeller, Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary is now known as Spelman College, one of the country’s most prestigious historically black colleges.

Partnering with the NFL and the King Center, the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality (RISE) hosted its fourth Super Bowl Town Hall on Thursday, bringing together players, NFL execs, owners, and Bernice King to talk about criminal justice and activism, and what place they have in America’s favorite sport.

"This day was no accident," said Bernice King. "[The dedication] had to happen at this day, at this time, with everything that's happening in this nation because once again Martin Luther King Jr. is providing a sense of direction as we deal with the current controversial climate."

Bernice King was only an infant when her father delivered his famous “Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but she can recite its lines with authority. And so, welcoming civic leaders invited to the Carter Center for a discussion on education and civil rights, she said she would like to focus on the portion of the speech about the “red hills of Georgia.”

We sent three writers in three different directions—northwest, east, and south—from the heart of Atlanta to search for the soul of Georgia, in 22 small towns.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, his youngest child was just five. She had spent little time with her father; he was so often on the road—jailed in Birmingham a few weeks after her birth, addressing 200,000 people on the National Mall when she was five months old, marching from Selma to Montgomery when she was a toddler.