A.D. King was not just Martin’s brother

Alveda King was 12 years old when a bomb went off under her Birmingham home in 1963.

“We were all in the house. And my father first rescued my mother,” she said last week.

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New York Times

A.D. King (front, second from left) walks with his brother’s family in the funeral procession for Martin Luther King, Jr. walk in Atlanta on April 9, 1968. (From left: Yolanda, 12; A.D. King; Bernice, 5; widow Coretta Scott King; Rev. Ralph Abernathy; Dexter, 7; and Martin Luther King III, 10.

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A.D. King referred to himself as “the amateur” civil rights soldier in the family.

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Her last name and the date of the bombing are unmistakable clues to the causes of the event.

She is the niece of civil rights hero, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But it wasn’t only her famous uncle’s work in a segregated South that got her home bombed. It was also the work of her father, the Rev. A.D. King, who has rested in the shadow of his famous older brother for nearly five decades. A.D. King finally is about to get some publicity.

A new documentary, “A.D. King: Brother to the Dreamer, the Half That’s Never Been Told.” premieres Wednesday at the King Center, 449 Auburn Ave., at 5:30 p.m. It is one of a series of events slated to celebrate the Monday holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and a movement that changed America.

Alfred Daniel Williams King, who drowned in 1969 under circumstances family and friends still question, referred to himself as “the amateur” civil rights soldier in the family. Those who knew him tell a different story. He was a fixture in the movement who never sought or found a spotlight.

“That was his way,” Alveda King of Atlanta said. “He and his brother were so close that Dad’s only interest was in serving the Lord and assisting his brother.”

The documentary includes the memories of those such as the Rev. Otis Moss, Rep. John Lewis, Andrew Young and the Rev. Joseph Lowery.

No one died in the 1963 house bombing because the device exploded under a place that was unoccupied, Alveda King said. But she also recalls different bombs in Birmingham later that year — a black lawyer’s office, and the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four children, whom she knew.

After the bombing of the lawyer’s office, an angry crowd was gathering and beginning to throw rocks at police.

A.D. King stood on top of a car to remind them of the principles of nonviolence, a press report from the time says. He was a player in the “Birmingham Campaign” that led to landmark changes in federal law. Police arrested him at sit-ins, he marched with thousands of others, and in 1966, after moving to Kentucky, A.D. led the successful push to abolish Louisville’s segregationist housing laws.

“A.D. was not just the brother of Martin Luther King Jr.,” said Babs Onabanjo, a professor of computer science at Atlanta Metropolitan College and co-producer of the documentary.

“He was a significant leader of the movement. That’s what motivated me to make this, because I felt his contributions were not acknowledged. And that is not right.”