It turns out that in 1960s Atlanta, the King and Roberts families were close friends.
If you want proof that Julia Roberts is a national treasure, watch My Best Friend’s Wedding. But if you need further evidence, the Oscar-winning actress’s birth was funded by none other than civil rights legends Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr.
It was announced back in September during Roberts’ and Gayle King’s conversation at the HISTORYTalks event hosted by A+E Networks and the History Channel in Washington, D.C. With Roberts’ 55th birthday occurring on Oct. 28 and a tweet from Zara Rahim, a former strategic counsellor to Barack Obama, it has gained some support a month later.
The Pretty Woman star was gently persuaded to reveal the information by King after remarking that the reporter’s “research is quite impressive.”
Roberts remarked, “The King family covered my hospital expenses.” “Coretta and Martin Luther King.” Walter and Betty Lou Roberts, who headed the Actors and Writers’ Workshop in Atlanta, a theatrical school that at the time was one of the few if not the only institution willing to take the King children, were friends with the Kings.
Therefore, the King family stepped in when tiny Julia was born and the Roberts couldn’t pay the hospital fee.
They all became buddies and assisted us in getting out of a problem, according to Roberts.
The oldest child of MLK, Yolanda King, who passed away in 2007 as a result of difficulties from a long-term heart disease, and Roberts became friends. When Yolanda King kissed a white actress during a performance of a play put on by the Actors and Writers Workshop, a KKK member detonated a vehicle outside the theatre.
In acting school in the 1960s, Gayle King observed, “you didn’t have small Black children mingling with little White kids.” And Julia’s parents were kind and inviting, which I believe is amazing and helps to define Julia as a person.
And feisty is who Julia Roberts is. After a Black acquaintance was turned away from a restaurant in South Carolina in 1990, Roberts made headlines for labelling the community “horribly racist” and “a living hell.”
Yolanda King subsequently remarked of Roberts in a CNN interview, “I can see her doing it.” I can see it coming straight out of her, and with good reason.
Residents of Abbeville, where Roberts was filming Sleeping with the Enemy, were upset by her remarks and bought an advertisement in Variety with the headline, “Beautiful Woman? Very Low.”
Roberts remarked in a statement at the time, “I was born in the South, so in no way am I attempting to establish a stereotype. “I was horrified that this kind of treatment, whether it be in the South or elsewhere, still persists in America in the 1990s.”
