King’s Son Tells L.A. Students to Be Resilient

When his father was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968, Martin Luther King III was 10--the same age as many in his audience Monday at Laurence 2000 School, a private elementary school in the San Fernando Valley.

“You must be resilient,” King’s second-oldest child told about 70 students, kicking off a week of tributes at the school that will end on the elder King’s birthday Monday. “The odds were stacked against [my father], but he and his team were resilient and as a result our nation moved forward.”

The afternoon assembly in Laurence’s auditorium featured a simple production by Los Angeles actors about King’s life, from his boyhood in Atlanta to the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, including the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in 1963 and his murder at age 39 five years later.

King’s lesson for students today is “that even though people show us that sometimes violence is the answer for stuff, that nonviolence is better,” said sixth-grader Aaron Hassel.

Martin Luther King III now heads up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Atlanta-based civil rights group co-founded by his father, and lectures across the country on community activism and human rights. He is filming a television series, “Wisdom of Dreams,” based on the achievements of everyday people.

Before King’s visit to Laurence, he spoke in Watts to about 2,600 students from Jordan High School and from Milken Community High School in Los Angeles.

The schools represented a range of ethnic makeup.