Drama! Firework! Ku Klux Klan! Why Julia Roberts owes her birth to Martin Luther King

It’s a friendly summer day in Atlanta in 1965. A couple of kids are acting. A boy kisses a girl. He is disguised as a fox, she as a tortoise, both wear masks, no one sees that the fox is white under his costume and the tortoise is black. But everyone knows.

A mixed children’s theater was unthinkable in the southern city of Atlanta at the time. And only one theater school accepted the turtle girl and her two little brothers. When the turtle and the fox finally kiss, a Buick ten meters away in front of the theater goes up in flames. Fortunately, only the car is damaged, it is too far away.

The man who perpetrated the attack is an otherwise rather passive yet deeply committed member of the Ku Klux Klan. He announced the attack the day before and is now present. The police can arrest him immediately. Meanwhile, the children continue to play undisturbed.

The target of the attack was the little turtle. Because she’s not just any girl, but Yolanda King, the daughter of the famous black civil rights activist Martin Luther King. The two who landed Yolanda in her drama class are Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Roberts, they had no luck on stage so now they teach acting, direct and often tour poorer parts of town with their children’s productions.

Betty and Walter and Martin Luther Jr. and his wife Coretta become friends. Yolanda will later call them “extended family”. And on October 28, 1967, the youngest chick from this family came out: Julia Roberts. Betty and Walter clearly belong to the creative precariat within this family. They have a lot of idealism, but no money and no idea how to pay the bill for Julia’s birth in the hospital.

However, the Nobel laureate MLK, as Martin Luther King is also known, is prosperous. It was soon decided that he and his wife would pay the hospital costs for Julia’s birth, Julia Roberts revealed in a conversation with Gayle King. Julia will no longer consciously get to know MLK. On April 4, 1968, when she was just six months old, the 39-year-old was gunned down before one of his performances on the balcony of a Memphis motel.

The children pass on their parents’ inheritance. And the legacy of extended parenting. Yolanda King becomes a civil rights activist and actress, above all founding a theater company with Attallah Shabazz, the eldest daughter of the other black activist who was also murdered at the age of 39, Malcolm X. And this despite the fact that the two women were initially afraid to falling apart upon first meeting because of their fathers’ differing ideas. Yolanda’s younger brother Dexter also becomes an actor and documentary filmmaker. Like Yolanda, most of his projects are entirely in the service of his father.

Julia’s older brother Eric Roberts became an actor, starting his career in 1978 with a Golden Globe nomination for his lead role in “King of the Gipsies.”

We all know Julia’s own story. At the latest after “Pretty Woman” (1990), everyone wanted to be her Romeo and her smiles are bursting on the screens of this world from now on. She and her family are still grateful to the kings to this day.