CHAPTER 8
This Little Light of Mine
My college training, especially the first two years, brought many doubts into my mind… I revolted too against the emotionalism of much Negro religion… shouting and stamping. I didn’t understand it, and it embarrassed me. I often say that if we, as a people, had as much religion in our hearts and souls as we have in our legs and feet, we could change the world.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Some people are fine doing the routine, following a tradition. They are capable of it, fulfilled by it, and the circumstances on which their routine or tradition was built do largely remain the same. Such was not the case for me. I think of Bernice and Yolanda and Martin, and each, in his or her own way, was fine and good following traditional steps. I was not. If it reflects badly on me, I can’t change it now. I can only go on from here. I use the comparison of the sacrament and the ceremony. To me, sacrament is what’s in your heart; ceremony is what people expect you to do about it. A wedding is the ceremony, but the love that you share with your companion is the sacrament. You do the ceremony for others, not for you; society, the world at large, needs to see proof to feel it’s validated. In God’s sight, you’re there anyway. I wanted to find a connection to something inspirational. I looked for it in a book, in a classroom, but didn’t find it there.
The fruitless search was never more evident than in my years at Morehouse College, a place of wonderful traditions, mostly. There’s no great disappointment where there’s no great love. If I was an actor like Will Smith, a hooper like Kobe Bryant, a ballplayer like Hank Aaron, a producer like Quincy Jones, I wouldn’t even have needed high school; you just go on to the next thing you’re good at, were meant to do. But being the son of Martin Luther King, Jr., put extra oomph into my feelings of failure when I didn’t follow his exact footprints.
I didn’t graduate Morehouse, but I did matriculate there. Had I been named Dexter Smith or something, and school hadn’t worked out, then I would have just left. Being who I was, I couldn’t just leave. I still felt like I’d accomplished something by the time I left Morehouse for good. It isn’t like I hate the memory. It was more a good feeling, actually. At least I knew what I wasn’t.
It started with graduating from Frederick Douglass High. That year, 1979, there were three graduations in the family. Martin graduated from Morehouse. Yolanda graduated from NYU, the MFA program in theater. “We’ve arrived!” I can still hear her chortling. She was not the same Yoki after our father passed, but she could still be exuberant.
I couldn’t join in her feelings. People were telling me, “Oh you got no choice. You’re going to Morehouse.” Great-granddaddy A. D. Williams was in the Morehouse class of 1898, the second graduating class of its existence; Granddaddy M. L. King, Sr., was class of 1930; Daddy was class of 1948; Uncle A.D. was class of 1950. Pressure never came from within 234 Sunset, yet despite that everybody assumed, “Your mom and grandpa won’t let you go anywhere else.” Sure, Granddaddy King wanted me to go to Morehouse. But he wanted Dad to do a lot of things he didn’t do either. Mother said, “Son, you don’t have to go there. But you must go somewhere.”
I had at least three football scholarships. I almost ended up at the University of Southern California. If I’d chosen USC, I could well have had a minor pro football career. The coaching and recruiting staff at USC didn’t exactly hound me, but the offer was there if I wanted it.
If I stayed in Atlanta, I reasoned there would be some obvious advantages. Football didn’t interest me that much after high school. I thought I was interested in electrical engineering.
People always ask young people, “What is it you want to do?” And in my opinion, all but the very lucky are thinking, “I don’t know, what do you want me to do?” In high school, I was in a club called JETS, Junior Engineering Technology Society; then there was also being the handyman for Big Mama.
Morehouse, like all the colleges in the AU Center, had dual-degree programs where you could take classes at AU Center and Georgia Tech. In five years you’re out with two degrees—sounded good to me. I chose Morehouse. I said, “If I stay here, I’m not going to play sports, because as far as football goes, Morehouse isn’t that well-known for it, so I figure I’m not going to waste my time fooling around.” So I got into the engineering program and quickly realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’d heard of young people who started off in engineering and ended up in law school, for instance. I didn’t feel bad about it. There was plenty else to feel bad about.
My brother had a collection of jazz LPs, vinyl, in his campus dorm room; and he had every reason to escape to them via headphones. He took the first wave, the brunt of expectations at Morehouse for the sons of the school’s most famous alumnus. The pressure on Martin, being Daddy’s namesake, was enormous. My first exposure to Lonnie Liston Smith and contemporary jazz fusion came because of Martin at Morehouse. I hung out in his room, getting my mind expanded by Lonnie Liston Smith, vocals by his brother Donald Smith, doing “Expansions” and “Give Peace a Chance” off the Visions of a New World LP. Music lived and moved and grooved and grew inside me. I didn’t concentrate on it. It just was.
In high school, I believed if I didn’t go to Morehouse, it would be scandalous. Jet editor emeritus the late Robert Johnson; Ebony editor Lerone Bennett; Maynard Jackson; Julian Bond; Olympic gold medalist Edwin Moses—all went to Morehouse; and in attendance there at the same time as my brother, Martin, was a guy named Spike Lee. I didn’t notice him a lot, but I’d seen him. Always thought he was somehow different. Everybody did; it was an impression we all had; Spike was kind of ahead of his time. I think the word is “innovative.” Not a Big Man on Campus type. His persona was more tied to coming up with creative pursuits. Because his was not a mainstream type of persona, he had a cult following— his troupe, if you will. Always had people hanging out with him, kind of an entourage. I think he still works with some of those people till this day. I never really got to know him in terms of working in that inner circle. I was on the periphery, a high school kid, the kid brother of Martin III. I didn’t stand out. I don’t think anybody knew he was going to be the Spike Lee he is today. At that time, who was thinking that far ahead?
I was going over to see Martin at Morehouse, hanging out, picking up the campus vibe, deejaying parties still. At one point I had two or three mobile units; people working for me. My first memorable encounter with Spike was when he was directing the Morehouse homecoming coronation, like in his movie School Daze, only this was real; I helped do the sound, audio engineering, even though I was still in high school. Spike Lee finished Morehouse as I was about to enter freshman year.
I noticed the barrier still existed, even at Morehouse; the barrier was that people didn’t know how to relate to me and Martin, whether to be down home, or serious, or more formal. I didn’t know how to be with myself, after always having to deal with “What does the family of King represent?” We don’t have royalty in this country, as African Americans. Don’t have it or need it. But maybe, like most people, secretly we do kind of want it. We want our version of it. We need positive myths; all people do. One thing that got through my thick head at Morehouse was that some of the students and faculty needed to see Martin and me as scions of the royal King family. But that also meant that those people didn’t really want to see or get to know the real us, two young men trying to figure out who we were like every other college student in America. I tried to do well, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Or maybe it wasn’t in me. Better to have people think I didn’t try hard than the alternative—that somehow I didn’t have the equipment.
College life was still fun. Even I knew that. I managed to be less inhibited, worried less about the responsibilities of being Dr. King’s son. I wanted no part of it. I’d seen what it got you. And so I became the black sheep of the family. Didn’t fit the mold. Doing my own thing and being unconventional. Deejaying, and a preacher’s kid—PK, that’s one name I got called at Morehouse.
Isaac came to Morehouse a year after I did. I never went to him specifically with any of my frustrations. We were always in each other’s heads, so I didn’t have to. His situation was similar to mine. After all, his mother, Aunt Christine, taught at Spelman. Seemed as if we both had to live out other people’s ideas. We were constantly talking through things because we were dealing with some of the same issues. Some people seemed to be successful at college and yet became what we called “professional students”—there were a number of them at the AU Center schools, who, for one reason or another, wound up staying in undergraduate school five, six, seven, eight years. Not that they were stupid; they liked being there—the three squares, the casual academic environment, the new batches of coeds every year, the safety of the college campus and the avoidance of the workaday world. They were in their own way institutionalized. Others may have bright minds, but the regimentation of academia, for one reason or another, doesn’t reveal their strengths. I don’t know why, but academic regimentation didn’t reveal me. I did know that. I wasn’t the first one in history. I happened to be the first in my immediate family.
It was not the best idea for me, to follow the family male scholarly theme in the first place. We—Isaac and I—should’ve gone away to school. Maybe to the army. But the armed forces weren’t options for me. The son of the prince of nonviolence, an infantryman? Wouldn’t do. Then I was constantly being asked, “When are you going into the ministry?” Or “Pre-law? Hm?” We come from five generations of ministers. Granddaddy’s mother and father had been functionally illiterate; when he first came to Atlanta, there was not a high school or library where blacks could go. Like most black southern families, mine believed vehemently in education, believed in it because for so long they were denied it, in some cases they could trace back only a generation or two privileged by it. It affected Martin III at Morehouse. He was called out as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s son lots of times, but with the piano playing of Lonnie Liston Smith consoling his ear, he made it through.
Aunt Christine was on the faculty at Spelman. Granddaddy had served on some of the boards of the institutions in the AU Center, namely Morehouse and Atlanta University. Since Daddy’s death, there had been plans to build a bronze statue of him in front of the Morehouse administration building. Eventually the memorial was built.
Maynard Jackson had been mayor of Atlanta. Now Andy Young was gearing up for a successful run at being mayor. Contrary to what segregationists always said, Atlanta was still there after integration—not only was it there, it was also bigger and better than ever.
In 1981, my third year at Morehouse, Uncle Andy ran for mayor and was elected.
I had always thought that I might pursue a career in politics; maybe even become Georgia’s first black governor. I was interested in the arena, and it would serve the family legacy. But later, I saw how my brother got treated in politics. He was a Fulton County commissioner in 1986. Isaac was his campaign manager. I helped on his campaign by organizing a fund-raiser that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., attended at which the singer Jennifer Holliday performed, at the home of Michael Lomax, the chairman of the Fulton County Commission. Martin did get elected and served two terms. I admire Martin. I know deep down he wants to help humanity. I know he cares. But I saw how he got dragged through the mud because he wasn’t Daddy. I said, “Not me.”
I did have a need, as my father did, to be understood and gain understanding. I had trouble getting it out of books, as my father did. He didn’t do it so much at Morehouse; he was an average student there, didn’t take off academically until he went to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. I can’t fathom how he did it, analyzed and translated philosophers like Immanuel Kant or G. W .F. Hegel or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard or Henry David Thoreau or Reinhold Niebuhr. He had done it.
I wanted—needed—to contribute in life. Like most young men, I had not yet found my mission and I didn’t have the same interests Daddy had. By the time he was twenty-five he was ready to pastor; by the time he was twenty-six, political machinations or not, back door or not, his idea or not, he was the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, and everybody from Mahalia Jackson to Kwame Nkrumah to Dwight Eisenhower to Jack and Bobby Kennedy to Richard Nixon was in his sphere of influence. I needed space to experiment and figure out who I, Dexter, wanted to be. But this need seemed to always put me at odds with a society, and well-intentioned people, who wanted me to be what they wanted: the second coming of a King. Outside of the family, I didn’t even have a friend, let alone a best friend.
I think there were only a few people that Isaac and I bonded with. One was John Carson. He was from Stockton, California, a town outside San Francisco. His plan at the time was to follow in his father’s footsteps. His father was a doctor. John was like me— didn’t make friendships easily. Another person with whom I bonded was Phillip Jones. I met him in the spring of 1980. There was a girl I especially liked. He was dating her, only I didn’t know it. I was trying to date her. He didn’t know that. I’d frequently visit her at Spelman. As I was coming out of my campus dorm one day, this guy approached me. I didn’t know he was coming to read me the riot act. He said, “Say, what’s up with you? Do you know you’re trying to talk to my lady?”
I took the initiative.
“Hi, I’m Dexter King. And you are?”
He told me later the way I did it was disarming. Said he couldn’t bring himself to even say anything about his girlfriend. We hit it off, became friends instantly, spent almost a twenty-four-hour period nonstop hanging out, though he was a senior and I was a freshman. The girl was from Tennessee. Very attractive lady. Don’t know what happened to her. Phil and I spent the day and night talking and walking around. We went to the music room and he played some of his songs on the piano, asked me what I thought of them. We hit it off because our interests were aligned; we were musically inclined. We could talk on any level; that impressed me because there weren’t many I could do that with. He seemed to warm to my interpretations in the field of music. It’s funny, I can say that and see it clearly now, but back then, I didn’t even think of music as an option of what to do with my life because I knew people would not have found it “acceptable” for King’s son. It was not an academic discipline as I had approached it. Phillip was a musician, a good composer, and I liked that we could talk about issues, politics, growing up, hanging out; there was substance, but also an ability to have fun. The fun was important; the seriousness was draining; there’s a side of me, a little boy that wants to play, wants to be expressive. Being around Phil, hearing him, watching him, helped that side. There’s a process of composing that teaches you about life. I wanted to learn about life.
Some of the buddies I had were Isaac, Vernon, Ralph, and John Carson, James “Chip” Carter, and Clarence “Bumpy” Cox III. I do know there were not many people I could really be “down” with at Morehouse. With Phil, I was down.
The summer of his graduation, we went into the studio to produce a record. This was the first production where we hired the artists, we hired the musicians, we were producers. And I felt… right. I felt alive. Just maybe I had found my calling.
We were at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1980 when Phil’s mother passed. She committed suicide. I’d seen and met her at his graduation—an attractive woman. Her name was Loretha. He remembered that she cried over the TV in 1968 when my father was assassinated. She was an alcoholic. An angel when she wasn’t drunk, Phil said, a biochemist who’d been trained at Meharry. But she was sometimes attracted to violent men. She was violent with Phil when she got drunk. Split personality. He didn’t even know he was being abused. When she wasn’t drunk, she’d tell him how much she loved him.
At the convention, Granddaddy gathered us in a circle, and we held hands and said a prayer for Phil’s mother. Loretha had done the same thing with him when my father was killed. He said, “This is my family now.” I could relate. My grandfather brought him into the family prayer circle and prayed for Phil, so it was memorable and tragic at once, and formed a bond between us that will last forever.
That next fall, I was on my own again. School was not working out. While my father could argue the relative merits of philosophers, I could not; but I could tell regional differences in musical preferences among the school enrollment. I took advantage of my rep as the person to work with for music. It got to the point I was so busy deejaying I had to hire out help; in some cases, had three parties going on at one time. I had mobile units I’d send out; two other guys who worked with me, plus Isaac. One is now a federal law enforcement agent, and the other is a dentist. But they all worked for K&F Sound Productions and were dedicated and loyal. We had a thriving enterprise.
In the summer of ’80, we auditioned a couple of female singers. We even flew one girl in whom Phil knew from his earlier days at Morehouse. She’d been at Spelman a year, and had gone on to become an Ebony Fashion Fair model. We had songs written, hired the studio, engineers, musicians. The song went nowhere. This was before Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Antonio “LA” Reid, and the music industry descended on Atlanta in the ’90s. We learned the hard way. You can have the talent, the song, the arrangement, a good product, but it’s held against you if you do something independent. You’re penalized for not going through normal channels; if you’re outside the system, the system keeps you outside. It was a learning experience; same in politics, same in music. We never took no for an answer, but eventually Phil went back to New York. The next time we got together on a serious project would be years later.
My problems with school worsened. I would try to read something, and I would struggle to comprehend it. I would have to keep trying over and over again, and even then I had trouble retaining it. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the reason why. I was guarded about admitting this challenge; I still am even now; guarded because of early recollections in ’72 when I was at the Democratic convention in Miami, as an eleven-year-old, and saw Tom Eagleton stepping down as vice-presidential nominee because he’d seen a psychiatrist and had electroshock. I thought, “Man, I’ve got to deal with these issues. People will say I’m nuts. Mother will be shamed.”
I was in a catch-22. I needed help, but I couldn’t afford to be seen as needing help. How could King’s son be less than perfect?
At that time, Morehouse’s administration asked students to choose a major at the end of sophomore year, as a part of the liberal arts education process. I had more episodes where I couldn’t focus, buckle down. Going to class, following up assignments, schmoozing the professors—the basic functions of college academic life seemed to throw me. Some of my professors were concerned and wanted to help, but others were happy to heap the incompletes on me, and others simply gave me F’s even when they knew I was in the process of completing assignments, or trying to. No matter what their reaction to me, everybody saw clearly that this particular King communicated well, could tell you what he thought, seemed intelligent, ran this successful K&F Sound operation, yet they couldn’t pinpoint why he was not following up. It had gotten the best of me; it was increasingly difficult to accomplish anything, and the shame of it, the shame, as Martin Luther King’s son. Hey, I had problems just getting up in the morning; chronic fatigue, where I would just sleep. I might sleep twelve hours, no problem, and always had a hard time waking up.
Those professors who didn’t take the time to really talk to me were offended and insulted: “Well, who does he think he is?” I even had some people tell me, “Look, if you think you’re going to get through because you’re King’s son, you better think again.” But I didn’t think that. Scholastically I was bad all on my own. Figured they’d already made up their minds about me. I couldn’t articulate why I was having problems, felt embarrassed because people were comparing me all the time with my father, comparing me to this singular great finished product.
How could I get up before children and say, “Get an education,” if I hadn’t completed mine? Even in high school, periodically I’d have some academic problems, but for whatever reason I was able to manage them better. Maybe because of the physical activity, the high school sports in some way helped me mentally, helped clear my mind. I was a walking illness without activity. Maybe that was it. I’m sure there was some practical reason why I couldn’t sustain in academics.
I got a party-boy reputation to go along with the black sheep hook. People knew I wasn’t performing in class and they also heard, “DK’s deejaying tonight.” People couldn’t reconcile it. It wasn’t that I was dissing one for another. Deejaying paid, and academics it seemed I could not do. It was not ability for one as it was lack of capability for the other. The music was more fluid and did not require any textual analysis. The classwork required a connection between analysis and execution, a thought process. Deejaying was sensing what you and others were feeling inside.
I enjoyed the latter because I had to learn about the different cultures too. D.C. people wanted to hear a certain kind of music— go-go music played by the godfather of go-go, Chuck Brown. The New York brothers by then wanted to hear Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, or Kurtis Blow; Chicago and the Midwest wanted to hear house or dancehall; brothers from L.A. wanted to hear the solar sound. Then you got into different styles of rhyming, early hip-hop, the stage being set; there was a connection between it and me—it was exciting, thrilling, cutting-edge, inspirational. The classroom seemed cobwebby, constricting, strangling by comparison. Music permeated me; I could read the crowd and see, “Okay, tonight I got a lot of brothers from D.C., so I’m going heavy on the go-go”; or “I got some brothers from New York, so I’m going house.” Or, “Hey, the rhyming…”
Whatever the flow was, I felt it, I was always alert to it, you couldn’t plan that far ahead of time, so you didn’t have to read up on it. No homework. It required only reaction, a sense of what you heard, of what was going on around you, a sense of what was “out there,” in the streets, in people’s faces, in their hearts, what they responded to. You couldn’t script it out and you couldn’t learn it in a class on Western civilization. In class, it was all numbing regimentation—numbing to me, anyway. I disliked the distance of the subject matter from the culture at hand, and from my own personal history. The music made me feel good and useful, somehow, as if… as if I was making a thing right that needed making right. The only place I had problems was with the structured environment of a college classroom. I asked myself why, why did I have this problem?
I got plenty of “Well we are very disappointed in you, young man.”
Everybody approached it traditionally. They saw me as a failure. I always felt my symptoms and knew my problem, I just didn’t know why. Nobody could tell me why—why I didn’t do well at Morehouse. Why I didn’t finish. Maybe this is another reason why the music, the Sound, meant so much to me. I wanted music to be worth it. I wanted to be worthy.