Growing Up King (15 page)

In 1976, I transferred to Frederick Douglass High, a predominately black public high school. Nearly three thousand students
attended Douglass. Martin had by then graduated from Galloway and gone to Morehouse. Bernice and I left Galloway a year after
he did; I wanted to go to Douglass because Isaac went there. Bernice left Galloway because I did. Isaac was going to Douglass
for his second year. I joined Isaac in entering tenth grade. Bernice went there as an eighth grader.

I also wanted to play football; there was no football team at Galloway.

For you to know how important football was to a young man at the time in Georgia, think of how important basketball is to
a young man in an inner city today—then double it. Or go to Atlanta today during football season and see how much coverage
is given over to high school football in editions of the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The high schools get more ink than the NFL Atlanta Falcons. Then, and probably now, there was a social order and acceptance
to playing football, a communal sense I desired, wanted to be a part of, wanted to experience.

My mother seemed to be open to Douglass. After all, my father had gone to Booker T. Washington High, another public high school.
I don’t remember any resistance one way or the other. Douglass. We knew it was a good school academically in terms of its
rating; it was west, over on Hightower Road, now renamed Hamilton E. Holmes Drive after one of the two black students who
integrated the University of Georgia, at the foot of Collier Heights. I think she was comfortable with Douglass because she
knew my Aunt Christine would not be sending her kids to a school that was underachieving. Aunt Christine was a college professor
at Spelman. Still is.

Douglass is on the west-by-northwest side of town. If you’re going toward Six Flags, I-20 West. The surrounding neighborhood
had an interesting mix if you could discern it; though it was nearly 100 percent black, you still had kids from all walks
of life, from the projects to the wealthiest black kids in the city from Collier Heights. People also started moving into
Cascade, which had been all white traditionally; white flight came when a few blacks started moving in. Pretty over there.
Not built by blacks. Collier Heights was founded by blacks.

The Atlanta I grew up in at the end of the 1970s was a busy city. Growing. Since John D. Rockefeller had bought all this land
on the near west side of town for Spelman, Morehouse, and Atlanta University, and since the Methodists had moved Morris Brown
College from over Auburn Avenue way to the AU Center, along with Clark, the west side was different from most inner cities.
The colleges themselves brought a professional class—instructors and administrators. Movement outward toward the suburbs on
the west side was overwhelmingly black.

Something was always being built in Atlanta in those times. Topographically, streets changed to accommodate construction.
A two-way street became one-way to accommodate growth. Highways expanded. I was always out traveling. I drove to school the
spring of my last year as Atlanta turned luxuriant, verdant green. I appreciated that the city was well-kept. Clean. You didn’t
see a lot of trash on the streets, things that make a city seem run-down. In Atlanta, I always felt I was in a clean, fresh
place and a pretty place just purely from an aesthetic point of view. In terms of attitudes… that was another story.

I always saw football as about being a member of a team—a way of being accepted and getting respect. I always saw the sport
as a chance for a camaraderie I hadn’t known for years—being able to interact on a level with my peers while growing up. In
high school, I wanted to identify with others my age, not be apart from them, to be down with the fellows, the peer group.
What’s more important to a teenager than to act, think, and dress like those of his generation? Very little I know of. I think
football gave me that.

Maybe it was a macho thing too. I know it was a tough experience; some of the players didn’t readily accept me, not at first.
Maybe it wasn’t because I was the son of Martin Luther King, but because I was fresh meat, somebody who wanted to join and
had to be initiated. They tested me because they wanted to see if I was real. I would always be tested to see if I was a real
person or the saintly son of a saint; it’s one of the burdens of my particular legacy. When I first got to school, the B-team
defensive coach took a liking to me and put me on the squad. Coach Montgomery gave me a chance at running back and linebacker.
He saw potential in me. Put me on first team. When the season ended, he brought me up to the varsity. All advanced players
were brought up. The B-team was JV.

I was in tenth grade. It was the first day in the locker room with the varsity football team at Douglass High, the Douglass
Astros, me, Dexter King, one of the royally cursed King children—I was a ’Stro! Just as I was feeling I was part of this great
thing, here come the three biggest guys on defense. They jumped on me and basically “initiated” me—let me know who was boss.
I then also found out that I could hold my own too; that sometimes when you fight back, it hurts less than if you just let
someone pummel you. Afterward, through the shiners and bloody lip and everything, the smiles were warm and sincere and the
experience led to a different kind of bond. After that episode there was a newfound respect in their eyes that I had earned
by my own actions, not from the passive notion of being the son of the prophet of the Civil Rights Movement.

They said, “He real. He King’s son, but he real. He ain’t plastic. He bleeds. I seen him bleed.”

I ultimately became captain of the defense as middle line-backer. Yet that awareness was always there. “Hey… son of Martin
Luther King!”

There was no getting away from it.

Football wasn’t the whole school experience, though. Not everybody rallied to football necessarily to embrace me. Some used
it to ridicule me, critique me, maybe to see what I was about in responding. I was for them intriguing. Sometimes I felt humiliated;
the way they’d chide me in the cafeteria or hallway. Walk down the halls and you could see them pointing, whispering, not
caring to be discreet. “Martin Luther King’s son,” pointing. Another one would loudly say, “No it’s not.” “Yeah it is.” “Ain’t.”
“Bet a dollar that’s him.” And then they would walk over to me and stop me and say, “What’s your name?” Just like that. No
hello. No warm fuzzies.

I might say, “I’m Dexter, nice to meet you.”

“Yeah? Dexter what?”

“King.”

“You lying. Your name ain’t no King. Your name King f’real?”

When I’d say, “I’m Dexter King,” the other one might say, “No you’re not.”

“Yes I am.”

“No, you’re not, ’cause if you was, you wouldn’t be here with us.”

I’m saying, Hold it. Saying that to myself later on, after the fact, because I’m speechless in the situation as it is happening.
I don’t know how to respond. For the longest time I walked around thinking that in the predominately white environment at
Galloway School I wasn’t totally accepted, and had to debate whether Maynard Jackson was qualified, or whether Hank Aaron
deserved to be mentioned with Babe Ruth, or whether black people can do math and science, endlessly proving myself, having
to always take a “black position” on a “black issue.” Now here I was at Douglass, thinking I’d be comfortable, only I was
having to prove myself again. From then forward I realized I didn’t really fit in anywhere.

Even some of the teachers at Douglass High might say, “Your father was up above all of us.” I’d say, “He was one of the people.”
But they’d always have the last word. About my father. This would become a life trend—people telling me what my father was
and wanted, having the last word about my father. “One with the people. Not one of the people.” He did everything he could
to have us belong, and yet people would not let us. We were trying and Mother was trying. It wasn’t phony baloney. And it
was a long time before I started to say to myself, “So what? So what that you don’t fit in anywhere? Who does? What’s so great
about fitting in places that need changing anyhow?” But those weren’t my thoughts back then.

That happened throughout school, into college, even today: being a part of a “living legend,” as if people don’t know how
else to relate to you. I didn’t have many peers I could hang out with because where do you find somebody else who’s the son
of a pope? Where do you congregate? Where do you go?

When people judge you, it’s subjective. You are always being compared to this more-than-a-man, once-in-a-lifetime phenomenal
presence. So who’s to determine what’s right and wrong about you? Nothing is right enough. Conforming was a problem. Conform
to what? Compared to what? When I started deejaying parties in high school, of course people found that odd. I should be doing
serious things. Couldn’t do something because I was good at it or enjoyed it, but weren’t these the privileges of youth? In
photography, I shot the homecoming events, parades. Sometimes I’d get in trouble because I’d pass photo proofs around and
end up in the assistant principal Mr. Hill’s office. This gentleman later became principal at Douglass for many years. Mr.
Hill took his job seriously, and more so because he had the children of Martin Luther King in his charge. He sat me down and
said:

“Ah, Dexter. You know you are in violation of the Sherman antitrust act. You have a monopoly on selling photographs and you
are disrupting class.” And I mean, he was serious.

Photography, deejaying, and football all helped me commune with my peers. Without those activities, I might have been even
more lost. I got to feel normal, even if it was from behind a camera viewfinder, a turntable, or the face mask of a football
helmet. That was as close as I could get. My senior year, we won the high school football championship of our region. We were
a good team, one of the top teams in the state of Georgia. We went to the state championships and got to the quarterfinals,
where we lost to Griffin, Georgia. In Atlanta, our region, we were number one. High school football was significant to me;
I contributed to something real; I believed my father might have been proud; I had a chance to spread my wings at Douglass,
clipped as they were. I found out I was athletic. I joined the track team, and put the shot. I made the tennis team, played
singles and doubles. What else could I do in life?

Since his name was Isaac N. Farris, Jr., and since he bore small resemblance to me, he could disappear. He said he had the
best of both worlds, access to the world of notoriety, but at the same time he could step back from it. Especially in the
earlier years. Everybody in school knew who he was, son of the sister of Martin Luther King. And things were happening. Somebody
would make a death threat against us, cops would have to come to the school, things of a strange nature. Happened more than
once. Who would be next?

This began in ’74, before I came to Douglass. Around the time of my grandmother’s death, we got a kidnapping threat. This
was the era of the Patty Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in California. All kinds of kidnapping threats
were going on. Hank Aaron’s daughter was threatened with kidnapping while she was at Fisk, right when he was threatening to
break Babe Ruth’s home run record. An editor at the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
named Reg Murphy was kidnapped. The King family got a threat. Police posed as teachers at Galloway.

We grew up in an environment of house and church bombings, shootings, murders, jailings, beatings. We were desensitized in
that way; we knew there was always a possibility of danger, but we didn’t walk around looking over our shoulders. Not consciously
anyway. My brother had just started to drive, and when we’d ride places, there’d be a cop car following us around, which was
awkward. You go to a high school function, you’ve got a cop car following you. It cramps your style. And there was always
security around; how awkward it was to live like that. Subliminally, you begin to think people were out to get you.

Dating was difficult. Basic things. Girls would not be shy, but rather were wary, not because of me, but rather because of
what— and who—I carried with me. There was one girl I kind of fell for. If there is such a thing as love at first sight, this
was it. It felt natural once I started going out with her and getting to know her. Her parents were in the ministry. Her father
was even a prominent minister; it was in keeping, I thought, in light of Granddaddy and Big Mama. Actually her parents were
friends with my grandparents. I thought that was even more natural. I was on a high every time I was with her. It was all
perfectly innocent. Then she told me she felt like she wasn’t good enough for me. She cut it off. This crushed me internally.
I pretended not to care.

After that I held back. A lot of girls I liked never really gave me the time of day anyway. One said, “You’d make a good husband,
but not a good boyfriend.”

What?

Another girl said, “Nooo, I don’t want to go out with you— no thank you. The FBI may be watching.” Or the girls’ parents objected
on similar grounds. One father said, “I’m not burying my baby because she was standing too close.” People were afraid, or
intimidated, or superstitious. “Your daddy may be looking down at us.” If it was bad for me or Martin, I can only imagine
how much worse it was for Yolanda and Bernice. Just another step along the old tracks of our tears.

These experiences made me realize that no matter how much I tried to blend in, I was never going to ever be able to do it.
It was part of our legacy. Some of the rejection I took personally; maybe the girls really didn’t like me. I went through
that for a period, but then I realized, no, that wasn’t really it, what they said is what they meant. Some of those girls,
as I got older, made a beeline back to me, because as worrisome as the whole thing may have been, the girls later realized
that the idea of being with me wasn’t so bad after all. My response was, You didn’t want me then, so why now? But in truth
I said it to protect myself from future rejection. I was just still numb, a jumble of contradictions.