The actress has revealed this weekend a chapter of her hitherto unknown past: her friendship with the family of Martin Luther Kingthe civil rights activist assassinated in 1968. The parents of Julia Robertsplaywrights and owners of an acting school, accepted King’s eldest daughter into their classrooms when other schools rejected black children, a detail that united families for life.
The interpreter, winner of the Oscar for Erin Brockovich, has placed the beginning of that friendship in the decade of the 60s, in Georgia. So his parents, Betty Lou y Walter Grady Roberts, they accepted Yolanda King into their school, giving her a leading role in one of the school functions. The Ku Klux KlanHorrified to see a black girl falling in love with a white man on stage, they set off a car bomb outside the school gates in 1965, but Roberts’ parents were undeterred.
The Kings, grateful for the Roberts’ love, did not hesitate to help them when Julia came into the world and the hospital bills for her birth piled up: “They couldn’t afford it and Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta, paid it all”Julia has told in the program History Talks.
Sadly, the renowned activist was murdered by a white supremacist on April 4, 1968, but the friendship between the families endured over the years. In fact, Walter Grady personally took it upon himself to train Yolanda King as an actress, a field in which she stood out thanks to films such as Fluke o Ghosts of Mississippi.