Bernice King

Bernice Albertine King (born March 28, 1963) is an American lawyer, minister, and the youngest child of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr.. and Coretta Scott King.

Bernice Albertine King was born on March 28, 1963, in Atlanta, Georgia.

The day after she was born, her father had to leave for Birmingham, Alabama, but he rushed back when it was time for Bernice and her mother, Coretta, to leave the hospital.

He drove them home himself but, in what was all too typical with the work he was doing, had to leave them again within hours.

Following her birth, Harry Belafonte realized the toll the Civil Rights Movement was taking on her mother's time and energy and offered to pay for a nurse to help Coretta with the Kings' four children.

They accepted and hired a person that would help with the children for the next five or six years.

Her father died a week after Bernice's fifth birthday.

Once, she and her sister Yolanda thought it would be funny to pour water into their father's ear while he was sleeping.

Their father, though, was furious.

It was the first and only time he would ever spank them.

Later on, Coretta told Bernice that her father had celebrated her fifth birthday, knowledge that has been special to her since.

King said she has only two strong memories of her father, one of him at home with their family and the other of him lying in the casket at his funeral.

"I don't let people know this, but I think of my father constantly," King said at age 19.

"Even though I knew him so little, he left me so much."

When her father was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, Bernice was asleep.

When she woke up, her mother told her that the next time she saw her father would be at his funeral.

She was five years old when her father died in 1968.

In her adolescence, King chose to work towards becoming a minister after having a breakdown from watching a documentary about her father.

King was 17 when she was invited to speak at the United Nations.

Twenty years after her father was assassinated, she preached her trial sermon, inspired by her parents' activism.

King's uncle, Alfred Daniel Williams King, drowned in a swimming pool when Bernice was six on July 21, 1969.

In the April 1998 issue of BET Entertainment Weekly, King reflected, "I was five when my father was assassinated, so I had no concept of who my father really was. I have been told, but imagine trying to really understand or put it in its proper perspective at that age. When it finally became clear to me around fifteen or sixteen, I was angry at him because he left me. So I didn't want to have anything to do with my father."

After her husband's death, Coretta Scott King took on the role of raising four children as a single mother.

Family friends recall that she spent considerable time with Bernice, who feels that being raised by a single parent has given her special insight into single-parent homes.

"I didn't have a father to deal with about boyfriends. I didn't have a father to show me how a man and woman relate in a family setting. Therefore I have given over my life to mentoring young people. I'm adamant about young people who have been denied a father/daughter relationship."

Other tragedies followed.

King was known for her advocacy against gay rights, in contrast to the rest of her outspokenly pro-LGBT family, through the 2000s and early 2010s.

Her mother had a stroke in 2005 and, after she died the following year, King delivered the eulogy at her funeral.

A turning point in her life, King experienced conflict within her family when her sister Yolanda and brother Dexter supported the sale of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

After her sister died in 2007, she delivered the eulogy for her as well.

She supported the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008 and called his nomination part of her father's dream.

King was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 2009.

Her elder brother Martin III and her father had previously held the position.

She was the first woman elected to the presidency in the organization's history, amidst the SCLC holding two separate conventions.

King became upset with the actions of the SCLC, feeling that the organization was ignoring her suggestions, and declined the presidency in January 2010.

King became CEO of the King Center only months afterward.

King's primary focus as CEO of The King Center and in life is to ensure that her father's nonviolent philosophy and methodology (which The King Center calls Nonviolence 365) is integrated in various sectors of society, including education, government, business, media, arts and entertainment and sports.

King believes that Nonviolence 365 is the answer to society's problems and promotes it being embraced as a way of life.

King is also the CEO of First Kingdom Management, a Christian consulting firm based in Atlanta, Georgia.

She later seemed to retract these views in 2015.