MLK paid hospital bills for Julia Roberts’ birth, actress reveals

Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, were close friends of the parents of beloved Hollywood veteran Julia Roberts. So much so that the late civil rights icon paid for the hospital bill when the actress was born. 

As reported by The Huffington Post, Roberts shared this fun little detail about her personal life during a conversation with Gayle King back in September, as part of a series called “HISTORYTalks.” A segment from the D.C. event was recently shared on Twitter by Barack Obama’s former strategic adviser Zara Rahim to celebrate Roberts’ 55th birthday on Oct. 28. 

In the clip, Roberts explained that her parents could not afford to pay the hospital bill for her birth, so, “The King family paid for my hospital bill,” Roberts told Gayle King.

She then recalled how her parents, Betty Lou Bredemus and Walter Grady Roberts, developed a close bond with the Kings in the 1960s. At the time, the Robertses ran a theater in Atlanta called the Actors and Writers’ Workshop, and it seemingly was the only performing arts school in the area willing to accept the King children.

“My parents had a theater school in Atlanta called the Actors and Writers’ Workshop,” Roberts shared, as reported by Today. “And one day Coretta Scott King called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school because they were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her kids. And my mom was like, ‘Sure. Come on over.’” 

She added, “And so they just all became friends and they helped us out of a jam.”

The Robertses cast MLK’s eldest child Yolanda King in a play in which she kissed a white actor. The KKK was so enraged by this that they blew up a car outside the theater. 

“In the ’60s, you didn’t have little Black children interacting with little white kids in acting school,” Gayle King noted, as reported by Entertainment Weekly. “And your parents were like, ‘come on in.’ I think that’s extraordinary, and it lays the groundwork for who you are.”

Phillip DePoy was the 15-year-old white actor who starred in the play and he recalled the car bombing in an essay for ARTS ATL in 2013. 

“A man, a tangential member of the Ku Klux Klan, had seen me kiss Yolanda the day before in the same parking lot,” DePoy wrote. “The Klansman had come around the day before the explosion in order to make trouble. The workshop was offering a free show in the Carver Homes housing project, an exclusively African-American wonderland filled with hammered lives and children with nothing to do. The guy only heckled us the first day, said words that everyone had heard a million times before, finished his case of PBR, and was about to leave when I kissed Yolanda.”

DePoy said after their kiss, a Buick began to burn about “10 yards away.”

Yolanda King gushed about her experience with the Actors and Writers ‘Workshop in a 2001 interview with CNN.

“Mr. Roberts was so imposing,” she said at the time. “I loved him, but I was also a little intimidated by him too. And — but he was — I mean, he taught me so much, and he and Mrs. Roberts, about the work, and just about living and being really open, grabbing life and making the best of it.”

Yolanda King said the white kids and the Black kids in the workshop got along quite well. 

“We had no problems whatsoever, racial problems,” she added. 

In 2007 Yolanda died from complications connected to a chronic heart condition, EW reported.

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