Claiming Her Father's Legacy -- The Rev. Bernice King Seeks Answers In God

DALLAS - The youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is sitting in a Dallas hotel room, her voice rising over the rain drumming against the window.

The Rev. Bernice King knows the power of words and is choosing hers carefully. At 33, she is the spiritual keeper of her father's legacy.

"People say I sound like him," she says of her father, whose words galvanized the nation during the civil-rights movement.

Since she was only 5 when her father was slain, King cannot remember her father's voice or much else about him. What she can remember is a sense of emptiness. She remembers turning away for years from the void that his death left in her life.

Now a minister herself, she is on a spiritual quest to find her own identity - recently penning a collection of her sermons and speeches, "Hard Questions, Heart Answers" (Broadway Books, $20). She also is in the midst of making peace with the loss of a father she barely knew. And she is on a mission to stir the consciousness of a nation she feels is becoming unraveled by moral and spiritual decay.

"I'm on this journey," she says. "For me, it began with `Why?' My question was about my father's death, why did it happen and why was he taken away from me? . . . Now it's being ready for the answer."

Without memories of a man whom the public knew so well, King has been able to fill the emptiness by connecting to her father spiritually. And she holds dearly to two dreams.

The first came in 1988, the year she preached her first sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both her father and grandfather had been pastors. In it, she's sitting at a table with her father, holding hands. Her father expresses concern about whether his wife is getting enough time for herself. Before King can answer, though, her brother Dexter awakens her.

The second came in 1990, the year King was ordained. This time her father sits in a chair, while her older sister, Yolanda, stands behind him.

"I was fussing at him for not being in touch. My sister said, `He's been in touch with me.' He said, `Yes, I have. You'll understand,' he told me. `It's my ministry.' So I'm on this journey now to find out why he hasn't been in touch with me," she says. Growing into her father's footsteps

Being the child of a man whom many Americans idolize cannot be an easy task. Walking in his footsteps has to be, at best, a tremendous burden. It's a task, King says, she slowly accepted. She has, she says, simply accepted what God has directed.

At 16, while watching footage of her father's funeral during a church retreat, the emptiness she had so carefully avoided crashed in around her. At 17, she discovered she had the gift of oratory when she filled in for her mother at the United Nations. In her 20s, she slowly began to delve into her father's writings, his sermons and his life.

"I tried to balance it so I would know who my father was and why I am the way I am, but I didn't want to be so consumed by his ministry, mission and purpose that I lost my own sense of identity," she says.

"Even to this day, I don't delve deeply."

There are times, she says, when she looks in the mirror, searching for the resemblance. It's there in the shape of her eyes and the cut of her chin. It's there in the cadence of her preaching. And it is there in page after page of her book - the words that are meant to strike at the heart, comforting the weary and pricking the comfortable.

America, she says, is bursting at its seams.

"The most disturbing part is the kids. When I was growing up, it was rare to hear about a kid bringing a knife to school. Now, here is this sudden shift in our young people, and that says something about the spiritual decay of our society," she says.

She wants her book and her work to help lead Americans away from a posture of self-centeredness to one of moral and social responsibility.

The other day at an airport, she says, a child was recklessly rolling around a cart while his mother retrieved luggage.

"A gentleman said, `Don't do that. You'll hurt somebody.' It sounds so simple. But it's those things that teach kids that there are parameters," she says. Values imparted by family example

Family values are something that the four King children learned, she says, not through words but by their parents' examples.

Today, Yolanda King, 41, is an actress. Martin Luther King III, 39, has been involved in local politics and preserves his father's legacy through speeches. Dexter King, 36, has headed the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta and remains active in the family's affairs.

When Coretta Scott King recently asked that James Earl Ray, the man who pleaded guilty to her husband's assassination, be granted a new trial, her four children joined her at a news conference.

Ray, who is suffering from a terminal illness, has long asserted that there is a larger conspiracy involved with Dr. King's death and has tried for years to get a new trial. Coretta Scott King has said that a trial would allow the family closure on haunting, unanswered questions about the assassination.

"My mother is very focused, graceful, compassionate," King says of the matriarch who held the family together. "All parents make errors. But she knew how to do enough to make sure we didn't go over the edge, and we all got close to the edge."

With her husband gone, Coretta Scott King tended to the business of ensuring that his legacy continued at the same time she made sure her children sat down to a home-cooked meal. She taught them spirituality by example, starting each day with meditation and prayer. And when they strayed from what she expected, yes, she even spanked.

"My mother always used to say, `Somebody has to cut off the chain of violence,' and she would say it with such a convincing tone," King says. The phrase came up when the children squabbled. "When I'm in conflict now, I can hear my mother's voice. And you know what she's saying, in essence: That somebody has to be you." Busy with `what God wants me to do'

She has spent the past month crisscrossing the country on a book tour. She remains in demand as a speaker. And, on the few days each month when she is home in Atlanta, she tends to her youth and women's ministries at Greater Rising Star Baptist Church.

She is at work on her memoirs. The task is a harder, more painful endeavor. King once described herself as a shy and withdrawn child. Underneath the polished speech and chosen words, remnants of the once-shy King still remain.

"It won't be an easy process. I haven't done one word yet formally, although I've been working up here," she says, pointing to her head.

For now, though, King is looking forward to the end of her book tour. She is looking forward to returning home to Atlanta. She'll worry about resting later.

"All of this has taken me to another level of motivation," she says about a day where her schedule stretches from 4:30 a.m. until after 10 p.m. "What helps me is I focus my energy on what God wants me to do."