Growing Up King (24 page)

I wouldn’t call it sexism so much as obliviousness; the same factors that might have helped cause my grandfather and his sons
to take up the calling were impacting her, as a woman, a black woman in the South. Many mothers and grandfathers of earlier
in the century in the South wanted their sons and grandsons to “hear the Call,” to take up the Bible and the way, because,
first, it was one of the few ways a man could speak his mind and then still be held safe against powers that would kill or
otherwise mute a “Negro” who was outspoken about the heinous crimes being committed against those of his flock, and, second,
it was a way to make a living, a way out of no way, before segregation ended. Some of the same factors held true for women
nearer the close of the century. But Bernice was, as my grandfather would’ve said, a woman who was “God-troubled.” He died
aware of her calling. Wish I’d been there when Bernice told him, to see the happy look on his face.

For whatever reason, it was Bernice who got the Call; not only that, it was the right Call, according to her talents and gifts.
She had an ability to reach her zenith through preaching, to move an audience via spoken word, to minister, even though she
claims to have no memories of our father. Granddaddy was dead. He’d found no successors among his grandsons.

I was in the congregation for Bernice’s first sermon. She gave it at Ebenezer, on March 27, 1988. She called it “Getting above
the Crowd,” and based it on the story from the Book of Luke, about Zacchaeus, a short man who climbed a sycamore tree, the
better to see Jesus. Fittingly, she gave this message in the sanctuary at Ebenezer, where I had seen my father and grandfather
speak so many times. Bernice had fasted for seven days before she gave the sermon. She seemed to me to be in another realm
that Sunday. She is unique. Bernice is singular, unto herself; her individualism would be a strike against her later on.

We all were there that Sunday—Mother, Yolanda, Martin, me. A light shined in Mother’s eyes, a light I had not seen in a long
time, as it did in the eyes of many of our cousins and extended family. When Bernice spoke that day, I could see she’d inherited
much from our father—certain hand gestures that startled me in their familiarity. I’d not seen them in so long—a certain tilt
of her head, a lilt in her voice, strategic pauses, drawing out words—
seeeen
—or making multisyllabic certain words, the opening twist of humor, even the looks on her face that were exactly the kinds
of looks that my father had. It was eerie. I think Bernice was oblivious to these similarities.

Bernice came in knowing how to preach, but she needed to learn how to pastor. Rev. Roberts advised her to take her apprenticeship
elsewhere, because she had grown up in Ebenezer and might benefit from outside experience. She took his advice and went to
minister at the Love Center at Greater Rising Star Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta. She became an assistant to Pastor
Byron L. Broussard, and she dealt primarily with youth and women’s ministries. It seemed strange not to have a King somewhere
in the pulpit in Ebenezer.

My spiritual crisis had begun with my father’s death, and continued with my uncle’s death and my grandmother being gunned
down. Ever since, whenever I have had a question of faith, Bernice has helped show me the way.

What about my other siblings? Were they proud of Bernice, yet disappointed in me? I’m sure they were caught in a difficult
position. I think they never understood why I had to leave the King Center. Mother didn’t really understand it, and they seemed
to follow her lead. There may have been a feeling that maybe I walked away from it because I wasn’t mature enough to handle
the pressure, didn’t have the stuff of Kings. I didn’t ask and they didn’t say. Later, once they saw subsequent events and
we’d talked about it, they understood. We couldn’t always talk about it initially, it was just so heated that it became more
of a divisive conversation than a productive one. So we just kind of steered clear of it as a family. I think there was this
feeling that maybe I brought some of this on myself, but I never felt that way.

Bernice confided in me that she had also had dreams. She dreamed of our father, back when we had that retreat in the north
Georgia mountains in 1988 and Mother asked if any of the four of us would volunteer to succeed her at the King Center. Bernice
dreamed that Daddy appeared and expressed concern about Mother and the King Center; that she needed time for herself. Suddenly
Bernice saw me appear in the dream and at that point she awakened from her sleep. She later concluded I was the one to succeed
mother.

Bernice told me she’d had another dream since our retreat. In her dream, Daddy was sitting at his desk. Bernice was sitting
across from him. He reached across and held her hands. Then she said I came in, and our father smiled and looked at me and
said, “Dexter,” and put Bunny’s hands in mine. Bernice said in her previous dreams about our father, he was chasing her, gliding
after her. But now she had no fear. When she told me that, it humbled me. Scared me a little too.

Bernice asked me to trust the Bible. I told her I didn’t know it as well as she did. Now I had an opportunity to learn more
about it, through my eyes and hers.

I came back into the King fold around ’92. I told Mother I still wanted to have involvement with the family, with the legacy,
but from another perspective. Consulting with my best friend Phil, I began to focus not on the King Center but the King Estate,
the business and cultural side of the legacy. They were separate— licensing, intellectual property, creative projects—an open
book. Bernice left the Ebenezer fold. I knew I must work with the King Estate, must not give up on the legacy, must be true
to it. The question was, how?

M
y mother had always dreamed that a big, important movie would be made about my father’s life to honor him and his message,
much like the movie
Gandhi
had honored its subject. In 1992, Spike Lee released
Malcolm X
through Warner Bros. studio. The film was launched amid a firestorm of publicity. Everywhere I went people asked, “When is
a movie about your father coming out?” Not to take anything away from Malcolm X’s story, but I had to agree that a movie about
my father made sense. Movies are central to our culture—they’re the way into the collective consciousness and a way to continue
for each generation. At one time it was books, radio, newspapers, billboards. Now it is television and movies. And music.
We had the story. We had the fascinating character. We just needed a way in.

For what I had in mind, I’d need help, big-time—somebody who knew the ins and outs of the filmmaking business. Two associates
would back me. One was Phillip Jones. He became key to virtually all the plans of the King Estate and Intellectual Properties
Management (IPM), the company he set up.

The other was Michelle Clark Jenkins, a New Jersey native who had graduated from Princeton in 1976 and had gotten a law degree
while working in New York for Time Inc. She had been a business affairs manager for HBO, and had worked in several divisions
in what was later to become Time Warner. I first worked with Michelle when she was at HBO and she produced the video for the
King Holiday record. Later, she would come to Atlanta, at my request, to run the King Estate.

In 1990, Michelle Clark Jenkins took a job offer from Bob Johnson, head of Black Entertainment Television, to go to L.A. and
develop films at Tim Reid’s production company. One of the first projects they worked on was
Once upon a Time When We Were Colored.
She kept in contact with Phil, and he aligned her with me after
Malcolm X
came out. That was how we came to be in L.A. together, trying to get a film made about my father.

“So we’re talking biopic,” Michelle said. We had nerve, thinking it could be done. But Michelle knew the terrain and thought
we had a good shot. Through her I learned that the film industry felt there had been so much out there on the subject of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s that the story had been told. We felt there hadn’t
been enough told.

There’s never really been a feature film made about my father.
King
, a ’70s TV movie with Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson, was only adequate. I have respect for Cicely and Paul as actors, and
Ossie Davis, and the other key people who were in it, but the story was too one-dimensional to me. That production was an
Abby Mann made-for-TV movie in 1977. The overall texture was lacking—a lot of it had to do with the technology then. Just
seemed like it was a little rushed, maybe.

We were on the set for that. It was shot in Macon, Georgia, and all of us children had some extra roles. Yolanda actually
had a speaking part. She portrayed Rosa Parks. That turned into an uneasy experience because what the finished product ended
up being was not what we’d believed it would be. Abby Mann was famous for the long-running TV series
Kojak.
Paul Winfield played Daddy. Everybody I’ve ever seen portray Dad, they sort of overdo his piety. It’s like they’re forcing
a presence on you; it’s actually their perception of that presence being forced—that’s not what he was. That wasn’t his approach.
His was natural, a presence that spoke for itself. My point is, we just felt something was needed: the right person had to
be involved, and we needed not only to have somebody who got it creatively, but who could also get it done. This was twenty-five
years later, a new day.

The whole purpose of the many trips I made to L.A. during this period was to identify a director, a studio, a producer, and
a “bankable” star who could “open a picture,” and who would be not only willing but eager to do a definitive King project.
The whole point was that we always felt there had not been a definitive film done. There hadn’t been a film about Dad’s life
showing not so much the icon or the serious, public, celebrated person, but rather the man in terms of a very interesting
and gripping story. It had never been done.

So we felt like we needed someone who could do it justice.

The first person Phil and I thought of was Spike Lee, the old homecoming coronation director at Morehouse who in the intervening
years had become the controversial and internationally famous film director. He had shot
Malcolm X
starring Denzel Washington, and I gathered it was not easy to get funding, not easy in any way. Phil called Spike. Spike
didn’t bite—either it wasn’t a challenge to him, or he was tired because it had taken such a monumental effort on his part
to get
Malcolm X
made.

Michelle set up meetings with movers and shakers in the Hollywood scene. It was just Michelle and me. I stayed with her and
her family in the foothills of Pacific Palisades, between the beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu. In the down time I’d sit
and look at and listen to the breakers rolling in, looking westward, and for the first time in my life I knew peace. This
place was calling to me. I was serving as the administrator of the King Estate, away from the political machinations of the
actual day-to-day operation of the King Center.

* * *

We met with Frank Price, a former head of Columbia Pictures, who still had an office on the lot, and had kind of “godfathered”
director John Singleton. He broke a lunch date to meet with us and was very accommodating, and it made me feel like if we
could come up with a director, a script, and a star, we might get a studio interested—maybe the studio he was aligned with.

Then we started meeting with what’s called the “talent.”

We met Ed Zwick at his office, in Santa Monica. I was impressed that he was the only one who met with us—by then I’d learned
that Hollywood types are usually bracketed by yes-men whom they treat awfully no matter how many times they say yes. It was
just Michelle, him, and myself, and I really liked him; that one was really my initiative. I had asked for Ed Zwick, really
liked his approach directing
Glory
, and while in the end I felt
Glory
was a tragic movie, it was a triumph of historical re-creation and dramatization as well. It moved me. Very few movies have
done that.

Glory
was a good movie, but again, in Hollywood translation, it didn’t do big box office. Michelle said that was because you didn’t
have repeat business, where, in particular, fourteen to twenty-five-year-olds went to see it four or five times. The ending
was depressing; one viewing was enough.

Ed Zwick was polite, quiet, didn’t ask a lot of questions but had a few, was an unassuming person, laid-back, seemed very
interested; but then, everybody we met with was interested. Not one person said, “This isn’t something I’d be interested in,”
or “It’s not up my alley.” Michelle and I approached it more like we were feeling people out, wanting to get different perspectives.

We met with actor/director Bill Duke in a restaurant in the Valley, Burbank, I believe, just Bill, myself, and Michelle. Bill
had an assistant who was kind of around the periphery, but she wasn’t actually sitting there during the meeting. We saw her
at the beginning and at the end. Bill Duke had directed films like
Deep Cover, A Rage in Harlem,
and
The Cemetery Club.
He was about to join the faculty at Howard University as head of its film department. He was very passionate about our proposed
project, really seemed he wanted to do it himself, but he also felt it needed to be done right. His whole thing was, “You
can’t hurry it—you don’t want to rush through this. This needs to be done by somebody who really gets it.” I agreed with Bill
Duke.