Daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. dies

(AP)
Updated: 2007-05-17 09:07

The flag at The King Center, where she was a board member, flew at half-staff on Wednesday.

In 1963, when she was 7, her father mentioned her and her siblings at the March on Washington, saying: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Her brother Martin III was born in 1957; brother Dexter in 1961; and sister Bernice in 1963.

King was a 1976 graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., where she majored in theater and Afro-American studies. She also earned a master's degree in theater from New York University.

Yolanda King was the most visible of the four children during this year's Martin Luther King Day in January, the first since her mother's death.

When asked by The Associated Press at that event how she was dealing with the loss of her mother, she responded: "I connected with her spirit so strongly. I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength."

At her father's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, she performed a series of solo skits that told stories including a girl's first ride on a desegregated bus and a college student's recollection of the 1963 campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Ala.

She urged the audience to be a force for peace and love, and to use the King holiday each year to ask tough questions about their own beliefs about prejudice.

"We must keep reaching across the table and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, feed each other," she said.

Funeral arrangements would be announced later, the family said in a brief statement.


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