Yolanda King, 51, Actor and Dr. King’s Daughter, Dies

 

Yolanda King, the eldest child of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who melded her father’s message of racial equality and nonviolence with her own calling as an actor and a motivational speaker, died on Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 51.

Steve Klein, a spokesman for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, said the cause of death had not been determined but seemed related to cardiopulmonary problems.

Ms. King was meeting her brother Dexter King at a friend’s home when she collapsed and died. Yolanda Denise King, who was born on Nov. 17, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., lived virtually her entire life in the maelstrom of the civil rights revolution that her father and mother, Coretta Scott King, helped lead. Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, and Mrs. King died last year.

Besides her brother Dexter Scott King, Yolanda King is survived by another brother, Martin Luther King III, and her sister, the Rev. Bernice King.

Yolanda King wrote and produced plays; gave speeches to groups that included elementary schoolchildren and Fortune 500 corporations; and acted in commercial movies. With Elodia Tate, she edited a motivational book emphasizing the importance of diversity. Ms. King’s consistent goal was to infect her work, including her films, with her family’s deeper purposes.

She portrayed Rosa Parks, who sparked the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her bus seat in a miniseries, “King” (1978), and Betty Shabazz, the wife of Malcolm X, in “Death of a Prophet” (1981).

In 1999, she acted in “Selma, Lord, Selma,” about the civil rights march, and in 1996 appeared in “Ghosts of Mississippi,” about efforts to track down the killer of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader.

She founded a dramatic group with Atallah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, the slain civil rights leader, and started a theatrical production company, Higher Ground Productions, dedicated to what she called personal empowerment. She was also on the board of the King Center.

In a statement, Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia and a veteran of the civil rights movement, said that being Dr. King’s daughter was to carry an extra burden.