Growing Up King (17 page)

I did have a need, as my father did, to be understood and gain understanding. I had trouble getting it out of books, as my
father did. He didn’t do it so much at Morehouse; he was an average student there, didn’t take off academically until he went
to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. I can’t fathom how he did it, analyzed and translated philosophers
like Immanuel Kant or G. W .F. Hegel or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard or Henry David Thoreau or Reinhold Niebuhr.
He had done it.

I wanted—needed—to contribute in life. Like most young men, I had not yet found my mission and I didn’t have the same interests
Daddy had. By the time he was twenty-five he was ready to pastor; by the time he was twenty-six, political machinations or
not, back door or not, his idea or not, he was the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, and everybody from Mahalia Jackson
to Kwame Nkrumah to Dwight Eisenhower to Jack and Bobby Kennedy to Richard Nixon was in his sphere of influence. I needed
space to experiment and figure out who I, Dexter, wanted to be. But this need seemed to always put me at odds with a society,
and well-intentioned people, who wanted me to be what they wanted: the second coming of a King. Outside of the family, I didn’t
even have a friend, let alone a best friend.

I think there were only a few people that Isaac and I bonded with. One was John Carson. He was from Stockton, California,
a town outside San Francisco. His plan at the time was to follow in his father’s footsteps. His father was a doctor. John
was like me— didn’t make friendships easily. Another person with whom I bonded was Phillip Jones. I met him in the spring
of 1980. There was a girl I especially liked. He was dating her, only I didn’t know it. I was trying to date her. He didn’t
know that. I’d frequently visit her at Spelman. As I was coming out of my campus dorm one day, this guy approached me. I didn’t
know he was coming to read me the riot act. He said, “Say, what’s up with you? Do you know you’re trying to talk to my lady?”

I took the initiative.

“Hi, I’m Dexter King. And you are?”

He told me later the way I did it was disarming. Said he couldn’t bring himself to even say anything about his girlfriend.
We hit it off, became friends instantly, spent almost a twenty-four-hour period nonstop hanging out, though he was a senior
and I was a freshman. The girl was from Tennessee. Very attractive lady. Don’t know what happened to her. Phil and I spent
the day and night talking and walking around. We went to the music room and he played some of his songs on the piano, asked
me what I thought of them. We hit it off because our interests were aligned; we were musically inclined. We could talk on
any level; that impressed me because there weren’t many I could do that with. He seemed to warm to my interpretations in the
field of music. It’s funny, I can say that and see it clearly now, but back then, I didn’t even think of music as an option
of what to do with my life because I knew people would not have found it “acceptable” for King’s son. It was not an academic
discipline as I had approached it. Phillip was a musician, a good composer, and I liked that we could talk about issues, politics,
growing up, hanging out; there was substance, but also an ability to have fun. The fun was important; the seriousness was
draining; there’s a side of me, a little boy that wants to play, wants to be expressive. Being around Phil, hearing him, watching
him, helped that side. There’s a process of composing that teaches you about life. I wanted to learn about life.

Some of the buddies I had were Isaac, Vernon, Ralph, and John Carson, James “Chip” Carter, and Clarence “Bumpy” Cox III. I
do know there were not many people I could really be “down” with at Morehouse. With Phil, I was down.

The summer of his graduation, we went into the studio to produce a record. This was the first production where we hired the
artists, we hired the musicians, we were producers. And I felt… right. I felt alive. Just maybe I had found my calling.

We were at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1980 when Phil’s mother passed. She committed suicide. I’d seen
and met her at his graduation—an attractive woman. Her name was Loretha. He remembered that she cried over the TV in 1968
when my father was assassinated. She was an alcoholic. An angel when she wasn’t drunk, Phil said, a biochemist who’d been
trained at Meharry. But she was sometimes attracted to violent men. She was violent with Phil when she got drunk. Split personality.
He didn’t even know he was being abused. When she wasn’t drunk, she’d tell him how much she loved him.

At the convention, Granddaddy gathered us in a circle, and we held hands and said a prayer for Phil’s mother. Loretha had
done the same thing with him when my father was killed. He said, “This is my family now.” I could relate. My grandfather brought
him into the family prayer circle and prayed for Phil, so it was memorable and tragic at once, and formed a bond between us
that will last forever.

That next fall, I was on my own again. School was not working out. While my father could argue the relative merits of philosophers,
I could not; but I could tell regional differences in musical preferences among the school enrollment. I took advantage of
my rep as the person to work with for music. It got to the point I was so busy deejaying I had to hire out help; in some cases,
had three parties going on at one time. I had mobile units I’d send out; two other guys who worked with me, plus Isaac. One
is now a federal law enforcement agent, and the other is a dentist. But they all worked for K&F Sound Productions and were
dedicated and loyal. We had a thriving enterprise.

In the summer of ’80, we auditioned a couple of female singers. We even flew one girl in whom Phil knew from his earlier days
at Morehouse. She’d been at Spelman a year, and had gone on to become an
Ebony
Fashion Fair model. We had songs written, hired the studio, engineers, musicians. The song went nowhere. This was before
Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Antonio “LA” Reid, and the music industry descended on Atlanta in the ’90s. We learned the hard
way. You can have the talent, the song, the arrangement, a good product, but it’s held against you if you do something independent.
You’re penalized for not going through normal channels; if you’re outside the system, the system keeps you outside. It was
a learning experience; same in politics, same in music. We never took no for an answer, but eventually Phil went back to New
York. The next time we got together on a serious project would be years later.

My problems with school worsened. I would try to read something, and I would struggle to comprehend it. I would have to keep
trying over and over again, and even then I had trouble retaining it. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the reason
why. I was guarded about admitting this challenge; I still am even now; guarded because of early recollections in ’72 when
I was at the Democratic convention in Miami, as an eleven-year-old, and saw Tom Eagleton stepping down as vice-presidential
nominee because he’d seen a psychiatrist and had electroshock. I thought, “Man, I’ve got to deal with these issues. People
will say I’m nuts. Mother will be shamed.”

I was in a catch-22. I needed help, but I couldn’t afford to be seen as needing help. How could King’s son be less than perfect?

At that time, Morehouse’s administration asked students to choose a major at the end of sophomore year, as a part of the liberal
arts education process. I had more episodes where I couldn’t focus, buckle down. Going to class, following up assignments,
schmoozing the professors—the basic functions of college academic life seemed to throw me. Some of my professors were concerned
and wanted to help, but others were happy to heap the incompletes on me, and others simply gave me F’s even when they knew
I was in the process of completing assignments, or trying to. No matter what their reaction to me, everybody saw clearly that
this particular King communicated well, could tell you what he thought, seemed intelligent, ran this successful K&F Sound
operation, yet they couldn’t pinpoint why he was not following up. It had gotten the best of me; it was increasingly difficult
to accomplish anything, and the shame of it, the shame, as Martin Luther King’s son. Hey, I had problems just getting up in
the morning; chronic fatigue, where I would just sleep. I might sleep twelve hours, no problem, and always had a hard time
waking up.

Those professors who didn’t take the time to really talk to me were offended and insulted: “Well, who does he think he is?”
I even had some people tell me, “Look, if you think you’re going to get through because you’re King’s son, you better think
again.” But I didn’t think that. Scholastically I was bad all on my own. Figured they’d already made up their minds about
me. I couldn’t articulate why I was having problems, felt embarrassed because people were comparing me all the time with my
father, comparing me to this singular great finished product.

How could I get up before children and say, “Get an education,” if I hadn’t completed mine? Even in high school, periodically
I’d have some academic problems, but for whatever reason I was able to manage them better. Maybe because of the physical activity,
the high school sports in some way helped me mentally, helped clear my mind. I was a walking illness without activity. Maybe
that was it. I’m sure there was some practical reason why I couldn’t sustain in academics.

I got a party-boy reputation to go along with the black sheep hook. People knew I wasn’t performing in class and they also
heard, “DK’s deejaying tonight.” People couldn’t reconcile it. It wasn’t that I was dissing one for another. Deejaying paid,
and academics it seemed I could not do. It was not ability for one as it was lack of capability for the other. The music was
more fluid and did not require any textual analysis. The classwork required a connection between analysis and execution, a
thought process. Deejaying was sensing what you and others were feeling inside.

I enjoyed the latter because I had to learn about the different cultures too. D.C. people wanted to hear a certain kind of
music— go-go music played by the godfather of go-go, Chuck Brown. The New York brothers by then wanted to hear Grandmaster
Flash and the Furious Five, or Kurtis Blow; Chicago and the Midwest wanted to hear house or dancehall; brothers from L.A.
wanted to hear the solar sound. Then you got into different styles of rhyming, early hip-hop, the stage being set; there was
a connection between it and me—it was exciting, thrilling, cutting-edge, inspirational. The classroom seemed cobwebby, constricting,
strangling by comparison. Music permeated me; I could read the crowd and see, “Okay, tonight I got a lot of brothers from
D.C., so I’m going heavy on the go-go”; or “I got some brothers from New York, so I’m going house.” Or, “Hey, the rhyming…”

Whatever the flow was, I felt it, I was always alert to it, you couldn’t plan that far ahead of time, so you didn’t have to
read up on it. No homework. It required only reaction, a sense of what you heard, of what was going on around you, a sense
of what was “out there,” in the streets, in people’s faces, in their hearts, what they responded to. You couldn’t script it
out and you couldn’t learn it in a class on Western civilization. In class, it was all numbing regimentation—numbing to me,
anyway. I disliked the distance of the subject matter from the culture at hand, and from my own personal history. The music
made me feel good and useful, somehow, as if… as if I was making a thing right that needed making right. The only place I
had problems was with the structured environment of a college classroom. I asked myself why, why did I have this problem?

I got plenty of “Well we are very disappointed in you, young man.”

Everybody approached it traditionally. They saw me as a failure. I always felt my symptoms and knew my problem, I just didn’t
know why. Nobody could tell me why—why I didn’t do well at Morehouse. Why I didn’t finish. Maybe this is another reason why
the music, the Sound, meant so much to me. I wanted music to be worth it. I wanted to be worthy.

I
went to work in 1982 for the Atlanta Police Department. I started out as a community service officer, poised to become a police
recruit, then changed to corrections officer, all under the umbrella of the Department of Public Safety. My motivation for
joining the police department was that I thought I could help people who were victims of the criminal justice system and pay
my dues in public service, which I felt was a prerequisite for any elected office I might pursue in the future. I was still
dealing with Morehouse too. I took some time off from school to get established in public safety, but I still had the intention
of going back.

I’d been wanting my own place, so Ralph Abernathy III and I became roommates.

Ralph had been living in the Kappa house, I’d been in a good old dorm. We moved into a renovated duplex in the West End, on
Beecher Street. Ralph initially went to Benedict College in South Carolina before he transferred to Morehouse. My mom had
said, “If you don’t want to stay on campus, I’ve got a house here that’s paid for, you can stay here. But if you want your
own place, you pay for it.”