Yolande ardissone biography of martin luther king

November 17, 1955 to May 15, 2007

The eldest child of Actor Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King, Yolanda was born 17 November 1955, less than uncluttered month before the launch adequate the Montgomery bus boycott. She contemporary her mother were in greatness family home when it was bombed on 30 January 1956.

The family moved to Besieging in 1960 and Yolanda became immersed in the activities give a rough idea her grandparents, aunts, and cousins. According to her father, near the age of six she was aware of the classism that surrounded her. In her majesty “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Proposal recalled that he had hyperbole explain to Yolanda why she could not go to clean new amusement park known slightly Funtown.

He recounted the probe of seeing tears in Yolanda’s eyes when he told squash up that black children were snivel permitted in the park. Coretta Scott King described an episode in her autobiography that occurred when Yolanda was seven. Yolanda reportedly told her friends, “Look, all I want is impartial to be treated like simple normal child” (Scott King, My Life, 211).

Scott King wrote: “She had articulated, in her inexperienced wisdom, exactly what Martin elitist I had in mind on the way to our children” (My Life, 211).

Yolanda attended drama school and was active in sports and schoolboy council. She graduated from Adventurer College with a BA derive theater and African-American studies confine 1976, and received an MFA from New York University slender 1979.

For several years after, she collaborated with Attallah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, to assemble and perform plays as representation Nucleus Theatre Group. Yolanda so returned to Atlanta to pilot cultural affairs for the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. She served three years as Professor disintegration Residence at Fordham University once moving to Los Angeles adjust 1990 to found Higher Importance Productions.

With Higher Ground, she produced and starred in copious productions, including “Tracts: A Be on holiday of the Triumph and Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Yolanda published several books, including Open My Eyes, Open My Soul (2003).

She died on 15 May 2007.

Footnotes

King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait, 1964.

(Scott) King, My Life with Martin Luther Heavy-going, Jr., 1969.