Growing up as the child of a famous person is never easy. As the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Dr. Bernice A. King came to this realization at an early age.
Born to two famous parents in 1963, one year before her father received the Nobel Peace Prize, King was taught that people are in this world for a reason. Recently, she was told the Nobel Museum in Stockholm that their website gets about one million visitors a day, and the luminary that receives the most searches in all fields, not just peace,is her father.
"Can you imagine being the daughter [of someone] who has had more impact on the world since he has died?" she told a spellbound audience yesterday at Financial Advisor's Invest In Women conference in Atlanta.
King's father was assassinated shortly after her fifth birthday. Much of her talk was devoted to her mother. "My mother told us you don't have to be your dad," she recalled. "You don't have to be me. You just have to be your best self. I grew up knowing that I am an answer to a question and a solution to a problem.
"You are in this world for a reason," she continued. "Martin Luther King was just an ordinary individual. He understood he was here for a reason."
The same thing was true with her mother. "She was responsible for my father's voice in the peace movement," King said.
Indeed, while Martin Luther King was admired by wide, bipartisan cross-sections of the American political establishment during his lifetime, many of these same so-called experts and authorities thought he had waded into foreign territory beyond his expertise when he became an early critic of the Vietnam war. It turned out that the civil rights leader was only a few years ahead of the Washington elites, most of whom would begin to see the folly of the war in Southeast Asia and turn against it. It was her mother who convinced her father of what would become a national disaster long before foreign policy experts could see it.
"Growing up I saw this woman doing extraordinary things," Bernice King, who studied in the ministry and attended law school, told attendees. "My mother can be an inspiration to women. The movement led by my father was really a women's movement."
While the men "may have been out front leading" it, the real influence in Alabama cities like Montgomery and Birmingham came from women. They were the ones who called for and suggested the boycott.
Change in any regard requires that there are people, "a segment of whom are sick and tire of being sick and tired," she said. When you get to a certain "critical mass, something happens." If women hadn't participated in the civil rights movement, "nothing would have happened," she said.