Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  “Oh yes”—now she remembered—“I’ve heard some very nice things about you, also.” She had heard some bad things, too, like the fact that he was a Baptist preacher. She thought preachers were all pious stuffed shirts. Still, M. L. didn’t sound like some narrow fundamentalist on the phone. In fact, he was smooth and easy. In fact, she had never heard anybody talk like him in her life. “You know every Napoleon has his Waterloo,” King drawled. “I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms.” Coretta tutted, “Why, that’s absurd. You haven’t seen me yet.”

  King was unflappable. “Your reputation has preceded you,” he said. “I’d like to meet you and talk some more. Perhaps we could have lunch tomorrow or something like that.” She said she was free between classes from twelve to one. “I’ll come over and pick you up,” he said. “I have a green Chevy that usually takes ten minutes to make the trip from B.U., but tomorrow I’ll do it in seven.”

  They had lunch in a cafeteria, with a cold rain falling outside. She thought “how short he seems,” how unimpressive. He looked her over so intently—his eyes like shining pools—that she became self-conscious. He liked her hair—it was cut in bangs with a natural curl—and her shy and pretty smile. Though she seemed quiet, almost diffident, he could sense a degree of self-esteem. She was studying music at the New England Conservatory on a scholarship, had attended Antioch College before that, and had grown up on a farm just outside Marion, Alabama. He really did like her hair. As she touched it, he talked about his own life, about his classes at Boston University, about Communism and capitalism. As she listened to him, she no longer thought about how short he was. He was so sincere, so eloquent. And so sure of himself. And such a brain. To his searching statements, she attempted “some half-way intelligent replies.” “Oh,” he said, surprised. “You can think, too.” And he smiled.

  On the way back to the conservatory, he fell silent. Then: “Do you know what?” He looked at her. “You have everything I have ever wanted in a wife. There are only four things, and you have them all.”

  “I don’t see how you can say that,” she declared in astonishment. “You don’t even know me.”

  “Yes, I can tell. The four things that I look for in a wife are character, intelligence, personality, and beauty. And you have them all. I want to see you again. When can I?”

  She said she would have to check her schedule. “You may call me later.”

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT, he took her to a party in suburban Water-town. She seemed preoccupied. She was hoping he wasn’t serious about marriage, because she was determined to become a singer and wanted nothing to stand in her way; also, she had been in love once and it had not worked out. She had promised never to become emotionally involved again unless she was certain she would marry. He could tell that her defenses were up, but sensed that she liked him a great deal.

  At the party, young women made a great fuss over him. “Oh, so you are M. L. King, Jr. Oh! We’ve heard so much about you.” He appeared to take it all in stride, with a relaxed and easy air about him. How come he was so popular? “You know,” he said with a laugh, “women are hero worshipers.”

  When he took Coretta home, she was warm and affectionate toward him (those coquettish women had made her jealous). In his arms, she felt something tender between them. “He had taken me to the party,” she thought, “and I was his girlfriend.”

  After that he pursued her aggressively (“not that I ran very hard”). He drove her out to the shore to buy clams and walk along the ocean, with its lapping waves and cawing gulls. He took her to the Boston Symphony Hall to hear Artur Rubinstein perform his magic on the piano. He saw her for lunch, went ice skating with her, walked with her in Boston’s parks, teased her about another girl who had caught his eye (and laughed when it made her jealous), and talked on about things in an endless poetic flow. He talked about Rauschenbusch, Gandhi, agape love, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx. “I could never be a Communist,” he said. “My father is a thorough-going capitalist, but I could not be that either.” He talked about preaching—he preached some in area churches—and about how much he wanted to help humanity. Then he got around to the Atlanta girl his father intended him to marry. “But I am going to make my own decisions,” he said; “I will choose my own wife.”

  And his choice, he said, was her. Would she marry him? Now, in all honesty he was concerned about her music career. Frankly, he couldn’t marry a woman who would not be there when he came home. He would encourage her to have ideas and activities of her own, of course. He didn’t want a wife he could not communicate with. But he believed that a woman’s place was in the home, raising children. The problem with the American family was not infidelity, he contended, but the struggle to get ahead, to buy a big car and a big house, which required more and more couples to become working parents and short-shrift the children. Somebody had to work and somebody had to stay at home with them. “And biologically and aesthetically women are more suitable than men for keeping house.” Like his father, King wanted to be the head of his house.

  Well, he was certainly direct. Though his attitudes were no different from those of most other men in the 1950s, Coretta went through a difficult time giving him an answer. If she married him, she would have to forget a career and become a homemaker. If he entered the ministry, she would have to be a preacher’s wife, which was not at all the kind of life she had set for herself. On the other hand, she adored him. He made her feel “like a real woman.” Still, he came from a better background than she, and it bothered her. She had grown up in culturally deprived rural Alabama, attending an impoverished “colored” school with outdoor toilets. She loved and respected her father, an intrepid man who had built up his farm and become economically independent of whites. But she felt inferior in comparison to Martin—that was the name he used in her company—and what in her eyes was an upper-class, big-city background.

  He wanted her to meet his family, but she had reservations. “If you don’t want to come,” he snapped, “just forget everything. Forget it. Forget the whole thing.” At last she relented, and in Atlanta that summer he introduced her to his entire family. She found Daddy King “a big man, bigger than I expected.” He paid her little mind, since he expected M. L. to marry the Atlanta girl and soon. But King made it clear to Daddy that he was going to marry Coretta and nobody else: Daddy was not going to rule him in matters of the heart. And Coretta stuck up for herself, too. “I have something to offer, Daddy King,” she said during a subsequent visit. Finally, Daddy came around and gave the couple his blessings. And so it was decided: she would marry Martin and let her career “take care of itself.” But you realize, her sister told her, that “you will not be marrying any ordinary young minister.”

  In June, 1953, a motorcade of Kings pulled up at the Scotts’ new house in Marion, Alabama, and Coretta introduced Martin to her family and friends. They all liked the young reverend because he didn’t “put on airs.” On June 18, Daddy King married Martin and Coretta on the lawn of her parents’ home, with A. D. as best man. Because there were no bridal suites for Negroes in the South, the couple spent their wedding night in the home of a Scott family friend, an undertaker. “Do you know,” King quipped, “we spent our honeymoon at a funeral parlor?”

  BACK IN BOSTON, the newlyweds rented a four-room apartment and resumed their respective studies. She would become his full-time wife after she earned her degree at the New England Conservatory, which would be in June, 1954. Still, she did not complain. She found that her husband was “a real man in every respect,” and she surrendered herself to him, making his life her own. Though he wanted her to respect him as head of the house, he believed that marriage should be “a shared relationship.” Because she had to take thirteen courses that year to graduate, he cleaned the apartment and washed the clothes, hanging them in the kitchen during recesses from his own studies. On Thursdays he even cooked the evening meal: his speciality was smothered cabbage, pork chops, and pigs’ feet, which were tasty and cheap. Like
his father, he budgeted family expenses with meticulous care, dutifully recording in a three-ring notebook what they spent money for, from laundry and parking to “Nodoze,” “Xmas presents,” “Drive in,” and “Kotex.”

  By the summer of 1953, he was hard at work on his Ph.D. thesis, dividing his time between the apartment and the Boston University library. He had finished his course work in the spring term and passed his qualifying examinations without mishap (his only trouble was with German, his second language: he flunked the German test and had to petition the faculty for a re-exam, which he won and passed). To deepen his understanding of personalism, he chose to write his thesis on the divergent theisms of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, both celebrated theologians. Tillich, a monist, argued that God was transcendent and hence outside of things. Wieman, a pluralist, stressed God’s immanence—His involvement in all things. In 1935, the two theologians had monopolized a Vermont religious retreat with their disagreements over the nature of God. And King used this real-life encounter as the starting point for his thesis. He wrote Tillich and other theologians for information (Tillich was beyond reach, away in Scotland), examined a veritable library of published writings, and recorded his findings on three-by-five cards, which he collated in his living room. He discovered that he partially disagreed with both of his subjects and sought to synthesize their antipodal interpretations, as he had done with Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr. By year’s end, he had reached his principal conclusion: “Wieman’s ultimate pluralism fails to satisfy the rational demand for unity. Tillich’s ultimate monism swallows up finite individuality in the unity of being. A more adequate view is to hold a quantitative pluralism and a qualitative monism. In this way oneness and manyness are preserved.”

  Since he was finished with his residential requirements at Boston University, King elected to find employment and complete his thesis on the job. But should he go directly into teaching or first secure a pastorship? DeWolf urged him to find an academic position, for he considered King a “scholar’s scholar” of great intellectual potential. DeWolf subsequently rated him one of the best five or six graduate students he had taught in his thirty-one years at Boston University. Because King possessed unusual initiative and intellectual curiosity, “a wide, probing concern with the relevance of the Christian faith to both the thought and life of humanity,” DeWolf believed him capable of “quite creative and prominent scholarship.”

  For his part, King was immensely happy in the world of ideas and said he hoped ultimately to teach theology at a university or a seminary, to enjoy a life of the mind. As it turned out, several institutions offered him attractive posts—his old mentor and teacher, Benjamin Mays, tried to lure him back to Morehouse. But should he not preach before going into academe? Mays and DeWolf, not to mention Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and Tillich, had all been working ministers before settling into teaching and scholarship, and King thought he should follow their examples.

  Several churches expressed an interest in him. But his firmest offer came from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, which was looking for a new pastor and invited him down to give a trial sermon. In January, 1954, he flew to Atlanta and then set out for Montgomery by car, enjoying a radio performance of his favorite opera—Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. He thought: it really is lovely country down here—the rich and fertile farmlands, the sky a wintry silver. When he drove into Montgomery, which sprawled along a bend in the Alabama River, it occurred to him that this was his first visit to the Alabama capital.

  The Dexter people were cordial and solicitous. They showed him the parsonage and the church, a red-brick building situated across the street from the whitest capitol King had ever seen. In fact, the church was surrounded by white state buildings, a Negro outpost in the old white square. He learned that Dexter had been built during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War and that it stood as a symbol of Negro aspirations in downtown Montgomery, drawing its members from the outlying Negro sections.

  He was anxious about his sermon. Yes, he had preached plenty of times in Boston and Atlanta. But now he was on trial for his own job. How would he impress the Dexter congregation? Though a small church, Dexter counted mostly middle-class folk among its membership, and it had a long tradition of an educated ministry, which King liked. Should he give the Dexter people a display of scholarship, or rely on inspiration from God’s spirit? Perhaps he recalled what he had written in a course on preaching back at Boston University. “You don’t preach knowledge; you use knowledge to preach.” Finally he told himself: “Keep Martin Luther King in the background and God in the foreground and everything will be all right. Remember you’re a channel of the gospel, not the source.”

  On Sunday morning he stood at the pulpit of Dexter, surrounded by stained-glass windows, and gazed out over a packed sanctuary. He preached on “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” based on Revelation 21:16. “Love yourself, if that means healthy self-respect. That is the length of life. Love your neighbor as yourself; you are commanded to do that. That is the breadth of life. But never forget that there is an even greater commandment, ‘Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.’ This is the height of life.”

  The sermon was a great success. The members came up to congratulate him, the men to shake his hand and the women to fawn over him. He was just twenty-five, hardly more than a boy to them, and just as smart and nice as he could be. Though reputed to be “snooty” and “ice-cold,” they seemed warm to King this Sunday. As the pulpit committee shepherded him around the church, he heard stories about former pastor Vernon Johns, “a militant guy” who had exhorted the congregation like “a whirlwind” to get involved in social issues. But people at Dexter were “scared people” who tended to accept the racial status quo. At some point that day the pulpit committee asked King if he would accept a call to the pastorship. “I’ll give it my most prayerful and serious consideration,” he said.

  He returned to Boston and in March, 1954, received a telegram from Dexter’s pulpit committee, informing him that he had been unanimously chosen as pastor. The church offered him an annual salary of $4,200—the highest of any Negro minister in Montgomery.

  The offer threw King into a quandary. He was prepared to forgo an academic job and pastor for a few years to gain practical experience. But did he really want to live in the Deep South, with all its racial woes? Coretta was hardly enthusiastic about returning to the South, especially to Montgomery. After all, she had grown up near there, and she knew what a rigidly segregated city it was. As it happened, King had a preaching engagement in Detroit that Sunday, and on the flight out he sat by a window, looking down at the sunlit clouds and brooding over his dilemma. He thought about how much and how long he had resented segregation. He recalled the episodes that had hurt him so—the white parents who would not let him play with their son because he was “colored”…the white woman who had slapped him and called him “a little nigger”…the white bus driver who had called him a “black son-of-a-bitch”…the waiter who had pulled the curtain around him in the dining car. He shifted in his seat, pained by the memories. Could he endure all that again? Could he endure all the WHITES ONLY signs and the countless daily insults of being black in Dixie? He had never adjusted to separate accommodations because it “did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.” Now as the plane bore him toward Detroit, he thought: “I have a chance to escape from the long night of segregation. Can I return to a society that condones a system I have abhorred since childhood?”

  When he returned from Detroit, he talked the matter over with Coretta. They considered how difficult it would be to raise children in the bonds of segregation and how inferior their education would be in the South in contrast to the North. Still, the South was their home, and they loved it despite its racial difficulties. In fact, King had felt a driving desire to do something about them since his youth. Here was a chance to practice the Social Gospel among his own down
trodden people, to return home where he was needed. He believed, too, that southern Negroes who received part of their education in the North ought to go back to the South and work to improve race relations there. After he put in several years as Dexter’s pastor, he could go into academe as Mays and his other mentors had done.

  On April 14, 1954, King accepted the Dexter offer, with the stipulation that the church furnish the parsonage and grant him time and expenses to finish his Ph.D. thesis. The church readily agreed. He would become official pastor in September, in the meantime commuting to Montgomery by plane.

  King now flew to Atlanta to deal with his father. Predictably, Daddy King was not happy about his boy’s decision, not happy at all. Here he was, an associate pastor at Ebenezer and marked for the pastorship one day. Why would he want to take over a little church like Dexter? Moreover, why would he want to live in Montgomery, where trouble with white folks was worse than in Atlanta? But young King would not be dissuaded. Patiently he heard his father out and then headed for Montgomery to preach his first sermon as Dexter’s pastor. He did so on a May Sunday in 1954.

  That same month the United States Supreme Court handed down an epochal decision that rocked the Jim Crow South to its foundations. In Brown v. Board of Education, the court outlawed segregated public schools, thus reversing the doctrine of “separate-but-equal” that had prevailed since Plessy v. Ferguson fifty-eight years earlier. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the court ruled, and created “a feeling of inferiority” in Negro students “that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Thanks to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had argued against school segregation before the court, American Negroes had won their most spectacular victory in this century. In one historic blow, the Supreme Court had smashed the whole legal superstructure for the idea of racial separateness, knocking down a century and a half of devious rationalizations in defense of the creed that blacks must be kept apart because they were inferior.