Children of the Movement

As Van Evers squeezed beside the freshly unearthed casket for the six-hour ride, one thought consumed him: He was going to see his father.

He never thought he’d have this chance. Three years old when his father, Medgar Evers, was killed, Van had only faint memories of a man leaving bubble gum cigars on his bunk bed. After the murder, he would pick up the phone and ask, “Have you seen my daddy?”

Now, nearly 30 years later, the body was being brought to Albany, N.Y., from Arlington National Cemetery for an autopsy to bolster a case against the accused killer.

In the hospital, Van gazed down on the man taken from him so many years ago. Medgar Evers lay in the casket, perfectly preserved.

Slowly, he touched the arm, the hand and, finally, his father’s face. Van spoke softly, sharing his longing for a family unbroken by the bullet that had torn through Medgar Evers’ back.

“It made the circle complete, my image of family: mother, father, brother, sister,” Van recalls.

Van Evers is a member of a club he never sought to join: The sons and daughters of American leaders who gave their lives to the cause of civil rights.

Now, 30 years after the last of the three was assassinated, love and loss fill the lives of the 13 children of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

At a young age, they knew sacrifice. The fight for racial justice all but claimed their fathers from the families before the assassins’ bullets did. As adults, they chose different paths, but the challenge for all was the same: how to draw strength from sorrow?

King dreamed of a day when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” But his children--and these others--also would be judged by their parents’ achievements. The legacy is “a cross and a crown,” says Ralph David Abernathy III, also the son of a civil rights leader.

Time has brought them together and given them an understanding of their kinship in grief. In their 30s and 40s now, they run companies, raise children, create art, preach, write, act and carry on.

They wince over still being described as the children of martyrs, as if time stopped when their fathers were killed. The daughters of Malcolm X now mourn their mother, Betty Shabazz, who died last year in a fire set by her grandson.

Their lives haven’t been tragedies. Their fathers’ spirits cast a glorious light--a beacon to guide them. And their mothers, with strong wills and soft hearts, kept it burning.

“They are living examples that young people can come through the fire,” says Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights legend. “They have a message: ‘In spite of everything that happened to my family and to me, I’m not bitter and I’m not hostile. . . . We didn’t give up.’ ”

Children of Activists and of the Movement

By age 9, Yolanda King was on her way to becoming an actress, winning lead roles in school plays and pageants. Her mother, Coretta Scott King, and other relatives encouraged her dreams. But when she looked out into the audience, there was one face she rarely saw: her father’s.

In 1964, other events consumed him. He was jailed in St. Augustine, Fla., during a demonstration, met with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

To his daughter, he sent notes and telegrams praising her efforts.

“That was nice,” Yolanda says, “but it just wasn’t the same.”

Too young to understand the movement, these sons and daughters knew its effect: It kept their fathers away. Sometimes they saw them only once a week. Memories of their fathers are precious and few.

Their homes were hubs of activity. At school, they were ridiculed for their fathers’ efforts.

Yet growing up in the movement didn’t seem unusual. Men who made history--Andrew Young, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Dick Gregory--were like uncles. And the children often participated in demonstrations.

There was pride in being part of something dangerous and exciting, even if they couldn’t understand its significance. Before falling off to sleep some nights, Reena Evers heard unfamiliar voices in the living room, a sign of another late-night meeting.

She and the others were all born between 1953 and 1965. Yolanda King was 2 weeks old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. Van Evers, whose full name is James Van Dyke Evers, was less than a month old when sit-ins began at lunch counters in Greensboro, N.C. And Qubilah (pronounced cue-BEE-lah) Shabazz was 4 months old when freedom rides to integrate interstate buses began.

The youngest have no memories of those days--or their fathers. Malikah and Malaak Shabazz were born seven months after Malcolm X was assassinated.

When the civil rights leaders were home, the men dropped the uncompromising faces the world saw. All became fathers, ready for pillow fights and cartoons, foot races and catch.

“He was my dad, my hero,” Darrell Evers says. “He could do anything.”

The Shabazz daughters were raised with a sense of pride about their heritage. “Black was a wonderful thing,” says Attallah. “It wasn’t as if our life started at slavery, as if we were in a state of recovery.”

Their father, who grew up in the Midwest, also taught them about simpler things. “We knew about plants and leaves and lightning bugs,” she says.

Evers’ Family Hears the Fateful Shots

In all the families, the parents tried to shield their children from danger. But when these men left for trips, their wives silently wondered whether they would return.

Their phones were tapped. Death threats were common. And each of their homes was firebombed.

Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the NAACP since 1954, worked in Mississippi, a state notorious for racial violence.

At their home in Jackson, he put the children through safety drills. They practiced falling to the floor, which they should do if they ever heard gunshots.

Each man sensed death was coming.

On June 7, 1963, with Jackson reeling from a series of marches, Medgar Evers stood before 3,500 in a Masonic temple and said: “Freedom has never been free. . . . I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.”

Those words echo in his daughter’s heart.

“The image of that night comes back,” Reena says. “The hole in myself starts opening.”

For Darrell, Reena and Van Evers, staying up late was a rare treat. They huddled in their parents’ bedroom with their mother, Myrlie, watching President Kennedy on television. It was June 11, and he was discussing what would become the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. The children listened, but they were eagerly awaiting their father.

Shortly after midnight on June 12, they heard his Oldsmobile pull into the driveway. The car door slammed shut.

Before they could greet him, another sound rang out: gunfire.

Darrell, then 9, and Reena, then 8, remembered the lesson their father had taught them. They hit the floor and grabbed their little brother. Myrlie Evers raced outside.

Van, only 3, heard his mother’s scream.

Their father lay near the doorway covered in blood. He was 37. The children ran to him, yelling, “Daddy, please get up!”

For Darrell, there was something mystical in those moments: “I felt incredible waves of love and energy emanating from my father,” he says. “I was experiencing a lot of soul from him. It encompassed my whole body; I had a feeling he was home.”

Thousands crowded into the Masonic temple for the funeral. An NAACP executive picked out Reena’s outfit, a white and navy dress.

“I felt almost like it was Easter,” she says. “That’s when you get a brand-new dress, stockings and shoes.”

Darrell, who hadn’t cried much after his father’s murder, sobbed when he saw the open casket. A picture of his anguished face appeared on the cover of Life magazine.

Malcolm X Dies in Front of His Family

He kept it from his daughters, but Malcolm X realized his life was in jeopardy.

Initially, he asked his wife not to attend his speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on Feb. 21, 1965. The threats on his life had been increasing.

To the public, he was a militant black nationalist. Malcolm, 39, attracted national attention as the head of the Nation of Islam’s Harlem Mosque. But in the last year, he left the Nation, rejecting its philosophy.

A pilgrimage to Mecca had softened his views and caused him to change his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He had denounced the Nation’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and tension between them was escalating.

The week before, the Shabazz home in Queens had been firebombed. In a speech afterward, he vented his anger: “I wouldn’t care for myself if they would not harm my family!”

The next day, he called and asked his wife, then pregnant with twins, to bring the children to his speech. He wanted to see them in the audience.

Betty arrived early with Attallah, 6, Qubilah, 4, and Ilyasah, 2. (Gamilah, 7 months, did not attend.) They were seated near the front of the room. Attallah had a strange feeling that day. She couldn’t express it, but something was bothering her.

Her father came onstage. He and the audience had just exchanged Arabic greetings when several men, as a diversion, began arguing a few rows back. As Malcolm tried to restore calm, three men in the front began shooting.

“I watched my father’s life being taken and I watched the people do it,” Attallah says. “It was almost surreal yet real.”

He was hit 16 times.

That evening, friends and supporters visited the family. Attallah felt exasperated. “It’s not about your moment, even though the loss is incomprehensibly yours,” she says. “You’re not allowed to fall on the floor and kick because there are others in the room.”

Coretta Scott King Gets the News at the Airport

The King children were watching TV on April 4, 1968, in the family room of their Atlanta home. Their father was in Memphis to lead a march in support of striking sanitation workers. A special bulletin interrupted the program: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been shot.

Moments before, Jesse Jackson Jr. had called, giving Coretta Scott King the news. She quickly packed to catch the next flight.

Yolanda, 12, was in tears. Coretta kissed the children and asked them to stay calm.

After she left, the phone rang. The family housesitter answered and began screaming hysterically. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead at 39.

Dexter, 7, watched her drop the phone as she fainted.

Their mother received the news at the airport and returned home. Dexter remembers seeing her again but nothing else from that night.

During the next days, the children watched as national figures and celebrities--including Richard Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy and Harry Belafonte--filtered into their house. While most talked in hushed tones to adults, Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, stars of the popular TV show “I Spy,” came to play with them.

Coretta, 40, went to Memphis and flew home with her husband’s body. The children met her as she got off the plane. Five-year-old Bernice, whose nickname was Bunny, asked again and again: “Where’s Daddy?”

The funeral took place at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King, his father and grandfather had preached.

A poignant photo of Bernice resting in her mother’s lap at the funeral became a symbol of the grief shared by a nation.

That evening, their mother struggled to help Martin, 10, deal with his anger and confusion.

“Mommy,” he said, before drifting off to sleep, “it just makes me mad that I don’t have a daddy anymore.”

‘Everyone Was Being Taken’

Life now had a before and after.

The promise that a parent will raise a child had been broken, and the world, especially at night, became a menacing place.

Darrell Evers slept with a toy gun beside him. Dexter King, 7, dreamed his father was still alive and awoke in tears. And Malikah Shabazz shared her mother’s bed, a habit she continued until she was 16.

“I always knew that, ‘OK, they killed my father,’ they could also kill my mother,” says Malikah.

These sons and daughters went through the motions of a carefree youth--riding bicycles, playing games, going to summer camp. But some part of their earlier lives could never be regained.

C. DeLores Tucker, a civil rights activist who knows the families, saw a natural longing in all of them. “You could see it in Medgar’s boys--just a sad, faraway look in their eyes, like, ‘Where is he? Where’s Daddy?’ ”

Their mothers became fiercely protective.

These widows, determined to carry on the work that their husbands left undone, began establishing their own identities, returning to school, getting jobs and accepting national speaking engagements.

For the families, this brought pride but new pressures.

“I look at it like I lost both parents,” Darrell says. “She was such an incredible mother. . . . I understood why she had to be gone. I understood it, but there was still a little hole there.”

After two murder trials ended without a conviction, the Evers family moved to Southern California to a house that the NAACP bought for them in Claremont, a white suburb.

As they drove into the neighborhood, a girl yelled out: “They’re here!”

Reena watched as people peeked out their windows, grabbed their children and pulled their blinds. “That was the Welcome Wagon of Claremont,” she says.

At first, she hated it. But over time, the quiet college town became home. She was the first black girl nominated for homecoming queen at Claremont High. Darrell made all-league in football as a wide receiver, and Van played soccer.

In the Shabazz family, the girls looked after each other, the older ones paired off with a younger sister. They couldn’t go on sleepovers, and idle hours were spent taking piano and dance lessons.

It could be suffocating at times. Gamilah chafed against her mother’s strict doctrine of education first.

As a teenager, she rode motorcycles and went off into the woods alone to look at the stars.

All the children developed a fierce independence. This made the Shabazz daughters familiar to the teachers at St. Joseph’s Montessori School in Mount Vernon, N.Y., where the family moved after the assassination.

“We were termed as ‘troublemakers,’ ” she says, “Or, ‘That’s that revolutionary’s daughter.’ ”

The King children faced other losses after their father’s death. A year after the assassination, their uncle, the Rev. A.D. King, drowned in a swimming pool accident. Five years after that, their grandmother, Alberta Williams King, was shot and killed as she sat at the organ during a Sunday morning service at Ebenezer. The gunman apparently was trying to kill the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s father, known as Daddy King.

Daddy King, a pastor at Ebenezer for 44 years, was widely respected in Atlanta. He helped the children deal with the deaths.

Says Dexter: “That’s where I gained a lot of inspiration.”

But Yolanda was consumed by fear. “I began to feel: Who’s next?” she says. “One by one, everyone was being taken.”

The Kings stayed near the supportive, extended family of Ebenezer. The children begged off being different, preferring instead to just be like other kids.

Around the neighborhood, certain things went unsaid.

“You almost didn’t speak of your own father because you didn’t want to remind them theirs was gone,” says Michael Bond, the son of civil rights leader Julian Bond, who lived down the street from the Kings. “They missed him. . . . There was an absence, and it was completely unspoken.”