On her 55th birthday, Julia Roberts sat down for an interview with Gayle King and revealed that Martin Luther King Jr.’s family paid for her parents’ hospital bill when she was born. Roberts said the relationship between the two families started when Coretta Scott King asked if her kids could join The Actors and Writers Workshop school in Atlanta, owned by the Roberts’ family.
“They were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her kids,” Roberts said as she reflected on the challenges the King family faced due to segregation.
After the acting school owners accepted Coretta’s children into the school, the social justice champions later returned the favor by paying for the Roberts’ hospital bill.
“My mom was like ‘Sure come on over,'” Roberts said. “They just all became friends and they helped us out of a jam.”
Today is Julia Roberts birthday! 55 years ago MLK and Coretta Scott King paid for her parents hospital bill after she was born. Can’t stop thinking about this since I read it. Here she is talking about it with @GayleKing https://t.co/5HvpNSUIYb pic.twitter.com/147x6d807W
— Zara Rahim (@ZaraRahim) October 28, 2022
In a 2013 essay, writer Phillip Depoy said the KKK targeted the acting school after Walter and Betty Roberts accepted King’s daughter, Yolanda.
Depoy said a KKK member saw him kissing Yolanda while the two were performing at The Actors and Writers Workshop.
“He came back the next day with a box, the kind his spiritual brothers had used two years earlier to kill children in a church in Birmingham,” Depoy wrote. “Maybe his intention was to put it under the flatbed truck, but there were too many kids and parents and dogs and drunks and cops, so the closest he could get was the Buick. I don’t know what kind of Buick it was. I know it was a Buick only because somebody later said, ‘They sure did blow up that Buick.'”
The attack, however, ended without causing much damage.
“It wasn’t much of an explosion, and the most startling thing about it was the fact that most of the people in the parking lot responded very mildly,” Depoy wrote. “The car belched, then started to burn, and most people glanced that way and then back to the stage. So a car was on fire. It wasn’t a first for that particular parking lot. In fact, if the Klansman hadn’t been an idiot, and drunk, he might have gotten away without being identified.”
The actors went back to work shortly after the failed attack.
“Yolanda blinked and said, ‘Gosh.'” And then she did her funny little dance again,” Depoy wrote. “Children laughed again. The car was already starting to burn out. Filthy smoke blew away from the project, toward the highway.”
Depoy titled his essay Academy Theatre, Julia Roberts’ parents laid foundation for blossoming of theater in Atlanta.
“Yolanda King spent the rest of her life involved in theater; my brother, Scott DePoy, who had joined the workshop before I had, continues to work all over the Southeast. Eric Roberts eventually went to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. I understand that even his younger sister got involved in acting,” Depoy wrote. “As a result of the kind of theatrical work that was happening in Atlanta in the 1960s, a great flowering of the performance arts was taking root in the South.”
