When Julia Roberts was born, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King paid the bill for her parents’ hospital room.
A month after her birth, Rev. King wrote a letter to her mother, asking her, “Are you satisfied?”
His tone was tender, but there was steel in his words. It was the same tone that Coretta King would use when she read the letter that would cause her husband to resign his seat in the state legislature just a few months later.
It wasn’t long after Coretta read her husband’s letter, she wrote to her daughter. “You know, darling, this boy is a mighty strange person,” she wrote, using her husband’s name in the letter. “I have my fears that he’ll hurt you or hurt us both. I’m so glad he won’t. And I’m really, truly happy that he’s on our side.”
The letter was dated October 28, 1968, four days after her husband’s second inauguration as the President of the United States.
The very next day, Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated.
A decade after Coretta wrote that letter, her voice of reason would be silenced forever.
She died in an Atlanta hospital on January 6, 1992. She died in the home she’d shared with her husband since 1953. She was 84 years old.
“What happened to Coretta?” Julia Roberts asked as the curtain rose at the 2018 Golden Globes, her mother’s birthday.
In the audience, Julia stood on stage with her mother’s former bodyguard, Tammi T. King. The audience quieted as Tammi spoke the words. “I don’t think any of us can come close to understanding the magnitude of your courage. You are someone we will remember,” Tammi said. “You may be gone, or you may yet be here.
