Remembering The Dream On MLK Day

With Both Coretta Scott King And Martin Luther King Jr. Gone, Their Children Look To The Future

(CBS/AP)  Yolanda, who is an actress, used her craft to deliver a tribute to her parents, performing a series of skits telling stories including a girl's first ride on a desegregated bus and a college student's recollection of the 1963 desegregation of Birmingham, Alabama.

The performance was attended by members of the extended King family and Yolanda's sister, the Rev. Bernice King.

The holiday, said Yolanda, is an opportunity for everyone to live her father's dream, and that she has her mother's example to follow.

"I connected with her spirit so strongly," said Yolanda, asked how she is coping with her mother's loss. "I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength."

For 15 years, as Coretta Scott King and numerous legislators around the nation worked to establish Jan. 15 as a federal holiday, Coretta Scott King publicly celebrated her husband's birthday at his tomb and at Ebenezer Baptist, where King preached from 1960 to 1968. She founded what would become the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

On Saturday, King's late widow was honored at the annual Salute to Greatness Dinner, a fundraiser for the King Center.

Another commemoration of Dr. King offers the public a chance to get a closer look at his ideas and writings.

Over 600 of his personal documents have been put on display, for the first time, in Atlanta.

The exhibit - which includes an early draft of his famed "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington in 1963 - is a glimpse at the collection of more than 10,000 King papers and books that Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin helped privately acquire for $32 million last summer from Sotheby's auction house.

The mayor pulled off the deal with the help of more than 50 corporate, government and private donors to give the papers to Atlanta's Morehouse College, where King graduated in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in sociology.

The Atlanta History Center, where the exhibit will be through May 13, is anticipating widespread interest of the papers. Until now, the collection has only been displayed at Sotheby's auction house in New York, both last summer and in 2003, in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, when King delivered his "Dream" speech about his hope that people of all races would be treated equally.

Sotheby's has called the collection "an unparalleled gathering of primary documents from Dr. King's most active years."

"The question is often asked, 'Where is the dream coming from?'" said Elizabeth Miller, who curated the Sotheby's exhibit and helped with the smaller Atlanta exhibit. "This exhibit shows the genesis and the struggle of that internal journey."