An astounding but little-known fact about Julia Roberts has resurfaced after her recent 55th birthday prompted a consultant to call attention to a link between the actor’s birth and revered civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.
Roberts, whose birthday was 28 October, first shared the story about the day she was born with journalist Gayle King this September in Washington DC during a HISTORYTalks live event for the History Channel. That day, she said during the talk, the activist known to many simply as MLK – as well as his fellow civil rights champion and wife Coretta Scott King – paid off the hospital bill for her birth because Roberts’s parents were poor and couldn’t afford it.
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
A tweet from consultant Zara Rahim about that story went viral over the weekend, and many people learned about it for the first time.
In Roberts’s words to Gayle King, who is not related to the late civil rights activists who share her last name, Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott helped her parents because “they couldn’t pay for the hospital”.
“They helped us out of a jam,” Roberts said.
Roberts explained how her parents, Walter and Betty Roberts, ran a theater school in Atlanta where the Kings’ children attended and got to know the couple that way.
Roberts said: “One day Coretta Scott King called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school because they were having a hard time finding a place that would accept her kids.”
The star of Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich said her mother welcomed the Kings’ children to enroll.
Gayle King said it was remarkable to see Black and white children interacting together when Roberts was born in 1967, at the height of Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King’s advocacy for civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated by a white supremacist within six months of Roberts’s birth.
According to CNN, Walter and Betty Roberts ran the only integrated children’s theater group in Atlanta at the time.
The youngest of Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King’s four children, daughter Bernice, on Monday expressed gratitude to Roberts on Twitter for having shared the heartwarming story.
Grateful that #JuliaRoberts shared this story with @GayleKing and that so many people have been awed by it.
— Be A King (@BerniceKing) October 31, 2022
I know the story well, but it is moving for me to be reminded of my parents’ generosity and influence.#CorettaScottKing #MLK pic.twitter.com/Hn9yOVxYIL
“Grateful that #JuliaRoberts shared this story with @GayleKing and that so many people have been awed by it,” Bernice King wrote on Twitter. “I know the story well, but it is moving for me to be reminded of my parents’ generosity and influence. #CorettaScottKing #MLK.”
Coretta Scott King died in 2006.