Kings paid hospital bill for Roberts’ birth

WASHINGTON

In a recent conversation with CBS News reporter Gayle King, actress Julia Roberts revealed that late civil rights activists Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, who were close friends of her parents, paid the hospital bill for her birth.

“The King family paid for my hospital bill,” Roberts told Gayle King, according to Insider.

The conversation from late September, which was part of a series called “HISTORYTalks” held in Washington, D.C., went viral on Oct. 28 when Zara Rahim, a former strategic adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted the interview clip to celebrate the actor’s 55th birthday.

“One day Coretta 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,” Roberts told King. “My mom was like, ‘Sure, come on over,’ and so they all just became friends.”

Roberts said her parents, Walter and Betty Lou Roberts, ran the Actors and Writers Workshop in Atlanta before she was born in 1967. Segregation kept the civil rights leader’s daughters from attending white schools and even their entry in a theater school sparked violence.

Roberts said the Kings “helped us out of a jam” when her parents couldn’t afford to pay the hospital bill for her birth on Oct. 28, 1967, in Smyrna, Georgia.