Christine King Farris, last sibling of Martin Luther King Jr., dies at age 95

Christine King Farris, the last living sibling of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., passed away Thursday. She turned 95.

Her was dead announced by her niece, Reverend Bernice King, in a statement. Where she died is not stated.

Mrs. Farris, Dr. King’s older sister, supported him politically and personally. She joined him in 1965 for the March for Voting Rights in Alabama and in 1966 for the March Against Fear in Mississippi. She also lent him money so that he could buy his engagement ring.

She experienced multiple tragedies in the following years: the murder of Dr. King in 1968; the death, by drowning, of her other brother, Alfred Daniel King, known as AD, in his swimming pool in 1969; and the murder of her mother, Alberta King, during a church service in 1974.

“I think about the things I’ve been through in my life, and sometimes I wonder how I’m still here,” Ms Farris told CNN in 2008. “I am the only survivor in my family.”

Ms. Farris devoted herself to promoting Dr. King’s legacy. She helped her sister-in-law, Coretta Scott King, establish the King Center, a non-profit organization that conducts educational programs and supports research related to Dr. King, and she served as senior vice president and treasurer.

She made herself available on everyday and dramatic occasions to honor her family. She helped pick out authentic wallpaper for a museum in the house where she and her siblings grew up. In 2007, the year after Coretta King died, Mrs. Farris takes her place in leading a memorial service at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on Dr. King.

In January of this year, she sat in the pews as President Biden spoke in her brother’s honor.

Willie Christine King was born on September 11, 1927 in Atlanta. She was the eldest child of Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Christine Williams King. Martin was born in 1929 and AD was born the following year.

She graduated from Spelman College, like her mother and grandmother, in 1948, and received two master’s degrees in education from Columbia University, in 1950 and 1958. She later returned to Spelman, where she worked as an associate professor of education and the director of a learning resource center for about 50 years. She was often described as the university’s longest-serving faculty member.

In 1960 she married Isaac Newton Farris. The couple had two children, Angela Christine Farris Watkins and Isaac Newton Farris Jr. A list of Mrs. Farris’s survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Farris wrote two children’s books about her brother and in 2009 wrote a memoir, “Through It All: Reflections on My Life, My Family and My Faith.” She set out to describe how Dr. King was, not as a great man of history, but as a brother.

“They think he just happened, that he seemed fully formed, without context, ready to change the world,” she wrote in her memoir. “Take it from his big sister, that’s just not the case.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.