Three decades after the charismatic civil rights leader's death by an assassin's bullet, King, now a 43-year-old TV and film actress (1996's Ghosts of Mississippi, the 1978 miniseries King), finds reminders everywhere of the father she lost. Last September, for example, she was shooting a scene for Selma, Lord, Selma, airing Jan. 17 on ABC, in which she plays a Selma, Ala., schoolteacher caught up in the bloody 1965 clash between black civil rights marchers and white club-wielding police. As she watched actor Clifton Powell deliver a sermon in her father's distinctive cadences, King found herself in tears. "It was really moving and brought it all home for me," she says, sitting in her three-bedroom L.A. townhouse, where she lives alone.
"We both hugged and cried at the end of the day," says Powell. "It was very powerful for Yolanda," he adds, "because as a child she was never there. Because of the danger surrounding her parents, she was kept away from most of the action." King elaborates: "My parents were afraid that people might try to hurt us to get to them." She says she and her three younger siblings—Martin III, now 41 and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Dexter, 37, who heads the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change; and Bernice, 35, a lawyer and Baptist minister—"had to read about the events in history books like most kids."
Despite Yolanda's father's absences, "a very strong bond developed between the two of them," says Coretta. "He was so happy because when she got older he could talk to her." Still, they had their differences. At about age 7, Yolanda was interviewed as part of a Mike Wallace profile of her father. "I want to be an actress," she told Wallace, only to be immediately contradicted, she recalls, by her father: "She wants to be a singer like her mother." Yolanda laughs. "He saw acting as being flighty."
Not so her mom. "I told her that whatever she decided to be I would help her become," says Coretta. When Yolanda was 9, Coretta enrolled her after school in the Actor's & Writer's Workshop, then Atlanta's only integrated theater company. As the child of celebrities, she had long been "constantly scrutinized," she says. "Onstage I could be more myself."
Plunging into plays also helped her escape the pain of her father's death. ("I didn't stop and really grieve," she says.) But in 1972, when Yolanda enrolled at Smith College, campus black militants were attacking King's doctrine of nonviolence. "I found myself defending my father on a regular basis," she says. She went on to earn an M.F.A. in acting from New York University in 1979.
Yet her father's legacy continued to tug at her. In 1982, the King Center, which honors his life and work, opened in Atlanta, and Yolanda began making speeches to promote it. But it wasn't until Jan. 20, 1986—the first Martin Luther King Jr. Day—that she was fully able to mourn him. "All I could think was that I'd rather take Daddy out to dinner than celebrate this holiday," she says. "I cried and screamed and was really angry, but I had to get it out, and it was very healthy."
It was also a turning point. "I finally began to ask myself: 'What is it that you really want to do in your life?' " She dived back into acting, specializing in characters drawn from black history, such as civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks (King) and Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz (Death of a Prophet). She plans to coproduce and costar in an NBC miniseries about her mother, Shabazz and Medgar Evers's widow, Myrlie.
Though never married, Yolanda, who has a boyfriend she declines to name, hopes to someday settle down. "I want to have children, at least one," she says. But she remains, proudly, Dr. King's daughter. "My father could be bigger than life behind the podium," she reflects, "while at home he was this little teddy bear, so gentle and warm." She smiles. "I know he's very pleased with what I've done."
Michael A. Lipton
Ulrica Wihlborg in Los Angeles
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- Ulrica Wihlborg.
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