Remembering MLK’s mother

Forty-six years ago on June 30, on a quiet Sunday in Atlanta, Georgia, morning services at Ebenezer Baptist Church had just begun when shots rang out.

A woman seated at the church’s new organ was playing the first strains of “The Lord’s Prayer.” A church deacon was nearby.

The deacon, 69-year-old, Edward Boykin, was killed. Also killed was the organist, 70-year-old Alberta King, the mother of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who six years prior had been assassinated in Memphis while planning a protest in support of sanitation workers.

One cannot escape the irony: a mother and her son both murdered as they worked for causes greater than themselves.

Unlike her martyred son, Alberta King never gained worldwide fame, was never awarded a peace prize, was never memorialized with a statue in the nation’s capitol, never honored with a national holiday in her name.

No, Alberta King may simply have had the dream of every mother: to be a woman who births and raises an extraordinary child.

Melba Tolliver Lower Mount Bethel Township