Civil Rights

"My father was sent to do a very specific job. . . . He was a God-sent man and when his work was done he moved on higher. . . ." —Yolanda Denise King

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.

One of the youngest heroes of the civil rights movement, John Lewis moved to Atlanta in 1963 to head the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

On Sunday June 30 1974, Alberta Christine Williams King played “The Lord’s Prayer” on the organ of Ebenezer Baptist, the church where her father, A.D. Williams, her husband, Martin Luther King Sr., and son, Martin Luther King Jr., all had served as pastors.

In the segregated South where the brothers Young grew up, the YMCA was much more than a place to work out. With restaurants, hotels, auditoriums, and convention centers off-limits to blacks, the Y—which was not integrated until 1963—served as a gathering place for meetings, concerts, and educational programs.

He is almost always just Hank. He is recognized wherever he goes and people want to touch him, get his autograph and pose for pictures with him. He was 20 when he began these sojourns, swatting No. 1 in 1954, when Eisenhower was President.

In December 1962, Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. ordered barricades to be built across two Atlanta streets to discourage black citizens from purchasing homes in an adjacent all-white neighborhood.

On the night of Thursday, April 4, 1968, Louise and I were in our bedroom at home watching television and reading the newspaper when a bulletin flashed on the screen: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., SHOT IN MEMPHIS.

One after another social commentators have watched Martin Luther King Jr.‘s children and wondered if one day one would assume the mantle once worn by the "king of peace" himself.

Lowery, a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, is nothing if not outspoken.