SECRETARY TO A KING
Martin Luther King, Jr., the Movement, and Me
Dora E. McDonald | Author

  • A HILL STREET PRESS BOOK
  • $19.95 hardcover
  • 192 pages | 32 photos
  • 1-58818-084-0
  • African American | Memoir







The Man and the Movement through the eyes of MLK's dear friend and devoted secretary, Dora McDonald


“'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

the book

Longtime friend and physician to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. James Palmer, observed long after the civil rights leader's assassination that "a lot of people shook hands with Reverend King and wrote a book." Dora E. McDonald's situation is the direct opposite. Personal secretary, aide, confidante, and trusted friend to Dr. King, Mrs. King, and their family, McDonald has an up-close and unique perspective on the man, yet so close was she to King and his family, that only recently, more than thirty years after his assassination, has McDonald been able to bring herself to write about the man she both revered as world leader and loved as personal friend. That unique experience is finally recorded in Sharing the Dream, McDonald's memoir.

"After I got into my job and what I was doing—what we were doing—and what the movement meant, I never wanted to be doing anything else. I was a part of something momentous, it was a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week position," McDonald writes of those early days as King's secretary. Earlier the assistant to Dr. Benjamin Mays at internationally acclaimed Morehouse College and, later in the 1970s, as Andrew Young's assistant, in the tumultuous 1960s she worked with King alongside Rev. Joseph Lowery, Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Wyatt Walker, Dorothy Cotton, and others at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.) in Atlanta.

Over the eight years spent with King at the S.C.L.C until he was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, McDonald became a central figure in his team and was with him through all the key protests, imprisonments, and sermons—his every triumph and tragedy. To list her involvement in the seminal episodes of the civil rights movement would simply be to recount the important events of King's later life and the tumultuous sixties. But it is McDonald's access to this great man in his quiet moments, his domestic moments, when his dignified public face warmed with a shared joke in the middle of a tense day at the office or furrowed with worry over a private concern discussed in the middle-of-the night, that give McDonald's book its unique perspective. Moreover, it was she who first told Mrs. King of her husband's death.

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 author

Dora McDonald currently serves as correspondence secretary to Coretta Scott King at the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. She lives in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta.

the praise

"My husband Martin Luther King paid Dora McDonald the highest compliment when he said, 'Dora could be the secretary to the President of the United States.' Her competence, dedication and loyalty made her an invaluable member of Martin's team."—Coretta Scott King

"Dora McDonald was 'Miss Indispensable' for Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC. As Administrative Secretary she managed his speaking, writing, finances, and attempted to put some order in the whirlwind which was the civil rights movement. Dora was everyone’s big sister and Mother Superior and provided much of the stability for our lives. '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 McDonald was the quintessential secretary to a famous American of international acclaim. Her service to Dr. King was marked by her gentle but firm demeanor with a clear sense of what the priorities were for the great social movement that had seized him. No one could have served him better or more loyally than she. As a team, they were a blessing to each other."—Wyatt Walker, former chief of staff to Dr. King