CHAPTER 14

A Moving Image

My 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.

Duke’s opinion was that we couldn’t allow people on board if they were just looking to take advantage; he also believed in having an African American in the process, if that person was among the best producers, screenwriters, or directors; somebody who knew how to make a film. He felt we needed to make sure “Dr. King” was portrayed strongly. He kept saying, “People need to get his full impact. Many think he was just some kind of wimp when in fact he was a revolutionary with a transcendent ability to move audiences and individuals through the power of his cause, his presence, the power of his speaking ability and action.”

He got it. No question in my mind Bill Duke got it. I was sure he could get the ball rolling, but he was clear he’d need backing. No knock against him. That was our challenge.

Producer George Jackson was passionate as well. In recent years, he died of a heart attack. We met at a restaurant on Sunset. I was beginning to know my way around L.A., and I was beginning to like it. First of all, nobody seemed to recognize me, or, if they did, they didn’t stop or stare or point or have some hustle they wanted to run by me. I liked being anonymous under the azure skies of Southern California. This was agreeing with me big time. I mentioned this to Michelle and to George as we sat down to lunch. George smiled. “That’s the way it happens,” he said. “You get bit.” He seemed to have a passion for the project. He and his partner, Doug McHenry, were involved in a number of films during this period—Disorderlies, Jason’s Lyric, several others. We met Doug later; this first time it was just George Jackson, and he was reverent about Daddy. He said, “It’s got to be done. It’s a powerful film.” He even talked about the importance of telling it right: every detail, from scenery, set design, the works. He spoke in the curious grammar of film, which I must admit mystified me somewhat, but I had Michelle break it down into English later. George got technical, down to the nuts and bolts of re-creating certain scenes, texture. He was excited about the prospect.

We walked away from Bill, George, and Doug with possibilities. Here were some people who would be interested, but we hadn’t met anyone with the ability to green-light a project. Without a script, we didn’t have a project. They all said, “We’d have to get a studio behind it.”

So we ended up meeting with a couple of people in the studio system as well, among them Ashley Boone at MGM, now deceased. We were trying to get advice on how to pull together a project. Everybody seemed positive from both the studio side and the creative side. They all seemed pumped. We met with HBO Films; as I’ve mentioned, Michelle was once Director of Business Affairs at HBO, so she knew people there. We were thinking, “Let’s not restrict ourselves, talk to everybody,” in case HBO was looking at that time to ratchet up their feature film division, and we felt like maybe we could get kind of both angles, cable TV audiences and feature-release quality.

Everybody was interested, intrigued, but the ones who asked the hard questions would say, “What is there really new you can tell us about Dr. King’s story? Haven’t we heard it all?” That was their feeling. We said, “No, you really haven’t.” The public has often seen only a very one-dimensional character and not the full three-dimensional person. Particularly in African Americans’ stories and lives, we don’t portray them as human beings with feelings and emotions and complexities of humor, pathos, conflict. When I read my mother’s book My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., I was in tears when she talked about what she went through in making a decision to come south after they both went to school and met in Boston, to come back to the land of their ancestors’ struggle, in a time of segregation, knowing they’d have to struggle, knowing what they’d be giving up, things they shared as a couple. They were well-rounded, talented people who were going to have to come back to a segregated South and give up what could have been a life of comfort, of learning, of travel. To me, there are other stories within the bigger story that need to be revealed. That’s where Gandhi or Malcolm X showed that kind of epic range. My mother and I met with Sir Richard Attenborough, who had directed Gandhi. He felt a feature biopic about my father should be done by an African-American director. He was also adamant that though the screen-writer didn’t have to be black, the story had to be well-written and original.

We did meet with Denzel Washington and his production company head, an extremely observant and competent woman named Debra Chase. We met at his office, on the Columbia lot. Debra and he thought this was a good idea. He seemed interested. I think what intrigued him was showing another side of the man. A lot of people saw Washington as Malcolm at the time; a juxtaposition of Malcolm and my father was often portrayed as two opposites. However, I felt Malcolm and my father bore the same frustrations, had similar dilemmas, longings, obstacles, and desires for their people to be truly free. But due to the circumstances of their lives, one approached it differently; sometimes you do things not so much because of the emotion of just getting the anguish out, but because you want to be effective, and my father was at root a Gandhian, with nods to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Somehow, I must’ve said something that resonated with Denzel—it could have been merely the challenge of portraying both men, getting lost in both characters. I can still see his face changing, him saying, “Yeah,” like he was getting it. People are amazed if they see the story generationally, my father and grandfather’s relationship, where my grandfather was personally a forceful man who would tolerate no mistreatment of himself, yet he was a product of his era. Meanwhile, my father was utterly nonviolent, and yet confrontational of the dilemma. He overturned a system with which his father had bargained. The father was converted by his son, based on the proof being in the pudding. My grandfather observed my father’s method, saw how it worked. It actually was effective. He had to be convinced; once he was convinced, he tried it and again it worked. It may have saved my grandfather’s sanity after nearly everything he loved was killed. He might not have survived the tragedies if he hadn’t changed. They would’ve eaten him up inside; you can’t give to others when you’re preoccupied. Grand-daddy saw the potential for hypocrisy within Christianity, being a minister of the gospel. At some point you’ve got to be accountable to what you say you believe. The difference between a great person and somebody who appears great is, one lives it and the other talks it. My father talked and lived it.

Denzel said, “Yeah, I hear you.” At first I thought he’d be opposed, wouldn’t care for the whole idea, because he had just portrayed Malcolm X, so maybe it would have been tough for him to play this different character from the same moment in history. But he wasn’t. Maybe he looked at it as a challenge for him as an actor. Michelle seemed to think that was key for interesting him in a role, particularly this one, where the actor says to himself, “I can reinvent a character people think they know, but don’t.” Actors enjoy that, Michelle said. I think also he was intrigued by the possibility of being on the production side. So I think it was more than just him as an artist/actor on this project. Debra sat and listened. I’ve no idea if they hashed it out between them later. I could see that the idea resonated with both of them somewhat, but I didn’t know how much.

Michelle did most of the talking in the meetings. We were hoping to put together a “package” as Michelle termed it, with a producer, director, writer, and star who could “open the picture.” Not just focus on one aspect, but consider the entire “package.” Michelle was knowledgeable because of her background in the industry; she had a sense of how you get things “packaged.”

We wanted a “studio project” rather than an “independent project,” but what we did not want was to go into “development hell.”

On the question of whether the director should be African American, to me, art is art no matter who does it. There are some people who can better relate to certain experiences, but I don’t think it’s the skin color that enables you to relate so much as your heart and your head—like Maya Angelou says, everybody who’s your skin folk ain’t necessarily your kin folk.

“Black” is cultural, a state of mind, particularly when you use it in the abstract context, and not about skin color; which led me to believe, then, that it did not have to be a black person who directed, because if it’s a state of mind, and cultural, then anybody who subscribes should qualify.

So it followed that if Steven Spielberg got it the way Bill Duke got it then it wouldn’t matter. Competence is what matters. Passion. Shared experience. Spielberg proved with Schindler’s List that he could relate to human suffering. So I was having these kinds of conversations with Michelle, whether or not we should look for the right kind of non-African-American filmmaker, when she interrupted me.

“We may have him already. I’ve booked us another sit-down. With Oliver Stone.”

The first Oliver Stone meeting occurred in the spring of 1992. I was spending enormous amounts of time in L.A., taking meetings. JFK was about to come out. We went to Stone’s office in Santa Monica, in a building he shared at the time with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was Michelle, Janet Yang, who ran Oliver’s production company, Oliver, and myself.

Right away, he kept looking at my face.

Stone was one of the people we’d heard had been talking about doing a King film, but at that time it was assumed it would be similar to JFK—more on the assassination, the controversial aspect. Which, to be honest with you, at that time, we were not necessarily interested in. If Stone wanted to do a controversial assassination film, fine, but let that be kind of in the aftermath; let’s get something definitive, get a “biopic” out there. Dealing with the assassination is aftermath.

I wasn’t thinking about the assassination at the time. Hadn’t dealt with the assassination myself, really, not deep inside. I tried to act as if it was just a business decision, but it was still too painful for me to discuss as film fodder to be callously manipulated. First we need to know who the man was before we start dealing with why he got killed. That was my position.

JFK is a perfect example of what we wanted to avoid. Not that it wasn’t a fine movie, with great performances by Tommy Lee Jones and Kevin Costner, just to name two of dozens, really. But in Stone’s movie, the president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the one who called my mother when she was pregnant with me to offer his sympathies about my father being unjustly jailed—he wasn’t even a character in the movie that bore his name.

All we saw was the few seconds of what Abraham Zapruder shot with an 8mm camera.

Then there was the reaction to that movie. It’s almost as if people, otherwise intelligent people, became like the three “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” monkeys, refusing to acknowledge there is evil in this world. Judging from the critical reaction to Oliver Stone’s JFK, you’d have thought it was Stone who’d assassinated Kennedy.

Conspiracy theories bother people. They bother me. They bother most right-thinking people: we don’t want to hear it, we don’t want to believe it, we just want to live free and safe and pursue happiness, and get by. That’s all we want to do, that’s all we want to know. As far as my father’s murder was concerned, at the time, we thought James Earl Ray was probably the shooter, with help; we had no issue with it otherwise, and we surely weren’t looking for any smoking gun. We mostly accepted the verdict and the official story, except we felt they had probably left out some other players. But accepting that James Earl Ray was the trigger-man—no problem with that. So we weren’t seeing Stone for any other reason than we heard he was interested in doing a film about my father. We wanted to kind of see what was under his fingernails—find out what he was talking about in that regard.

When we met him the first time, he was sketchy. He said he didn’t know what type of film he wanted to do. He seemed vague; he was interested, but he was not ready to commit; he was involved in other projects. Nixon was one of the films he was working on, and maybe by then he was finishing Natural Born Killers. He had a lot of stuff “in the can” or “on the drawing board” or “in development.” He made a comment when I was leaving, something along the lines of “Have you ever considered playing your father? You look so much like him.” I just said, “No I haven’t; I’m not an actor, but I take it as a compliment.” Little did he know that I’d been avoiding playing Daddy all my life. That was the extent of the meeting.

It turned out Oliver Stone really didn’t need much of a Martin Luther King character in the movie he had in his head—if he had a vision for it in his head. He wanted to make a point that had little to do with the point we wanted to make. That’s the way we left it. Friendly.

Michelle and I began to feel we had exhausted our options at that time. We decided to put the film idea on the shelf for a while and move on.

We sort of forgot the film idea for that time and moved on for a while.

It must have been 1995 when we learned that Oliver Stone was going ahead with a Martin Luther King, Jr., film project, and hiring a writer to create a script. I was immediately concerned because he hadn’t contacted us, hadn’t invited us to be a part of it. We didn’t know what to do, so we requested a meeting. Oliver was not in this meeting; he sent his producing partner at the time, Danny Halstead, who co-produced Nixon with Stone. Danny was not a suit. Creative, he seemed as though he’d be a cool guy in the long run; initially he was just following Oliver’s orders. They were playing hardball: “We’re doing this and we don’t need your permission or support.” We wanted them to understand it was important for us to be a part of the process. People assume incorrectly that Dr. King is fair use, public domain. No, he isn’t. Plus, most important, he was my father.

Danny said, “A biography or a film can be done by anybody about anybody.”

“True,” I said, “but if you use that person’s copyrighted materials, like speeches and the like, then you’ve got to get permission. That’s the law.” They were trying to say, “We don’t know how much we’re using.”

I asked, “How are you doing a movie about Martin Luther King and not using his speeches? Unless you do it like JFK.”

As soon as I said that, I thought, “Of course that’s what they’re thinking of doing.” Like JFK. That was not the kind of film we were hoping for, where Martin Luther King would be just the backdrop rather than the main character.

At that time, we were torn. If we were going to do a conspiracy film, Oliver would probably be the best person, yet that’s not where our heads were. We were still hoping to attract the director and writer who would agree with our vision of a biopic. It turns out we were in more of a predicament than we knew. Somebody was taking the baby away from us. Do we sit back and just let our baby go? Or do we go with the child to make sure that it’s nurtured, cared for? We chose the latter. Better to embrace Oliver Stone and try to cultivate him than to be hands-off and just see what he comes up with. So we developed a relationship with Danny, and started meeting again with Oliver. The last time I met with him was in early 1998.

I asked him straight out, “What type of film are you trying to do?”

He said, “I really want to do a story about the man, not the assassination story.”

That surprised me. I’m sure it showed on my face that I was happy to hear it. I’m not a duplicitous character. The way I feel shows on my face. Later I was questioning myself: “Does Oliver really have that in mind, or is he just trying to cool me out? He is a brilliant filmmaker-screenwriter, wrote Midnight Express, wrote Scarface, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon…”

That’s when I thought, “Uh-oh.”

It was the Vietnam War thing! That’s what had gotten him. That was the recurring theme in his films—working out his own conflict over his and America’s participation in the Vietnam War!

Stone’s very close to Vietnam. That’s his hook. That’s what made it powerful for him. Daddy came out against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, in his speech called “A Time to Break Silence,” one year to the day before he was murdered. That’s what Oliver saw. I don’t know if he saw that the media had essentially muffled Daddy after that, which was the only reason he had considered running on a third-party presidential ticket with Dr. Benjamin Spock—so that he would be covered in the media, so that peace and Poor People’s campaigns would have to get coverage.

To get started, Oliver had brought in a screenwriter named Kario Salem. We were still kind of skeptical. We didn’t know where Salem was coming from. We met with him, we did the interviews, and never really saw a script, so I can’t tell you till this day where he was coming from. I know Salem went to Memphis and did research, which made me more uneasy.

My sense was Oliver was going to doctor or rewrite this script—it was going to be his thing in the end. I’d been hearing he was obsessed with depicting Daddy in terms of womanizing. I went to him and said, “What’s your position on depicting my father in this light?” Oliver said, “Your dad was really something.” I said, “I don’t believe it’s true. Who are you hearing this from?”

Oliver was saying there was good evidence, in Ralph Abernathy’s book and from a woman who’d claimed she was sexually involved with my father the night before he was killed. I said, “I talked to Reverend Hosea Williams, who was there, about the incident; he told me it didn’t happen.”

This whole thing about the FBI files being sealed for fifty years, these records of my father—if the FBI really had something concrete, it would have leaked out long before now. The tape that my mother received from J. Edgar Hoover was not all that concrete. Mother says you can’t tell what is on that tape, or who is on that tape—there were a bunch of people she could not identify—and we were also told that J. Edgar Hoover had his FBI agents fabricate incidents. Mother till this day still claims that was not my father on the tape.

What I was trying to say to Oliver Stone was, “Whatever you do, make sure you’re basing it on facts, not innuendo.” Stone said, “Maybe I’m too close to it. Let’s go talk to the writer, Kario, and Danny.” We met with them; now, Stone could have been pulling my chain, but he was saying, “Look, you all make the call. If after you do your research, you come up with something different, I’m open.” What I didn’t want Stone to do was become obsessed with the perceived flaws both real and imagined of my father; it would be a tragic mistake for him to do a movie focusing solely on the perceived and unproven fallibilities of a great man.

But in the end Oliver couldn’t find another figure, a majority figure, within my father’s story for the audiences to latch on to. With JFK, he’d made a protagonist of Jim Garrison, the district attorney in Louisiana—a public figure who has a revelation, goes after “them,” whoever “them” is, that were responsible for the assassination. There isn’t that kind of figure in my father’s story. One of Ray’s attorneys whom I hadn’t met then, William Pepper, provided an interesting twist of a character. In my opinion, he became a lot like the Jim Garrison figure in JFK, but the reason it’s hard to put him in that light is because he had a vested interest as Ray’s defense counsel. People have a hard time with his story; they feel he’s biased, or slanted toward defending his client, similar to Johnnie Cochran’s situation with O. J. Simpson. I believe that any defense counsel is going to be viewed as being biased just for doing his job. Catch-22. I can relate. Stone was drawn to Pepper; Ixtlan, his production company, optioned Pepper’s book Orders to Kill. It was a mystery, why Oliver was so interested in doing this film. Warner Bros. put it on the back burner. No matter how big you get in Hollywood, you’re never bigger than your last film’s grosses. Nixon didn’t do so well commercially.

My sense was that Stone was still grappling with it. He wanted to do the conspiracy/assassination movie, based on Daddy’s coming out against the Vietnam War. I was in over my head here.

History says lone assassins rarely use rifles. A list of lone demented assassins is long and quite depressing, and shows the use of pistols, ear-close: Lincoln, Gandhi, Oswald, RFK, Wallace, Reagan, Lennon, Tupac, Biggie, Versace. Medgar Evers was shot in the back with a rifle by Byron De La Beckwith in 1963, but from relatively short range. Vernon Jordan was wounded by long-distance rifle fire; he survived. And one more. JFK. You can see why Oliver Stone would be on this.

My father, at Harlem’s Riverside Church, on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis, had said, “It is an evil war. We’re bombing too many rice fields, running too many peasant humble people out of the villages. It’s time for America to come on home from Vietnam.” That had to cut into Stone’s soul.

Five years later: “Oliver sees the mid-’60s and the transformation [King] was going through,” said Steven Rivers, then a Stone publicist. “It’s not a whodunit, a birth-to-death biopic, or documentary; it may take years for this movie to come about, if it comes about. But if it does, it’s about how toward the end of his life, Dr. King became a leader of the peace movement, how he was perceived by his enemies as an increasing threat.”

“Oliver can’t afford to do it wrong,” Phil Jones said. “Even if he wanted to be capricious, he can’t. He has more to lose than we do.” Because of this long-term back-and-forth with Oliver Stone, I thought more about the assassination, and James Earl Ray. The working title of Stone’s ill-fated production: Memphis. I found myself thinking more about Memphis. What had happened there? Not so much in terms of a movie, but for my own life, and the lives of my two sisters and my brother. Maybe we had not been able to move on because we were stuck there.

“It would be a film about Dr. King’s life,” said Steven Rivers. “It’s not a whodunit—though Oliver supports reopening the investigation and a view there’s more to learn.” Maybe one day Stone’s Memphis—which would have portrayed our father’s emergence as a peace leader dead set against the Vietnam War who was killed by the same interests who killed Stone’s JFK—will get made by somebody else. Maybe not. Daddy went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers and to support efforts to integrate schools and stores, not to protest the Vietnam War. Time passed. A film option we’d given Stone expired in the year 2000. Now my hope is that at some point during my mother’s lifetime, a movie on my father will be done.

In the early ’90s, I traveled to Memphis, though not for a movie or to investigate my father’s murder. It was arranged through Juanita Moore, executive director of the National Civil Rights Museum. The whole movie thing was in stasis—really off the radar screen. Michelle Clark Jenkins was leaving the King Estate soon, but she took this trip with me. While in Memphis, Ms. Moore thought it would be a good idea to meet with her girlfriend who worked at Graceland. So we also met and visited there while in the city.

We toured the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is housed in the old Lorraine Motel, south of downtown. Michelle and Juanita took the tour with me. There were other people on the tour; among those, a few recognized me; some recoiled; some, after saying hello, let me have space. When I started out on the tour, I was unaware of a wonderful feature that didn’t hit me until the end. The way the exhibit was structured, you started out dealing with the history of African Americans, through the Civil Rights Movement. As you move forward in history, the exhibit elevates you: you literally go up as you walk through, you rise step by step; it’s almost like you’re going to the mountaintop. I didn’t have a somber or nervous feeling. Then I got upstairs, second-floor balcony, outside Room 306.

From here, you could see the supposed path of the bullet. It was traced by visible laser-pointer light. At that time, I didn’t know what I know now, so I didn’t question it; yet the rooming house, window, bullet, pathway, the music they were playing, church music, and the background—it all suddenly seemed morbid. I could feel a cold sweat, and blood rising in my neck—where my father took the fatal shot. I thought of a song, played in the documentary Montgomery to Memphis, by Nina Simone, “The King of Love Is Dead.” As the documentary ends, during his funeral procession, with the wagon, the mule pulling the casket, that song is playing. It was all jumbled up in my head: What is film, what is real, what is re-creation, when was this music laid in? When I think of my father’s death, all of that is what comes to mind; I have mixed emotions—there was always a reluctance for my family to focus on the death. Even the King Center, in Mother’s mind, was to be a living memorial. We were approached years before, when the Lorraine Motel was still boarded up, about becoming involved with the National Civil Rights Museum. D’Army Bailey, a judge in Memphis, first chair of the museum foundation, came to Atlanta to entreat us. Mother had problems with it at the time. But it was all so distant. Now I was here. On the very spot.

And then… the laser-pointer blue light hit me.

The beam of blue-green light hit me in the chest. I stepped forward. It rode up toward my neck, to my throat. My heart beat faster. My hands clenched into fists.

… Unhhhh… I almost felt it, I tell you… and it changed me. Epiphany is a Christian festival commemorating the showing of Jesus to the Wise Men, celebrated January 6; or it is the appearance of a superhuman or supernatural being. In a strange way, I was feeling an epiphany.

We left the museum without a word. I wanted to leave the city of Memphis. We caught a plane soon thereafter, but it wasn’t soon enough. It was like I was in a strange land, and after that tour, it was like I felt unwelcome, foreign, even though everybody was nice enough. I felt now there was something unresolved in me about Memphis. There was this tragedy that had occurred in this city that I didn’t quite understand. This was the place where Daddy was killed. It wasn’t about a movie, money, or a conspiracy. It was about facing what happened to our lives. I had to know about Memphis— about our father’s murder. About me. And about us.