Great Expectations

Yolanda King sits in her stocking feet, sipping peppermint tea and passing on the gospel truth. “This old lady used to say, ‘It’s hard enough being who you is, let alone who you ain’t.’ ”

She smiles, and her warm laughter fills the hotel room. The old lesson guides her life these days. Growing up in Atlanta, people were always watching Yolanda King, reminding her that being herself was not enough.

She had a legacy to live up to and a hero’s torch to carry. It was the same with the other men and women who lost their fathers during the civil rights era.

The world expected more of the 13 children of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X.

As adults, they tried to balance impossible demands with their search for personal fulfillment.

“We have to find that place of self-acceptance and self-understanding and confidence,” says Yolanda, now an actress in Los Angeles. “It is a lifelong journey.”

The generation that stood with Medgar, Malcolm and Martin wanted the sons and daughters to be leaders who could stir a nation. In their eyes, a normal life was a disappointment.

“I want them to be engaged in the life of their communities,” says Julian Bond, recently named to lead the NAACP. “I don’t get the sense that they are.”

A simple life offered challenges enough. Some tried to slip through college without revealing their identities. In desperation, one sought escape by putting a knife to her wrist.

Old wounds began to heal during adulthood. But then the family of Malcolm X lost its matriarch, his widow, Betty Shabazz, in a fire set by her grandson Malcolm.

All searched their souls for answers to questions lingering since childhood.

They did not achieve the greatness of their fathers. There was no need. “You have to follow your own dream,” says Reena Evers-Everette. “More than anything else, that’s what my father wanted for us.”

College Was a Real Learning Experience

In college, these men and women learned how their fathers’ legacies could dominate their lives.

At the State University of New York in New Paltz, Ilyasah Shabazz felt people changed when they learned her parents were Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz. To her, their motives became suspect.

“They would want to know, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Oh, my gosh!’ ” says Ilyasah, now 35 and director of public relations for the city of Mount Vernon, N.Y. “Then they would start tripping, ‘Malcolm X’s daughter! Malcolm X’s daughter!’ ”

Black students wanted her to speak for them. They figured she could bring back the fire of the revolution. They were wrong. “I had gone to private school. I had gone to camps in Vermont. So, I wasn’t like this powerful, emotional speaker. I was just . . . “ she shrugs.

She just wanted to be Yasah, a biology major. Like Martin Luther King III, she wanted people to relate to her, not her name.

Self-doubt troubled their lives. Darrell Evers, 44, found comfort and stability in the teachings of the Maharaj Ji, an Indian guru who advocates abstinence. An art school buddy had told him about the guru and the followers of the Divine Light Mission.

For Yolanda King, acting provided a sense of self.

At 14, her role in a local play sent black Atlanta into an uproar. The local paper wrote about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter playing a prostitute and kissing a white boy in a production of “The Owl and the Pussycat.”

Yolanda knew she had to leave Atlanta.

“I got to get out of here,” she recalls. “I will never grow up. Everyone wants to tell me how to live my life.”

Her gypsy spirit carried her to Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and to New York University, where she earned a master’s degree in theater. In 1980, she met Attallah Shabazz during an interview with Ebony magazine. Soon they were giving speeches and touring as Nucleus, a theater troupe.

Yet, Yolanda wondered if acting was enough. She began speaking across the country and directing cultural affairs at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. But she really wanted to be on the stage.

“In life, I had to be prim and proper and poised--the King Daughter,” says Yolanda, now 42. “But acting, I could be the zany, silly, sometimes foolish person that I am. I could let the raw edges show.”

And it was acting that helped her deal with her grief. At the first national commemoration of King’s birthday in 1986, she hit rock bottom.

“It was the first time I really began to mourn my father,” she says. “I really had not taken the time to do that.”

She quit the King Center, cut back on her speaking and developed a multimedia tribute to her father.

“My mother supported me from the beginning and never said you should be an activist or civil rights leader or minister. She never did that to us, and thank God she didn’t,” Yolanda says.

For another King, the deepest despair came during graduate school.

Bernice King turned 5 a week before her father was killed. She barely remembered him, didn’t read his speeches, didn’t ask questions about his life.

But at 16, while on a youth retreat with others from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where three generations of Kings have preached, Bernice watched “Montgomery to Memphis,” a documentary about her father. She had seen it before, but this time the hurt buried since childhood poured out. She ran into the woods and cried for hours.

She was wracked by depression and stomach pains that doctors could not cure. Still, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Spelman College in Atlanta, entered law school at Emory University in 1985 and simultaneously worked toward a divinity degree.

Although she had always been an excellent student before, she was put on academic probation twice. The shame and embarrassment made her feel like a failure.

At 24, she grabbed a knife in her apartment and put it to her wrist.

“I couldn’t see any way out,” she says. “I had come to my end.”

Then an epiphany.

“The Lord came into my room through the presence of the spirit,” she says. The spirit spoke to her, told her she would be missed.

She stopped running from her past and accepted the call to preach.

“I felt you had to be this, that and the other before you were a preacher,” she says at Greater Rising Star Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta. “I know better now. When God calls you, you don’t have to get everything in order. You’ll never get everything in order.”

Shabazz Family Deals With Mother’s Death

Having come to terms with their father’s death, the Shabazz daughters now seek solace in their own ways from the tragedy that took their mother’s life.

Malikah lives in the Mount Vernon home where Betty Shabazz raised her six daughters. Gamilah looks in a mirror and sees her mother’s face in her own. Ilyasah hears her mother’s voice when she’s low: “Find the good and praise it.”

For years, Gamilah, the once-rebellious daughter, and her mother didn’t speak. But they had recently become close again.

“She learned to accept me as an individual with my own ideas, something I’d fought all my life for,” says Gamilah, 33, who lives in Harlem.

Ilyasah downplays her family’s tragedies.

“I don’t think we’re cursed,” she says. “I don’t think that our experience is so much different than other people’s.”

Her mother’s death has given her a new mission. She devotes herself to projects Betty Shabazz left unfinished. Born Muslim, she visits churches of various denominations and at night seeks comfort in prayer.

Betty Shabazz never got a chance to hold her namesake, Bettih Bahiyah, but she knew Malikah would have a girl. Malikah, 32, is thankful her mother supported her decision to have a child on her own.

In the children’s clothing store she and her mother opened in Mount Vernon last spring, Malikah says of her mother’s death, “It’s going to be something that we’re going to have to deal with for the rest of our lives.”

Malcolm, who pleaded guilty to the juvenile equivalent of second-degree arson and second-degree manslaughter, is serving an 18-month sentence at a treatment center in Lenox, Mass. His problems seem connected to the anguish his mother, Qubilah, now 37, faced in her life.

She spent two semesters at Princeton University, then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she had Malcolm. Hers was a nomadic life of low-paying jobs and rooming houses in California, Philadelphia and New York.

Three years ago, she was arrested for allegedly plotting to kill Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a man she believed was involved in her father’s murder. Bernice King, Reena Evers-Everette and other women rallied to support her, creating a defense fund. “We are indeed one in the spirit,” Bernice said then.

Prosecutors agreed to drop the charges if Qubilah consented to counseling. As she worked to straighten out her life, Malcolm lived with relatives, most recently his grandmother.

For the Evers family, no one cast a more troubling shadow than Byron De La Beckwith. They knew he was guilty, yet free.

Van Evers didn’t go to Beckwith’s third trial in Hinds County, Miss. He had already achieved a measure of peace. A year earlier, he had stood beside his father’s plot in Arlington National Cemetery and watched as workmen tore through the packed earth.

After they had lifted the casket into a waiting van, he had squeezed into the only space big enough for his body. For the six hours from Arlington to Albany, N.Y., he lay beside the coffin, thinking about his life and the father he barely remembered.

By the time he returned home from Albany, where the second autopsy had been performed, Van had what he set out to find: a lasting memory of his father.

His mother, brother and sister attended Beckwith’s trial, taking seats across the aisle from the aging segregationist.

On Feb. 5, 1994, the jury of eight blacks and four whites told the world what the Evers family already knew: On June 12, 1963, Beckwith took aim from a honeysuckle thicket and shot Medgar Evers in the back.

Van, 38, knows the conviction will not end his family’s pain.

“It will never be done,” he says. “That’s the struggle.”

And yet, Beckwith’s trial gave the Evers family a sense of resolution the Kings have never felt. James Earl Ray’s confession--quickly recanted--and guilty plea didn’t settle the issue for the Kings. They rarely discussed the case.

The men who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed there was a conspiracy. The truth remains a topic of fierce debate.

The Kings had their doubts but couldn’t see a way to reopen the case without forcing the world to relive the painful, violent spring of 1968 when cities burned.

Then last year, the New York Times called Dexter King. Ray was dying of cirrhosis of the liver. His family wanted a trial before it was too late. Any comment?

The Kings saw their chance. On Feb. 13, 1997, they stood before the media and said a jury trial was the only way to get at the truth. Historians scoffed.

Dexter, 37, who had emerged as the family spokesman, bore the brunt of the criticism.

He was the analytical son, the one who checked all the angles before making a decision. He had gone through his own trials, dropping out of Morehouse College in Atlanta because of a still-undisclosed medical condition, surviving a car wreck in which he was thrown into a field.

He became a strict vegetarian, began meditating. Some say Martin got the name, but Dexter got the looks. From certain angles, he has his father’s face. He still has the build of the young man who played fullback and linebacker in high school.

Last spring, he went to Nashville and sat with Ray for 20 minutes in a prison hospital. Dexter told Ray that the King family believed in his innocence. A year later, Ray, who is serving a 99-year sentence, is no closer to a trial, but the Kings have a sense of resolution that had eluded them.

Do They Want to Carry the Torch?

Their heritage complicates the private lives of the 13 men and women. Van Evers is the only one who is married. The rest are divorced, single parents, engaged, unattached.

They are wary of strangers. Because of who they are, some people have no qualms about stopping them on the street or in the supermarket to talk about their fathers. They’re never sure if the attentions given are genuine. In relationships, they wonder who measures up.

“I would think in the back of my head, ‘I’m Malcolm X’s daughter,’ ” says Ilyasah Shabazz. “And a lot of guys have said that to me. And sometimes you become a little unapproachable.”

In black Atlanta’s social circle, people look at the Kings--ages 35 to 42--and wonder why none have married. “People want them to marry,” says Michael Bond, son of the leader of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. He is an Atlanta city councilman and longtime acquaintance of the Kings. “They want to see a perpetuation, Dr. King’s immortality extended into the future.”

While the old guard understands the strains of a public life, they want these men and women to take greater roles.

The NAACP’s Julian Bond says the members of this generation “suffer from their inheritance.”

“No one passed the torch to Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King,” Bond says. “They grabbed the torch. You get the feeling that this generation wants someone to say, ‘Here’s the torch. Take it.’ ”

The old guard looks to the children of its leaders, but blood is no guarantor of character, of passion.

“I worry about the kids,” says Hosea Williams, 72, who led the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the road from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. “I worry about them very much.

“They have the ability,” he says. “They have the intelligence, the tenacity. . . . They lack the will.”

‘It’s Still a Battle’

They have all heard such comments, come across people who expected to find in them charismatic giants but, instead, found a man or woman trying to live an honorable life. That is the type of life Reena Evers-Everette wants for herself and for her children.

After she separated from her husband in 1987, she stepped off the management fast track at United Airlines, becoming a customer service representative with hours that give her more time with her three children.

Now 43, Reena has lived longer than her father. Yet she’s still often called “the child” of Medgar Evers.

“That’s how people refer to us because that’s how they remember us,” she says. “I might not like it, but I accept it.”

Reena grew up with the NAACP but is ambivalent about the group and its treatment of her family. She prefers to work with local groups, like the Red Cross and the Human Resources Race Relations Committee in Claremont, Calif.

“It’s still a battle,” she says. “There are times when I think maybe I should be jumping out there to speak, and I battle with myself all the time. I say, ‘If I do this, it will take me away from my family and what’s my priority right now?’ My priority is with them.”

Martin Luther King III, 40, also has been stung by people who complain that he’s not his father. He once tried to hide from his legacy by calling himself “Marty” but eventually realized he could not run from his father’s name.

“ ‘Marty’ is kind of playful, to me, not serious,” he says. “ ‘Martin’ is a serious person.”

In January, he became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which his father led during the civil rights movement.

For years the civil rights movement’s old guard waited for Martin Luther King III to find himself. They waited through his years as a Fulton County Commissioner. Now they wait to see how he will lead.

“I’m going to be compared to my father for the rest of my life, and there’s nothing I can do about that,” he says. “People expect me to be him, and that’s a problem, but not so much a problem that I won’t be able to function. I’m going to be Martin, and Martin the Third is not Martin Junior.”