What a way to be introduced to the world.
On April 9, 1968, just five days after her father was assassinated and two weeks after her 5th birthday, Bernice King found herself slumped on her mother’s lap.
There she was, the youngest of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr.’s four children, in a packed Ebenezer Baptist Church, dressed in a white dress. Her eyes were expressionless. A baby, mourning a father.
Although a photographer from Ebony Magazine captured the moment, during a 2008 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, King strained to remember the range of emotions she felt the day that her father was buried.
Moneta Sleet Jr.’s photograph of Bernice and Coretta Scott King won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, making him the first African-American man to win the Pulitzer and the first African American to win award for journalism.
King recollections of that moment was part of an oral history project marking the then 40th anniversary of King’s death. King was one of 13 people that The AJC sat down with to record their stories and shed light on the life and death of the civil rights leader.
On the April 4 anniversary of King’s death, we re-released all of the interviews as a 13-part podcast hosted by Multimedia Journalist Ryon Horne.
The ground-breaking series featured intimate conversations with family, friends and colleagues of King who each gave us a glimpse inside of the history that King was making.
Along with Bernice King, we talked to her brother Martin Luther King III and her aunt, Christine King Farris. We also sat down with Xernona Clayton, Tyrone Brooks, Earl Caldwell and Andrew Young.
But of particular value were the conversations with people who are no longer with us, like Kathryn Johnson, Billy Kyle, Juanita Abernathy, Ralph David Abernathy, the Rev. Joseph Lowery and Congressman John Lewis.
Each of the 13 episodes is available through the Unapologetically ATL newsletter, but you can also subscribe to “The Voices of King” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode.
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