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 sattarmi rated 6 months ago - ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Christine King Farris was sewing an Easter dress for her daughter in their Atlanta home one rainy April evening when the nightly news was interrupted by a special report.
"It was a horrible moment," Christine King Farris says of the night her brother Rev. Marti...
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- sattarmi rated 6 months ago
- ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Christine King Farris was sewing an Easter dress for her daughter in their Atlanta home one rainy April evening when the nightly news was interrupted by a special report.
"It was a horrible moment," Christine King Farris says of the night her brother Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.
The newscaster announced that Farris' younger brother, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee. Another update came minutes later: King was in critical condition.
"It was a horrible moment," Farris says of that night in 1968. "I tried to call my sister-in-law; the lines were busy. I tried to call my parents; the lines were busy. I couldn't get anybody."
While boarding a plane for Memphis, Farris learned her brother was dead. It was the beginning of a string of family tragedies. Her only surviving sibling, her younger brother, A.D., drowned the next summer. Her mother, Alberta, was shot dead five years later while playing the "Lord's Prayer" on an organ in church on Sunday morning.
Farris raises her hands in bewilderment when she contemplates the losses.
"I think of the things that I've faced in my life and sometimes I question how I'm still here," Farris, 80, says in her office at Spelman College, surrounded by photographs of her famous brother and other civil rights leaders she once knew.
"I'm the lone survivor in my family," says Farris.
This year, the civil rights community will gather in Memphis on April 4 to mark the 40th anniversary of King's assassination, yet Farris will not join them. She is talking publicly about the death of her younger brother for the first time, but a return to Memphis is not part of her agenda.
"I can't go," she says. "I've not been there since the time we went to gather my brother. My memory of Memphis is not a pleasant one. It's one that I cannot erase."
Farris is remembering her brother in another way. She is writing a memoir about her life with him called, "Through It All." A formal and reserved woman, Farris has spent the past year delving into her ugliest memories.
"It's been a real challenge," she says. "I've had to relive those moments. Sometimes it affects me more than others. I try to live with it."
She says it's important for her to push past those painful memories because she wants to humanize her younger brother. Everyone has heard about King, the civil rights icon. She wants to strip away those platitudes to reveal the playful brother she knew.
"He was normal as a person could be," she says. "I really want people to understand that. I want people not to think of him as some mythic character from out of space."
The mythic nature of King's ministry, though, is palpable in Farris' roomy office at Spelman, the predominately black women's college where she has taught education for 49 years.
Farris stores photos of her brother on her desktop computer as screen-savers. As each image shifts to another, her computer automatically plays highlights of her brother's most famous public speeches.
Isaac N. Farris, Jr., her only son, says his mother still plays recordings of her brother's speeches and reads his manuscripts at home.
They weren't just siblings. They were friends.
"She was the first one to meet Mrs. Coretta [King's wife, Coretta Scott King)]. She lent him money for his engagement rings," he says. "Over the years, she's especially talked about missing the friendship they had."
The resemblance to her brother is obvious up close. She has the same square face and the same measured, Baptist preacher's drawl. She says she's accustomed to people staring at her when they encounter her in Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Atlanta church her brother once led that she still attends.
- oneluv918 rated 6 months ago
- Story Highlights:
King's sister was sewing an Easter dress when she saw TV report he was shot
Farris' memory of Memphis is "not a pleasant one ... It's one that I cannot erase"
She remembers her brother loved playing pool, doing the jitterbug and telling jokes.
Despite loss of loved ones, Farris says "God never puts on us what we can't bear"
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