Sex and the Single Slain Civil Rights Leader Survivor

Why, for the most part, have the ten children of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. never married?

Malcolm X fathered six girls: Attallah (born 1958), Qubilah (1960), Ilyasah (1962), Gamilah (1964) and twins Malaak and Malikah (1965). Betty Shabazz, his widow, was pregnant with the twins at the time of his February 21, 1965 assassination, and both she and his other daughters witnessed the brutal event at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan.

While, admittedly, all of X’s offspring have, for the most part, chosen to live quiet, private lives—Ilyasah Shabazz wrote an autobiography, Growing Up X, in 2002—as far as is generally known, none have married. The sole exception may be daughter Qubilah, mother of Malcolm Shabazz, the troubled child who set the apartment fire that took his grandmother’s life in 1997. At the time, it was rumored that Qubilah had been briefly married, in France, to the child’s father. However, it appears that this was never confirmed.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fathered four children with his wife, Coretta, before he was killed on April 4, 1968: Yolanda (born 1955), Martin III (1957), Dexter (1961), and Bernice Albertine (1963).

Yolanda died suddenly in 2007, unmarried. Dexter has never married. Bernice has never married.

As it turns out, Martin III has married. He did so, shortly after his mother’s death in January 2006, to longtime girlfriend Arndrea Waters, and they are expecting a baby girl. Oddly, though, particularly given that he is the the firstborn son and namesake of the beloved Dr. King, he kept marriage a secret, for perhaps as long as two years, until January 2008.

Dag. As a person who firmly believes in marriage and its importance, but who also knows that, for prominent people, the uniting of two families can present the emotional tax and technical profundity of a strategic missile treaty, I have to admit I’ve long wondered: What gives with the kids of King and X?

Is it Gorgeous Lonely Girl on a Saturday Night syndrome? The Why Marry When I Can Pimp paradox? Or maybe the No One Good Enough for Mom scenario?

In a fascinating statement last week, King’s youngest and only surviving daughter, Bernice, gives insight into the issue (as does her now-married brother Martin). King is a licensed attorney, an author, and the only one of her father’s children to follow him into the ministry (she is an elder at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, the Lithonia GA mega-facility led by the flamboyant Bishop Eddie Long).

In an Associated Press article pondering “What if the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had lived?”, Bernice concludes she is “fairly certain” that, had her father not been assassinated six days after her fifth birthday,

she would be married and have children by now. But his graphic death and ponderous legacy, she fears, have made her a less than “viable candidate” for domestic bliss. Part of the problem is that her father set the bar so high. She remembers something her mother often said.

“She said, ‘I didn’t marry a man. I married a mission,'” the daughter says. “So for me, a spouse is more than just a companion. It’s someone to fulfill your destiny with. And I think in my case, because the destiny is so great, because you had a man whose life was cut short and there was some work that had to be completed, that you now have a responsibility to participate in, that makes it a little more difficult.”

Martin III, likewise, feels he wouldn’t be having his first child at age 50 had his father not been killed. “I wasn’t clear that I even wanted to bring a child into the world,” he says.

This is far more than a little sad, in Martin III’s case, but even more in the case of Bernice. It seems she is saying that because her father’s myth was spun into an almost superhuman form, she found potential suitors, and her own ambitions, maybe, dwarfed by her dad’s solar eclipse-sized shadow.

No one would measure up, because no one could. It’s almost like, since you can’t figure out how to be the absolute, hands-down best, bar none, damn them all, at some given task, you don’t try at all, not realizing that the way you possibly get there is to start, and to try anything.

If this is, in fact, Bernice’s case, then it just adds to the tragedy of King’s murder; the magnitude of what his family has suffered and lost; and the astounding reach, momentum, and impact of a single, solitary rifle’s bullet, fired from the brush in front of a motel, one April day, long ago, in Tennessee.