Dora McDonald, faithful secretary for Dr. Martin Luther King
From the Sydney Morning Herald we find that Dora McDonald, faithful secretary for the Reverend Martin Luther King, has died.
“WHEN Dora McDonald became the Reverend Martin Luther King’s personal secretary in 1960, she was entrusted with his secrets and counted on to look after his family if something happened to him.
“It was McDonald who often took late-night calls from King when he couldn’t sleep, who typed his manuscripts and speeches, and who told Coretta Scott King that her husband had been assassinated.”
McDonald said that a secretary was a keeper of secrets. “[King] could talk to me about anything, possibly things he wouldn’t even burden Coretta with,” she said. “When he was hurting, I was hurting.”
When McDonald was approached by King to work for him in 1960, she was working as a secretary at a financial company.
She became a loyal friend to King. In turn, he confided in her. When President John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963 McDonald received a call from a reporter seeking a statement from King. When she called King, she said, his voice was calm and sad. “Dora,” King said, “that is how I am going to die, too. There is no way to be protected when they are out to get you. Now, with all the Secret Service, the FBI and the Dallas police around to protect the president, they still got him.”
There were good times, too. In 1964 when McDonald told King he would have to wear a morning suit to receive his Nobel Prize, he asked what such a suit was. Told it was like the suits the Kennedys wore at the president’s funeral, he said: “I will not wear a suit with those funny-looking striped pants.” He did.
“’The wheel goes around because the center is at rest,’ says an old Quaker maxim. Dora was our center, which helped the wheel go around.”—Andrew Young
Dora has a new book out titled Secretary To A King. The Hill Street Press web site has this to say about the book:
McDonald best explains this unique, almost familial aspect of her memoir when she writes that “my book is different from other memoirs of King because is encompasses the everyday as well as the epic moments—and it is perhaps in the everyday tones that King’s nature is best revealed and the historical record of his position on some key matters and other people will be corrected.” Thus, the book will have a broad interest, both to a general readership (including young readers) and to scholars. Includes over 30 photographs, many never before published.
~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com
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