The 9-year-old granddaughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said Saturday that she spoke at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington because "there should be no guns in this world."
"Not just at schools," Yolanda Renee King told Brooke Baldwin on CNN. "But, like, everywhere."
In her speech on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, within blocks of the Capitol, King reflected on her grandfather's iconic "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 on the National Mall.
"My grandfather had a dream that his four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character," Yolanda King said.
"I have a dream that enough is enough."
Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, Tenn.
"My heart was beating, like, 'boom, boom, boom' — and it just got faster and faster," Yolanda King told Baldwin of how she felt during the speech. "But when I got used to the crowd, it got better."
She said that her Atlanta-area school had a "lockdown drill" on Friday.
"There are a few levels," she said. "One level when there is an explosion nearby — and I forgot what level two is — but level three is if the person has a weapon, and they are at the school.
"We have to do all of these lockdown drills, because it is unfortunate that people have guns," she said. "And people use them to hurt other people."
Yolanda King's father, Martin Luther King III, also talked with Baldwin. He was 10 when his father was killed.
"On the one hand, it is very sad that we have devolved to the level that we are have to do that," he said of the lockdown drills, "but the reality is that it is important for all of our children to be safe."
King III called for schools to be "safe zones" and wiser use of technology to make guns safer.
"We could manufacturer guns with certain chips and they could not be shot in a safe zone," he told Baldwin. "That is something that we need to think about.
"We have all kinds of technology — and we need to employ the technology to protect the children," King III said. "Every child deserves to go to school in safety."
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