A Leader Of Compassion And Hope Dies

Yolanda Denise King, daughter and eldest child of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has died, said Steve Klein, a spokesman for the King Center.

King died late Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif., at age 51.

Born on Nov. 17, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., King was just an infant when her home was bombed during the turbulent civil rights era. She was a young girl during his famous stay in the Birmingham, Ala., jail. She was 12 years old when Martin Luther King Jr. died.

"She lived with a lot of the trauma of our struggle," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, an aide of Martin Luther King Jr. "The movement was in her DNA."

King -- an actor, speaker and producer -- was the founder and head of Higher Ground Productions, billed as a "gateway for inner peace, unity and global transformation." On her company's Web site, King described her mission as encouraging personal growth and positive social change.

How bout that? Positive social change. It's nice to hear those words, especially when her passing is completely overpowered by the late hate-monger Jerry Falwell.

King was also an author and advocate for peace and nonviolence, and held memberships in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--which her father co-founded in 1957--and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her death comes more than a year after the death of her mother, Coretta Scott King.

Yolanda King was the most visible and outspoken among the Kings' four children during activities honoring this year's Martin Luther King Day in January, the first since Coretta Scott King's death.

At her father's former Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, she performed a series of one-actor skits on King Day this year that told stories including a girl's first ride on a desegregated bus and a college student's recollection of the 1963 desegregation of Birmingham, Ala.

She also urged the audience at Ebenezer to be a force for peace and love, and to use the King holiday each year in January to ask tough questions about their own beliefs on prejudice.

Open, honest dialogue. The only way for positive change to emerge. Her father knew that. Her mother knew that. Yolanda will be missed. A direct line of peace fighters is now one less. We must all stand and rise to the occassion and humbly fill her shoes.