We Keep Moving

In a Vanity Fair exclusive, Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter reflects on Trump's decision to declassify the civil rights leader's assassination files, her father's legacy, and the future of the movement

- BERNICE A. KING

On March 28, 1968, I celebrated my fifth birthday.

Unbeknownst to me, it would be the last time I would celebrate my birthday with my father. Seven days later, on April 4, Daddy was assassinated. For years I tried to figure out: What did my father do? Why did they assassinate him?

As a five-year-old, I reasoned that Daddy was a good person who loved everybody and whom everybody loved; why would anyone want to kill him? People who stood up for “the least of these,” I reasoned, were not supposed to be killed. I know now that waging a nonviolent fight for justice is dangerous work.

As my siblings and I grew up without a father, we were often reminded that he was assassinated while seeking to make the world a better place. And there were more assassination attempts to come. These were assassination attempts on his reputational character. Our mother, Coretta Scott King, prepared us for these repeated attempts, saying, “They keep trying to assassinate your father over and over again.” At times, public discourse about my father slithered into slander to undermine the importance and impact of his legacy, and I learned to brace myself for the attempted assassinations by keeping my mother’s words close to my heart.

By the time we matured into adulthood, we had developed the composure necessary to stand before the nation and the world each April 4. Laying a wreath on Daddy’s crypt reminded us of what can happen when the forces of hate and injustice have no bounds.