Growing Up King by Dexter Scott King, Ralph Wiley Page B

and Isaac
     were in our basement. Mother was maintaining the space where the idea of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent
     Social Change started.
    Uncle A.D.’s death damaged us all. But what really affected my spirit in an adverse way was what happened to Big Mama less
     than five years later.
    Time had passed after my father’s death and the death of Uncle A.D. We had watched our mother move the operations of the Martin
     Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change from our basement to the basement of the ITC, then finally next door
     to my father’s birth home, 501 Auburn Avenue, where my great-grandfather A.D. and his wife, Jennie Williams, had lived, and
     where their only surviving child, Alberta Williams King, Big Mama, had grown up, where she and my grandfather spent their
     lives until Granddaddy got a house a few blocks away on Boulevard. For the first four years of my life we lived in a house
     on Johnson Avenue that was down the street from where Granddaddy and Big Mama used to live.
    The years between 1969 and 1974 passed with music in my head and my head hung down. Any extroverted tendencies I might have
     entertained had been obliterated. I was paralyzed by the actions and potential actions of a world gone insane. Only music
     soothed my mind and soul and heart. Only music could get through to me.
    Martin and I rode our minibikes around Vine City. The Jackson 5 had that string of hits to keep us attentive to Motown. Aretha
     Franklin sang “Ain’t No Way” and “Chain of Fools” on radio stations WAOK 1340 AM and WIGO 1380 AM; I spun the dial and heard
     the Staple Singers—Daddy had loved Mavis Staples’s husky contralto. I heard Sly and the Family Stone doing “(I Want to Take
     You) Higher,” “Everyday People,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” Earth, Wind and Fire doing “That’s the Way of
     the World,” Seals and Crofts, then the Isleys, doing “Summer Breeze.”
    Being in Georgia, I began to watch the football served up to us every Friday night at high schools, every Saturday afternoon
     for colleges on TV, pros on Sunday. We had pro teams in Atlanta, but it was all about the Kansas City Chiefs, then the Pittsburgh
     Steelers winning a string of Super Bowls in the early ’70s by playing players from historically black colleges like the ones
     around the corner from our backyard. The great baseball player Roberto Clemente was killed in a plane crash while delivering
     relief to disaster victims in Nicaragua in 1972. In 1974, Hank Aaron, from Mobile, in our mother’s home state of Alabama,
     hit his 715th home run at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium to beat Babe Ruth’s record. I was thirteen, had no idea of the volume
     of hate mail he’d received or the kidnapping threats against his daughter, then attending Fisk University. I watched
Soul Train,
heard the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band doing “Express Yourself,” one-hit wonder Bloodstone performing the ethereal tune
     “Natural High,” Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston and then Tammi Terrell having a string of duets—“Your Precious Love,” “Ain’t Nothing
     Like the Real Thing.” I saw blacks begin to pepper the Southeastern Conference varsity football teams on Saturday afternoon
     football games, even at the universities of Alabama and Georgia. Watching football was where I lost Martin. He wasn’t interested.
     He was three years older. Three years is a lifetime at that age. Yolanda went to college— Smith. Bernice was turning eleven.
     Granddaddy was still in the pulpit.
    Six years had gone by since my father’s murder. On Sunday June 30, 1974, we happened to be together at church, me, Isaac,
     and Vernon, Uncle A.D.’s youngest. We were at church, dodging the unswerving eye of Granddaddy, who was still measuring us
     for a collar, while we were not seeing a deep, lingering sadness in him. Across Jackson Street from Ebenezer, there is a strip
     mall, where there were and are small