When Martin Luther King III first saw his father’s memorial being constructed on the National Mall he started to cry.
“The very first time — I’ve been now five or six times — but the very first time I had to fight back tears, of joy,” the son of the famous civil rights leader told Yeas & Nays at Wednesday evening’s Honoring Global Leaders for Peace gala.
But not so for King’s three-year-old daughter Yolanda Renee King. She’s apparently the tough one in the family. “She held it together,” he said. “The first thing she said was…she said, ‘I’m not going to cry,’…and then she said, ‘this is awesome.'”
Even though Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s first grandchild didn’t choke up, that didn’t mean she wasn’t incredibly excited about the memorial, which will be dedicated on Sunday after several nights of star-studded events.
“Subsequently, everywhere she goes and whenever she sees the memorial, on airplanes, in magazines, she tells everybody, ‘that’s Papa King’s memorial, that’s Papa King’s statue,'” King III’s wife Andrea Waters King told Yeas & Nays.
