In response to the unexpected death of Yolanda King, Chief Legal Correspondent Chitra Ragavan recalls the summer she spent with the eldest child of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.:
I had the privilege of working with Yolanda King in 1983, when I was a graduate student at the University of Georgia-Athens. I was making the slow transition from my life in Mumbai, India, to life in America's South. I was taking quite a liking to the warm weather and the buttery grits.
I won a governor's internship that summer and was given a choice of where I could work. I picked the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, which is the final resting place for the civil rights leader and showcases his legacy as well as his friendship with the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, who greatly influenced King's belief in nonviolent political movements and about whom I was going to write my graduate thesis.
At the center, I was assigned to work with Yolanda, an aspiring actress. I was immediately drawn to her warmth and sense of humor. She took her new Indian charge under her wing, walking me around and introducing me to her mother, Coretta Scott King, and other members of her family. Yolanda always laughed with gusto when she introduced me to people, saying my name reminded her of chitlins.
"Do you know what chitlins are?" she asked me. A lifelong vegetarian, I was rather horrified when I found out my name was being compared to a southern pork delicacy, but I forgave her, eventually.
I volunteered to design a new public service announcement for the center and drew some rough sketches. As Yolanda and I were transporting the sketches to a friend who had agreed to animate the ad campaign, Yolanda, who was always feeling hot, lowered the car windows to let the breeze in. The sketches flew out the window and landed on the median of the busy road. We were stunned at first but then somehow started laughing at the whole fiasco. Yolanda tried to find a safe spot to park on the side of the road so that we could try to recover the sketches without also losing our lives. We were laughing so hard--struck by the absurdity of the drawings fluttering in the breeze as a statuesque African-American and a slight Indian chased after them, angry passersby honking their horns--that the escapade took twice as long.
I'll always remember the freedom of that moment, as we held each other and laughed. And I'll always remember the woman who compared my name to chitlins, who taught me a little bit about southern hospitality and a great deal about her amazing dad.
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