Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  He learned, too, how white Atlantans loved their Confederate heritage, cherished the halcyon days when plantations and slavery flourished in the surrounding countryside. He witnessed all the fanfare that attended the world première of the motion picture Gone With the Wind, which opened in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, when he was ten. White Atlanta quivered with excitement when Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Vivien Leigh and her husband Laurence Olivier, all came to town for the opening. There was a gala parade downtown, then a grand ball at the auditorium, festooned with Rebel flags. Here white Atlantans reveled in songs like “Suwanee River,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” and danced waltzes like southerners of old. The next night more than 2,000 white Atlantans crowded into Lowe’s Grand Theater to see what they fantasized was the world of their ancestors portrayed in living color, a world of cavalier gentlemen and happy darkies, of elegant ladies and breathless belles in crinoline, a world that was lost forever in the Civil War. With its coveted myths and racial stereotypes (a good “nigger” was a loyal and obsequious slave, a bad “nigger” was an uppity and impudent black who rode in the same buckboard with a Yankee carpetbagger), Gone With the Wind became one of the most popular motion pictures ever produced in America, playing to millions of whites all over the land.

  This too M. L. learned: a good nigger was a black who minded his own business and accepted the way things were without dissent. And so his education went. He discovered that whites referred to Negroes as “boys” and “girls” regardless of age. He saw WHITES ONLY signs staring back at him almost everywhere: in the windows of barber shops and all the good restaurants and hotels, at the YMCA, the city parks, golf courses, and swimming pools, and in the waiting rooms of train and bus stations. He found that there were even white and black sections of Atlanta and that he resided in “nigger town.”

  Segregation caused a tension in the boy, a tension between his mother’s injunction (remember, you are somebody) and a system that demeaned and insulted him every day, saying, “You are less than, you are not equal to.” He struggled with that tension, struggled with the pain and rage he felt when a white woman in a downtown store slapped him and called him “a little nigger”…when he stood on the very spot in Atlanta where whites had lynched a Negro…when he witnessed nightriding Klansmen beat Negroes in the streets there…when he saw “with my own eyes” white cops brutalize Negro children. When his parents admonished him to love whites because it was his Christian duty, M. L. asked defiantly: “How can I love a race of people who hate me?”

  Besides, he didn’t think his Daddy really loved them either. His Daddy stood up to whites, the way Grandfather Williams used to do. Yes, Daddy was always “straightening out the white folks.” He would not let white agents make collections at his house. He would not ride the city buses and suffer the humiliation of having to sit in a colored section. He would not let whites call him “boy.” One day when M. L. was riding with his Daddy in the family car, a white patrolman pulled him over and snapped, “Boy, show me your license.” Daddy shot back, “Do you see this child here?” He pointed at M. L. “That’s a boy there. I’m a man. I’m Reverend King.”

  “When I stand up,” King said, “I want everybody to know that a man is standing.” “Nobody,” he asserted, “can make a slave out of you if you don’t think like a slave.” “I don’t care how long I have to live with the system, I am never going to accept it. I’ll fight it until I die.”

  Yes, M. L. said, Daddy was “a real father to me.” He set a powerful example for M. L. He demanded respect. But if his father exemplified manly strength, it was Grandmother Williams M. L. turned to for support in these dispiriting years. She was a tremendous source of warmth in a world that menaced and hurt him. He relied on Mama so much that his love for her, he said, was “extreme.”

  One day when he was supposed to be studying, M. L. stole away from home to watch a parade in the Negro business section. It was May 18, 1941, a warm spring day with a scent of magnolias in the air. While M. L. was enjoying the parade, a messenger brought him terrible news from home. Something had happened to his grandmother. But what could have happened to Mama? She was supposed to be at Mount Olive Baptist Church, speaking on a Woman’s Day program. M. L. ran home with his heart pounding, only to find a lot of people there—his parents, people from the church. Mama had suffered a heart attack and had died on the way to the hospital. God had come for her and taken her away.

  M. L. was stunned. But why? Why had God taken Mama from him? Was God punishing his family because he had sinned, because he had left the house without telling anyone, because he had run off to watch a parade? Griefstricken, racked with guilt, the boy raced upstairs and leaped out the window after his Mama, trying to follow her from this world. He struck the ground in a painful heap. Again shouting people ran up to him. He was still alive: bruised and shaken, but still in this world. Afterward, in his bedroom, he shook with sobs, unable to bear the hurt he felt inside.

  He cried off and on for days and couldn’t sleep at night. “Don’t blame what has happened to your grandmother on anything you’ve done,” Daddy told him in his bedroom. “God has His own plan and His own way, and we cannot change or interfere with the time He chooses to call any of us back to Him.” But M. L. was tormented by doubts, and he pressed his parents about the doctrine of immortality. They tried to explain it, tried to reassure the boy that Grandmother was in Heaven. But how could they know for sure? What if she had not ascended like Jesus and was lost somewhere? What if she were just dead? Was it possible that people just died and never again saw those who loved them? He felt so miserable and so alone without Mama. Who would cry for him now when Daddy had to whip him?

  NOT LONG AFTER MAMA DIED, Daddy bought another house on nearby Boulevard. The old place was “running down,” Daddy claimed, and the new house was a better one in a higher-class neighborhood. And so the boy left the house of his birth—Mama Williams’s house—and moved into a place that held no memories for him. It was poised on a bluff that overlooked downtown Atlanta; from the windows, M. L. could see tall buildings move against the clouds. The new house was a two-story brick dwelling—precisely the kind Daddy had promised to own one day. He was now “a major force” in Atlanta’s black community, a man with considerable business interests and political and social clout. He belonged to a small interracial coalition and was prominent in the Negro Voters League. Because he was a Negro on the climb, he received abusive letters and phone calls from the Ku Klux Klan.

  As the children entered their teens and developed wills of their own, Daddy tried to temper his domineering impulses and even encouraged them to express their views at the dinner table. But in a clash of wills he still overrode them. Christine tended to submit and let Daddy have his way, A. D. to rebel outright (and get thrashed as a consequence), and M. L. to waver in between. Still grieving for his grandmother, he tried to avoid collisions with his father, for whom he had such mixed and powerful feelings. But when he did incite Daddy’s wrath, he too suffered the indignity of his strap. He recalled that his father whipped him until he was fifteen.

  M. L. struggled with himself over his father, torn between his respect and love for the man and his desperate need for independence. Ambivalent about confronting him face to face, M. L. rebelled in subtle, indirect ways. Ever “the precocious and questioning type,” as he put it, he mounted an insurrection in Daddy’s church, no longer uncritically accepting the literalist teachings he received there. At thirteen, “I shocked my Sunday School class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus.” From then on, “doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly,” and he grew skeptical of Sunday-school Christianity, with its legends and stories. At the same time, he became disillusioned with the unbridled emotionalism—all the stamping and shouting—that went on in his father’s church. “I didn’t understand it,” he said later, “and it embarrassed me.” He came to doubt that religion could ever be “emotionally satisfying” or “intellec
tually respectable.”

  But how to tell his father about his doubts? The elder King was pressuring him to become a minister and succeed him at Ebenezer, thus keeping its pastorship in the family. In discreet ways M. L. let it be known that he would not become a minister, would not follow in his Daddy’s footsteps. At one point in his mid-teens, he did feel a call to preach, but fought it off. An emotional, fundamentalist ministry had little relevance to the modern world, he thought, and he wanted nothing to do with it. He would not be a preacher, would not be like Daddy.

  He had a lot of anger in him. In sandlot games, he competed so ferociously that friends could not tell whether he was playing or fighting. In basketball, he refused to pass and shot every time he got the ball. In backyard football, the neighborhood boys started him as quarterback because of his “shrimpy size.” “But he wound up as fullback,” a friend recalled, “because he ran over anybody who got in his way.”

  He also had his share of fights, excelling in what an associate termed “middle-class combat.” He never battled with knives and stones, as lower-class boys often did. And he preferred negotiation to fisticuffs. But if negotiation failed, M. L.’s ritual remark was “let’s go to the grass,” and he tore into his adversary. “He could outwrestle anybody in our gang,” a chum said, “and he knew it.” In all, young King was “a bit of a hellion” and subject to “violent swings in mood.”

  Meanwhile he sailed through school, skipping grades as he went, and entered Booker T. Washington High School at thirteen. It was the fall of 1942, and Atlanta’s black community hummed with war news. Blacks were serving in America’s armed forces—half of them overseas in segregated outfits. On the home front, A. Philip Randolph—the celebrated Negro labor leader—had threatened to lead a massive protest march if President Roosevelt did not employ blacks in the defense industry. Roosevelt responded with an executive order that prohibited racial discrimination in defense plants and government agencies alike. In 1941, Negroes up in Harlem had conducted a successful bus boycott; and the next year a new organization called the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) staged sit-ins in Chicago retail stores, testing racial discrimination in employment practices through direct-action protest.

  At Booker T. Washington, King enjoyed history and English. But overall the curriculum did not challenge him, and he compiled a B-plus average with a modicum of effort. He and Christine often studied together until she graduated: he helped her with mathematics, and she corrected the spelling in his English compositions. “I can’t spell a lick,” he complained. But he possessed a remarkable vocabulary that dazzled teachers and peers alike.

  At fourteen, M. L. was a sensuous youth who played a violin, liked opera, and relished soul food—fried chicken, cornbread, and collard greens with ham hocks and bacon drippings. Physically he was small and plump-faced, with almond-shaped eyes, a mahogany complexion, and expressive hands. But the most memorable thing about him was his voice. It had changed into a rich and resonant baritone that commanded attention when he spoke in class or held forth in a nearby drugstore.

  He discovered something else about his voice: girls blushed and flirted when he spoke to them in his mellifluent drawl. A natty dresser, nicknamed “Tweed” because of a fondness for tweed suits, he became a connoisseur of lovely young women, many of them from the best Negro families in Atlanta. A. D. could not remember a time when his big brother was not interested in girls, and M. L. himself laughed that women and food were always his main weaknesses. “He kept flitting from chick to chick,” A. D. said later, “and I decided I couldn’t keep up with him. Especially since he was crazy about dances, and just about the best jitterbug in town.”

  But he had a serious side, too, an introspective side that made him seem aloof sometimes. He liked to read alone in his room, to study the way authors and orators put words together. He asserted later that his “greatest talent, strongest tradition, and most constant interest was the eloquent statement of ideas.”

  In the eleventh grade, he entered an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks in a distant Georgia town. A “dear” female teacher accompanied him on what proved a memorable occasion. Speaking on “The Negro and the Constitution,” King captured a prize with the force of his presentation. That night, heading back to Atlanta on a crowded bus, he and his teacher reviewed the exciting events of the day. Presently the bus stopped and some whites got on. There were no empty seats. The white driver came back and ordered King and the teacher to surrender theirs, but King refused to budge. The driver threatened him, called him “a black son-of-a-bitch,” until at last he heeded his teacher’s whispers and reluctantly got up. They stood in the aisle all the way home, jostled and thrown about as the bus sped down the highway. “That night will never leave my mind,” King said later. “It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”

  BECAUSE THE WAR was drawing off Negro college students, Atlanta’s Morehouse College started admitting exceptional high school juniors to fill its depleted student ranks. In the spring of 1944, M. L. passed the college’s entrance examinations, graduated from Booker T. Washington after the eleventh grade, and made plans to enroll in Morehouse that fall. He was only fifteen years old.

  Through the college, King secured summer employment on a Connecticut tobacco farm. It was not his first job—he’d delivered papers for years. But it was the first time he’d been away from home, and he enjoyed it immensely. Sure, he and other Morehouse students put in long hours in the hot and humid tobacco fields. But on weekend trips to Hartford they found to their joy that they could eat in high-class restaurants just like white folks. They could also enter theaters by the front door and sit freely in the main auditorium. Perhaps M. L. noticed Hartford’s ramshackle black tenements, observed all the black cooks and menials in town. Nevertheless, he spoke of “the exhilarating sense of freedom” he felt in Connecticut, where he could go and do pretty much as he pleased.

  But on the train trip back to Atlanta, the reality of segregation smote him like a physical blow. As the forests of Virginia hurtled by outside, King made his way to the dining car and started to sit down anywhere, as he had done on the way through New York and New Jersey. But the train was in Dixie now, and the waiter led him to a rear table and pulled a curtain down to shield the white passengers from his presence. He sat there, staring at that curtain, unable to believe that others could find him so offensive. “I felt,” he said, “as though the curtain had dropped on my selfhood.”

  THAT SEPTEMBER HE ENTERED MOREHOUSE in search of a useful profession that might enable him to help his people. He felt a burning need to heal blacks, to break their bonds, to emancipate them. He considered becoming a physician, then a lawyer. “I was at that point where I was deeply interested in political matters and social ills,” he recalled. “I could see the part I could play in breaking down the legal barriers to Negroes.” Envisioning himself an attorney, he practiced giving trial speeches before a mirror in his room.

  At first King remained aloof from the main currents of Morehouse life. Younger and smaller than his classmates, he lived at home and commuted to school for classes, still wrestling with himself over a vocation. He dated high school girls, telling them how their beauty caused the Rubicon to part and men to meet their Waterloos. Eventually, though, he became more involved in college life: he joined the football team, sang in the glee club, and went out with fashionable young women from contiguous Spelman College. Like his fellow students, all four hundred of them, he was proud to be “a Morehouse man” and felt at home on campus, with its leisurely air, stately magnolias, and undulating lawns.

  Unable to decide on a profession, he chose sociology as his major and English as his minor. As he began his studies, he was shocked to learn that he read only at the eighth-grade level—and his schooling had hardly been deprived. Later he spoke bitterly about the inferior education he’d received in Atlanta’s colored schools. But thanks to his intelligence, he rapidly overcame his deficiencies and earned an impressive number
of A’s in English, history, philosophy, and sociology. But he was disappointed in many of his sociology courses, repelled by their emphasis on abstract data and impersonal force. Why study theories and numbers without seeking the human processes that lay behind them? he wanted to know. He objected to the reduction of people to mere numbers and grumbled about the “apathetic fallacy of statistics.”

  But he found guidance and inspiration from several brilliant professors. There was Walter Chivers, his sociology adviser, who taught that capitalism exploited black people, pointing out that “Money is not only the root of evil; it is also the root of this particular evil—racism.” There was Gladstone Lewis Chandler, professor of English, whom King and the other students affectionately referred to as “G. L. C.” A native of the British West Indies, with a B.A. from Middlebury and an M.A. from Harvard, Chandler was a spare, balding man who sported a pipe and a tweed jacket. Stern and caustic in the classroom, he respected his students and demanded as much of them as he did of himself. “Clarity, unity, coherence and emphasis were his word-gods,” recalled an appreciative student; “like a devout disciple, he prodded his pupils with a passion that made them conscientious converts.” “Gentlemen,” he would announce on the first day of English composition, “we are going to establish a ‘GLC Word Bank.’ You deposit some new words each class session, invest them in congenial conversation and withdraw rich dividends.” King loved Chandler’s word games. When asked, “How are you,” King would reply with a grin, “Cogitating with cosmic universe, I surmise that my physical equilibrium is organically quiescent.” But Chandler also taught King the art of lucid and precise exposition, and King later described him as “one of the most articulate, knowledgeable and brilliant professors” at Morehouse, “one of those rare unique individuals who was so dedicated to his work that he forgot himself into immortality.” Under Chandler’s supervision, King polished his forensic style and in his sophomore year won second place in the Webb Oratorical Contest.