The Boy King

Perhaps Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young said it best when he noted that The Boy King had helped Atlanta’s children take Dr. Martin Luther King out of the history books and made it possible for them to relate to him as a human being. What started out as a stage play at an Atlanta children’s theatre ended up as a superior television performance being syndicated nationally to almost 100 stations. What began as a local station seeking to produce a program “Hollywood style” ended up with more than 6000 study guides being requested, almost a third of Atlanta’s television viewers seeing the program, plus extensive discussion in the Atlanta schools following the telecast. It took a lot of local station effort to produce such a prize winning effort. It involved substantial staff: Executive Producers Mark Engel and Andrew Fisher; Producer Judy Cairo; Director Bill Parrott; Authors Rand Hopkins and Robert Earl Price; plus the talents of a number of fine performers, including Howard Rollins. Jr., Deniece Williams and Bill Withers. For the significant contributions of The Boy King, a Peabody to WSB-TV Atlanta.