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to win equal rights for black Americans and end a 400-year-old legacy of racial prejudice and injustice in the United States. African Americans were treated like second-class citizens because state and federal laws failed to guarantee them the rights enjoyed by whites, particularly in the South. A threat to Dr. King’s life was a threat to the entire civil-rights movement. The television news was reporting details of the shooting—the same details that Coretta had already heard from Young and Jackson. Suddenly, Yolanda and her younger siblings, Martin III, age 10; Dexter, 7; and little Bernice, 5, came into the living room. Coretta didn’t want them to learn of their father’s fate from a television report, but Yolanda had already realized that something serious had happened to her father and ran crying from the room. She returned shortly, and Coretta gathered her children around and told them the news. “I’m getting ready to go to Memphis because your daddy has been shot,” she said. Yolanda, summoning up her courage, helped her mother pack her bags. The telephone then sounded again. It was Ivan Allen, Jr., the mayor of Atlanta, whowas calling to offer his help in any way. “Well, I’m leaving for Memphis on the 8:25 flight,” Coretta told him. Allen immediately volunteered to escort Coretta to the airport. Soon, other family members, friends, and neighbors were showing up at the Kings’ home. Mayor Allen and his wife arrived, and Coretta kissed her children good-bye, leaving them in the care of friends, and departed for the airport, along with Dr. King’s sister, Christine King Farris, and her husband, Isaac; Mayor and Mrs. Allen; and local minister Reverend Fred Bennette, Jr., and his wife. Dora McDonald would be meeting them all at the airport. Once at the airport, Coretta hurried along the airport’s corridor to find the gate for her flight, all the while feeling as though she was in a nightmare. She was about to board the plane when her name blared out over the PA system. “I had a strange, cold feeling,” Coretta recalled in her autobiography, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. “For I knew that it was the word from Memphis and that the word was bad.”

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