Despite this, King managed to keep up her grades and became involved in high school politics, serving as class president for two years.

An important early memory was that she wanted to go to Funtown, a local amusement park, with the rest of her class, but was barred from doing so due to her race.

However, her father reassured her as she began to cry that she was "just as good" as anyone who went to Funtown, and that, one day in the "not too distant future", she was going to be able to go to "any town" along with "all of God's children".

[19] King, and her brother "Marty", were enrolled in the fall semester of 1965 at Spring Street Elementary School, in Midtown Atlanta, Georgia.

"[27] On the evening of April 4, 1968, when she was 12, Yolanda returned with her mother from Easter-dress shopping when Jesse Jackson called the family and reported that her father had been shot.

[34] King and her siblings were assured an education thanks to the help of Harry Belafonte, who set up a trust fund for them years prior to their father's death.

In the interview with the magazine, she related how people expected her to be "stuck up" and referred to it as one of the "handicaps" of being Martin Luther King's child.

Despite this wish, she acknowledged that this was of no ease and expressed happiness that her father had changed many things, and even made some people gain self-esteem.

But after finishing her sophomore year and returning home so she could work over the summer, her grandmother Alberta Williams King was killed on June 30, 1974.

[55] An alumna of Smith College after graduating in 1976, she was the subject of an essay among the "remarkable women" during a celebration during the college's one hundred and twenty-fifth year[56] and she was a member of the board of directors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc. (the official national memorial to her father) and was founding Director of the King Center's Cultural Affairs Program.

She stated in 2000 to USA Today, that her acting "allowed me to find an expression and outlet for the pain and anger I felt about losing my father,".

She served on the Partnership Council of Habitat for Humanity, was the first national Ambassador for the American Stroke Association's "Power to End Stroke" Campaign, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a sponsor of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Human Rights Campaign, and held a lifetime membership in the NAACP.

In 1979, Yolanda met Attallah Shabazz, the eldest daughter of Malcolm X,[60] after arrangements had been made by Ebony Magazine to take a photograph of the two women together.

[63][64] The theater company was based in New York City and Los Angeles and focused on addressing the issues that their fathers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, spoke of in their lifetimes.

[24] On January 7, 1986, Yolanda, her brother Martin Luther King III and her sister Bernice were arrested for "disorderly conduct" by officers responding to a call from a Winn Dixie market, which had had an ongoing protest against it since September of the previous year.

She also found "great irony" in President Ronald Reagan having signed a bill to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national holiday.

[25] She kicked off Martin Luther King Jr. Day by starting a week-long celebration on January 12, 1987, and talked to students about opportunities that they had at that point which their parents and grandparents did not have.

At the time of the honor, King said that their production company had been approached by organizations seeking to arrange special staging of the play for gang members before May 1, when the show's run would end.

King and Kelly starred in three films together, HBO's "America's Dream" starring Danny Glover and Wesley Snipes, award-winning period film "Odessa," that deals with racial unrest in which King gives a stellar performance as a nanny who lost her son to racial violence, and in Rob Reiner's film "Ghosts of Mississippi" about the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers starring Whoopi Goldberg and Alec Baldwin; King and Kelly played the adult and child versions of Reena Evers.

[89] In the fall of 1995, at age 39, she joined Ilyasah Shabazz and Reena Evers in saluting their mothers as they chaired an attempt at registering one million African-American women to vote in the presidential election of 1996.

[90] King joined the rest of her family in February 1997, in advocating a retrial for James Earl Ray, the man convicted of her father's murder, having realized that "without our direct involvement, the truth will never come out.

"[91] In an interview with People magazine in 1999, she recalled when she first learned of her father's death and stated in her words that "to this day, my heart skips a beat every time I hear one of those special bulletins.

In a twenty-four-minute-long speech, she brought up the presidential election of that year, and also quoted the words of Bobby Kennedy by recalling his line which he took from George Bernard Shaw, that "some men see things as they are and say why?

[95] She, her brother Martin Luther King III and Al Sharpton sang We Shall Overcome in front of "The Sphere", which stood atop the World Trade Center prior to the September 11 attacks.

"[101] "I struggled with a lot of the legacy for a long time, probably actually into my 30s before I really made peace with it," Yolanda stated in 2005 on "Western Skies", a public radio show based in Colorado.

[110] She preached in January 2007 to an audience in Ebenezer Baptist Church urging them to be an oasis for peace and love, as well as to use her father's holiday as starting ground for their own interpretations of prejudice.

In the early hours of May 19, 2007, King's body was brought to Atlanta, Georgia by private plane belonging to Bishop Eddie Long.

In fact, she proved that the smile was more powerful and sweeter because it had to press itself through mournfulness to be seen, force itself through cruelty to show that the light of survival shines for us all."

Despite this, she did voice opposition to President Ronald Reagan's reluctance to sign the law establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, her father's national holiday.

Suzan Johnson Cook was highlighted in an article written by the minister, as she dubbed her deceased longtime friend a "queen whose name was King".