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GREENSBORO — The 7-year-old was watching "I Dream of Jeannie" when he heard his mother, doing housework in another room with the television in the background, scream.

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"She said, 'Everybody come here,'" Vernon King, now senior pastor at St. James Baptist Church, recalled of Naomi King's tears, as he turned from what he had been watching and his siblings gathered. "'Uncle M.L. is dead.'"

"Uncle M.L." would be the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., his father's brother, who the announcer said had just been assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. King was there on behalf of striking garbage workers.

That was 40 years ago today.

King delivered his famous "mountaintop speech" there the night before, uttering the oft-quoted, "I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land."

Vernon King's father, Albert, was also there, helping in the background of his brother's appearances.

"The phone started ringing," recalled King, whose family lived in Louisville, Ky., where his father was a local pastor and who would only years later fully understand what happened next throughout the country. "You could hear the sirens going, and, eventually, gunfire."

As the world would come to mourn the civil rights icon and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Vernon King would instead feel the loss of the uncle who playfully chased him through the grass and whose laughter lit up the "grown-folks" gatherings, the one everyone feared at pool.

At his uncle's funeral, he began to realize why so many people were angry and distraught.

"Every now and then my father would let us travel, so I knew the electricity of the movement," King recalled. He also remembers walking behind his uncle's body in a carriage at the funeral.

Vernon King's father would move the family back to Atlanta, assisting their father "Daddy" King at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Vernon King never heard his father talk about what happened in Memphis. Yet as security tightened around them, the son sensed there were things his father wanted to say but knew Vernon was too young to understand.

"He said, 'Your uncle was killed and it may be soon with me,'" Vernon King recalled him saying one day.

His father was right. Death would come again, and within the family, often as horrendous as his uncle's death. Albert King drowned a year later. His grandmother was shot to death years later as she played the organ during church service.

There were whispers of a King curse.

"I went to my pastor and I questioned God," King said. "I said, 'Why is it that we are having family members die probably on average every four years, and my friends, who don't go to church, their family's still alive?' But I began to understand that death is a part of life."

Back then, Vernon King had no interest in joining that lineage of King men in the ministry. The night of his "trial" sermon at Ebenezer, his godmother reminded him of something he had said long before.

"'You said preachers talk too loud, too long and too often,'" he said she reminded him. "That was the last thing I had on my mind. I wanted to be a professional football player. At Morehouse I was a political science major. I guess the Holy Spirit led me that way."

He has, however, tried not to capitalize on that family heritage.

When he was installed as the pastor at St. James Baptist Church in Greensboro in 2001, his famous aunt, Coretta Scott King, was in the pews — but that was his Aunt Coretta.

"Vernon King is his own man, and I think that is what he has set out to be," said Melvin "Skip" Alston, the former president of the state chapter of the NAACP and a member of the pastor search committee at St. James. "I think he wants other people to see him as Vernon King and not the nephew of Martin Luther King. I think he wants it to be an afterthought."

King readily admits the family heritage can be both a "cross and a crown."

"We have benefited from the name and we've been exposed to a lot of things people would want to see and be a part of," King said. "Although it has opened doors, it has also closed doors."

King didn't get his vote as pastor until Alston heard him preach.

"There's an expectation there that because King was so great, one would assume that type of bloodline would go very deep, and from what I know of Vernon King and the King children, it does go deep," Alston said.

Contact Nancy H. McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com