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Bernice King was only five years old when her father, civil-rights leader the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Today she is a 33-year-old woman who has amazed herself by following in her father's footsteps and becoming a minister. An associate minister at the Greater Rising Star Baptist Church in Atlanta, the Reverend Bernice King heads a singles ministry.

Here King speaks about the persisting racism within society and the challenge to make her father's dream a reality even in the church—topics she addressed in her recently published first book, Hard Questions, Heart Answers (Broadway). In her candid responses, you can hear echoes of her father's cadences, but the voice and the vision—inspiring and challenging—are clearly her own.

King also talks openly about her suicidal state (about a year before she accepted her call to the ministry) and her family's desire to see James Earl Ray, the man accused of killing her father, finally get a trial.

How do you view race relations in the United States more than a quarter-century after your father's death?
I think we have become stagnant. Nobody really wants to deal with the depth of the issue, nobody wants to deal with the historic pain and confusion that's associated with it.

I believe ultimately racism is a spiritual issue, and I think my father understood that. But he also understood that to create some kind of racial harmony we had to first deal with the legal barriers, the things that kept the races apart. Now that the races are together, we have to begin to do some self-examination, some identification, some calling out, some forgiving, some apologizing, some embracing, some crying—all of that, if we're going to deal with it realistically.

As the Rodney King and O. J. Simpson cases demonstrate, we haven't found real unity.
I think the O. J. Simpson case helped us realize that we cannot sugarcoat the problem and expect it to go away. It's deeper than that. These cases opened the dialogue to an extent, but it was the same old dialogue. It wasn't the dialogue of saying, "Look, we have a problem. We really need to sit down and dig into it and deal with it."

People want to dismiss the problem, just stay on the periphery. We don't want to say, "Okay, it's not about O.J.; it's about you and me, it's about them and us, so to speak." This is where we need to focus our energies.

The issue is much bigger than O. J. or Rodney King. It's about the way blacks have been mistreated throughout the years—and the misunderstandings and misinterpretations of that. There is a fear of acknowledging the problem, because acknowledging means taking responsibility, and nobody wants to take responsibility. Maybe I didn't create the initial system. But the reality is, if I've been a beneficiary in the system, and if some of the myths and some of the beliefs have been passed on, even subconsciously, to me, then there's work that I must do.

All of us have work to do—psychological and spiritual work. Even once we deal with the psychological scars, the biggest issue is going to be forgiveness from both sides. We're going to have to forgive each other, and that takes a big person, spiritually.

What is the church's role in all of this?
Until the church starts to deal with these issues and their offspring—the sexism and all the divisions that are within the church—then we certainly cannot expect society to move to the next level.

We represent God. He has placed us here and given us a commission. The role of the church is to overcome barriers. It is to create a unity. Unfortunately, the Devil has separated us and divided us. We've got to deal with divisions within the church first.

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June 16 1997, Vol. 41, No. 7