CNA Staff, Sep 12, 2025 /
09:00 am
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk at a college campus on Wednesday, Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., encouraged people to pray.
“It broke my heart,” King said when asked about her reaction to learning of the assassination.
“I was so very startled when I got the news that Charlie had been shot, and my heart immediately went to him and his family, his beautiful wife, his little children,” she told Raymond Arroyo on EWTN’s “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo.”
“Having experienced those kinds of occurrences in my own family, I immediately went into prayer,” she said.
King shared about her own experience with political assassinations in her family. Not only was her uncle, Dr. King, assassinated but her father, Rev. Alfred Daniel Williams King, was also assassinated as well as her grandmother, Alberta King.
“For me, I am a Christian. I still have the peace and the joy of the Lord, but it’s almost like a trauma or a trigger point when those things happen,” King said.
But amid the trauma, King encouraged listeners to “do what my uncle talked about,” encouraging people to have “regard for human dignity.”
“We’ve got to care again,” King said. “We’ve got to see human beings as human beings — from the womb to the tomb and beyond.”
“We’ve got to get back to a point of caring, of loving, of repenting, of forgiving,” she continued. “Therein lies the answer.”
The greatest of these is love
Calling Charlie Kirk a “man of faith,” King said she will remember him with a Scripture verse: 1 Corinthians 13:13.
“Now abides faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love,” she said. “That’s the way that I do remember Charlie.”
King said she believed that if Charlie Kirk, Dr. King, or President John F. Kennedy were still with us, they would encourage us to not “seek our answers in humanity.”
“We’re going to find not our heroes in humanity, but we’re going to have to look to Jesus at these times,” King said.
“We’re living in tumultuous times, and social media drives us to retaliate, to strike back,” she said. “I want to remind people that if you don’t agree with someone, you don’t shoot the person. You pray, you talk, and you consider your position. But this violence is just absolutely wrong.”
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She noted that we are living in “a time of violence and anger and fear and frustration.”
“So that leads me to say to everyone: fear not, listen, love, communicate,” she said.
King encouraged listeners “to do something good for someone” in remembrance of Charlie Kirk and in memory of the victims of the violence on the 24th anniversary of 9/11.
“I would remind us to call for peace, to call for prayer,” she said. “And I know Charlie would want us to do that as well.”
Kate Quiñones is a staff writer for Catholic News Agency and a fellow of the College Fix. She has been published by the Wall Street Journal, the Denver Catholic Register, and CatholicVote, and she graduated from Hillsdale College. She lives in Colorado with her husband.
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