Christine King Farris - Through It All: Reflections on My Life, My Family, and My Faith

H aving been blessed to see the sunrise on the eightieth year of my life, I find myself more convinced than ever of the biblical admonition that to everything there is a season.

I am now embarking on a season of reflection. Its a time to look back at the panorama of my life with a mixture of awe, gratitude, and a very real sense of wonderment.

Its a time to come to terms with the reality that joy and pain are simply opposite sides of the same coin.

God knows, I have seen my fair share of each.

I was, of course, blessed to have been born into an established, staunchly middle-class, God-fearing, politically influential family. We lived on what was, at the time, probably the premier African American street in the nationSweet Auburn Avenue.

Ive lived to witness one of the cornerstones of our family, my own mother, murdered by a deranged gunman as she played the organ in our church during a Sunday morning service.

Ive witnessed the hand of providence and a joining of the man and the moment as my younger brother Martin Luther King, Jr., (who will forever be ML to me) headed the revolutionary nonviolent movement that in the middle of the twentieth century and helped to transform America. His leadership of that movement inspired multiple peaceful uprisings worldwide. Oppressed people from across the globe came to understand that they could, indeed, overcome.

But more than that, they came to see that they could, in fact, be the architects of their own liberation.

Ive lived to see the worlds recognition of my brothers labor culminate in his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I have seen his bithday designated a national holidaythe first such honor to be afforded an African American.

And yet, the inevitable ebb and flow of history led Martin to oppose his own government as it recklessly waged an unjust and immoral war in Vietnam. I watched his understanding and analysis evolve as he concluded that the freedom struggle required confronting what he termed the giant evil triplets, racism, militarism, and poverty.

I have come to know and depend on the presence of a just and generous God. A God who has shown me, time and time again, two things: His presence in joy and rejoicing, and that He never puts upon us more than we can bear.

I have arrived at this point in my life having had the advantage of a large, supportive, and loving family. Naturally, weve borne, shared, and experienced all the ups and downs that confront any American family.

But my particular story is unique.

And its this story, with all its peaks and valleys and all its facets, that I seek to share with you on the pages that follow.

It is the story of a family that has been blessed by God to play a role in the struggle to help America deliver on its promise of freedom, justice, and equality for all it citizensespecially for those we know as the least of these. I believe this to the core of my being.

This is my story.

Willie Christine King Farris
Fall 2008
Atlanta, Georgia

G od has given me many blessings, for which I am eternally grateful. It would be an understatement to observe that my life has been extraordinary. What appears on the following pages is the result of my having reached the vantage point of eighty years. It is my feeble effort both to take stock of my life and to share it with others, in the hope that my story might provide inspiration and, perhaps, speak to the need to stand tall through joy and pain, success and tragedy, and to find a way to keep on keeping on.

Generations of my family who came before us tilled the soil and gave us their shoulders to stand on. We have tried to respond to the call of conscience and the will of God.

Every now and then, I have to chuckle as I realize there are people who actually believe ML just appeared. They think he simply happened, that he appeared fully formed, without context, ready to change the world. Take it from his big sister, thats simply not the case.

We are the products of a long line of activists and ministers. We come from a family of incredible men and women who served as leaders in their time and place, long before ML was ever thought of.

My brother was an ordinary man, called by a God in whom he had abundant faith. He took on incredible challenges, and he rendered extraordinary service to his fellow man. At the outset, it is critical to recognize that many of the gifts with which the public later associated ML came from those in our family who preceded him, including my maternal great-grandfather, Willis Williams, who was a slave and a minister. Actually, he was an exhorter, which is what Negro ministers were called during the era of slavery. He was from Penfield, a small town in Greene County, Georgia, about seventy miles east of Atlanta.

Penfield is famous for its cemeteries, and cemeteries have certainly figured prominently in my life. Among the notables buried in Penfield are Jesse Mercer, one of the founders of Mercer University, and General James Edward Oglethorpe, a founder of Oglethorpe University, which began originally in a Penfield church.

There is a lot about the background of Willis Williams that I do not know. I do know, however, that he was married to Lucrecia Williams, who was thirty years his junior.

Before the Civil War, Willis and Lucrecia attended Penfields Shiloh Baptist Church. In a practice that was probably unusual for the time, Shiloh counted both slaves and whites as full members of its congregation. My great-grandfather was owned by William N. Williams, who was also a member of Shiloh.

Consider the irony of that sentence for a moment: concurrent Christian church membership and simultaneous slave ownership.