Dexter Scott King and his older brother, Martin Luther King III, were sitting on the floor, watching TV, when a news bulletin jarred them.
Their father had been shot.
Startled, the boys got up and ran to their parents' bedroom, to their mother, who was on the phone, hearing the terrible news from Memphis.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968, was a national tragedy. But for his four children, it was a personal blow that changed their lives forever.
"I kind of see all of us as children of war, if you will, the civil rights movement being certainly the backdrop, but like a modern-day civil war," Dexter King, 41, said in a telephone interview from Malibu, Calif., where he lives part time. He was 7 when his father was killed.
"While it may have been unarmed conflict, in some respects, or nonviolent, there was still the hardship and the emotional trauma of war and, in some respects, maybe even worse because most of it was psychological and emotional, and those are the types of scars that can last for a long time."
Luckily, so can good memories, and King recounts many in a new book, Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir (Warner Books, $24.95), which he co-wrote with Ralph Wiley, a former senior writer for Sports Illus-trated. King will discuss and sign the book at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
In the book, the younger King son recalls loving his father, losing him and growing up under the weight of the King legacy.
Christmas 1967. His mother, Coretta Scott King, bought Dexter and her husband matching purple bicycles. They rode together, laughing, along hilly Sunset Avenue in Atlanta's Vine City, where Dexter King's mother still lives.
"He was really like a playmate," he said, laughing. "He really would let his hair down. I think those moments were like his refuge away from the very serious, stoic kind of individual who in his public life had to deal with such serious issues. So, coming home for him I think was really like a joy and relief to be able to play with his kids."
When their father would return from a trip, the children would hide from him, shaking with excitement, knowing he would want to play. He'd find them and have them jump off the top of the refrigerator into his arms. "We would get on top and drive my mom crazy because she thought one of us might fall," King said.
Their father called it the kissing game. Yolanda, the eldest, would be first. She'd land in her father's arms and he'd ask, "Where's your kissing spot?" Hers was a corner of her mouth. Martin's was his forehead. Bernice's was a corner of her mouth. Dexter's was his temple.
Dexter writes that he can still see his father walking down the hallway at home in his slippers and a burgundy robe. Seeing his father in his robe made him happy "because it meant he wasn't going anywhere for a while."
He saw his gentle father get angry only once -- after the children hid his carton of cigarettes. "There was an unbelievable amount of stress on him," King recalls in the book. "He didn't start smoking until the last few years of his life."
One scene in the book particularly foreshadows the heartbreak to come. Dexter and Martin found some plastic toy guns. They played war, gangsters, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. Their father, who'd probably been watching from a window, came out and gathered his sons at his knee. He asked them for their guns, which they handed over reluctantly. He told them the toys represented handguns, which are used only to kill or maim people. "If you saw what they did to people, you'd be sad," he told his sons. "Suppose somebody shot somebody you loved?"
After some more talk, the boys destroyed the guns. They put them in a metal trash can and burned them.
Dreams of father
At their father's funeral, one of his last sermons at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church was played. "Bernice could hear him; it puzzled her; in ways, she remains puzzled," King writes. The youngest of the Kings, she was 5 at the time.
As for Dexter, "it wasn't until I reached adulthood that people saw me express much emotion about anything."
After their father's death, Dexter never rode his bike again. Sometimes, he would look under his bed for his father, hoping he was hiding there to surprise him. For a long time, he dreamed his father was alive: They would ride their bicycles, play softball, sit together in his father's study. Then he'd wake up, grieving.
Dexter took refuge in music and was thrilled when the Jackson 5 visited their house and played Ping-Pong and board games with him and his siblings in their basement. Vice President Hubert Humphrey invited the Kings to the White House, where the chef made a cake and served ice cream.
When was life what could be called normal? "Playing in the neighborhood and going outside, you know, really just getting kind of bruised and bumped up as kids do," King said. "Those times, I really felt normal, like a normal kid."
Going to Southern Christian Leadership Conference picnics also felt normal, he said. "The movement family, if you will, always had a closeness," King said. "We had playmates and we had other kids we could identify with."
A little more than a year after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, his brother, the Rev. A.D. King, drowned. Five years later, during a Sunday service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Alberta King, the civil rights leader's mother, was shot.
It took Dexter King years to realize that he'd pulled into a shell because of his family's tragedies. "I don't want to say we built a wall around us, but we weren't kidders anymore, as gregarious," he says in the book. "All of us developed this caution, this reserve, that affected our closest interpersonal relationships."
King is haunted by fears of losing people he loves. "I can commit to a cause, an idea -- but a living being of the opposite gender?" he writes. "People I love, who touch my heart, I keep them at a distance. All four of us, the children of Dr. King, are like this. None of us is married, none of us has ever been married. None of us has children. So there are issues there."
Yolanda, 47, is an actress who lives in California. Bernice, 39, is an assistant pastor in Atlanta. Martin, 45, is president and chief operating officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Confer-ence. Dexter, who is president and chief executive officer of the King Center, splits his time between Atlanta and the West Coast. There, he's developing some film projects that he says he's not ready to discuss publicly and, as he explained it, finding himself.
California "has been my refuge," he said. "Atlanta is still very much home. But it's also been a blessing to be able to have a place where I can have a little more anonymity."
Lifetime of pressure
In high school, girls hesitated to date him. One girl's father said, "I'm not burying my baby because she was standing too close."
Dexter King graduated from Atlanta's Frederick Douglass High School in 1979, then attended Morehouse College, his father's alma mater. He didn't graduate, and he felt, as Martin Luther King Jr.'s son, an "extra oomph" in his feelings of failure. "In school, it was hard for me to focus," King said. Finally, in his late 20s, he confirmed he had attention deficit disorder.
If Dexter felt pressure at Morehouse, so did Martin. People wanted to see the young men as scions of the royal King family, he said. "Our job is to carry on my father's worthwhile legacy," King said. "But the flip side is that people don't allow you to do anything else."
Laughing, he said many times he has told his brother, the namesake: "I wouldn't want to be in your shoes."
Yet even if Dexter King wanted to distance himself from his famous father, he couldn't. He looks just like him.
He said he's grateful for his mother's steady attention. "And a mother who was always taking time, no matter how busy her schedule was, we were number one," he said.
His heartbreaking dreams about his father stopped long ago, he said.
"I think I connect more with him spiritually," he said. "It's almost like I feel that he's a part of me and I'm a part of him."
Still, Dexter King's life isn't without anxieties. A news bulletin can summon old fears.
"You brace yourself," he said. "And I don't know if it will ever be different."
Tragedy changed the family in many ways, civil rights leader's son says
"I kind of see all of us as children of war, if you will, the civil rights movement being certainly the backdrop, but like a modern-day civil war."
Book reading, signing
What: "An Evening With Dexter Scott King"
When: Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
Where: Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St.
Admission: Free
Call: 410-396-5430