These adverse circumstances caused more confusion than usually attends the filling of a pulpit. Both the church and the deceased pastor’s family were divided. Most of the deacons wanted to find someone older and more experienced than Mike King, who had pastored only minor-league country churches, but such pastors tended to be ones who already had churches and were clinging to them during this time of extreme adversity. Within the family, Alberta Williams King expressed the strongest opinion. “King,” she said—she would always call her husband by his last name—“I don’t want you to go to Ebenezer. I’ll never be the First Lady there, but at Traveler’s Rest I am the First Lady.” By this she meant that at Ebenezer she could never take the place of her mother. Mrs. Williams wanted her son-in-law to take Ebenezer, for reasons that ran in the opposite direction. Without her husband, she faced the loss of her church role unless the pulpit stayed in the family. Mike King, for his part, tried to straddle the positions of the two Williams women.
After seven months of indecision at Ebenezer, Mrs. Williams finally abandoned the woman’s normal church role of offstage persuasion and took the floor. Still the First Lady, she declared that Mike King was destined to succeed her husband as pastor. Her speech swayed the membership, which caused the deacons to reverse themselves and recommend King as the new preacher, and King accepted the call after assuaging the hurt feelings of his wife.
By the time the new pastor assumed his duties at Ebenezer in January 1932, a local bank had prepared a rude introduction for him by putting a court-sanctioned padlock on the church’s front door. His first job was to negotiate enough credit to get the padlock removed, so that he could hold services in the hope of raising enough money to make the church solvent. His career was at stake, as was his well-being in the delicate mix of cross-currents within his own family. Seldom if ever was a preacher’s nature better suited to the critical challenge of his life. As a preacher, Mike King was everything Vernon Johns was not—practical, organized, plainspoken, and intensely loyal to the things and people at hand. His talents, like the task before him, had little to do with rebellions or with the theological battles over fundamentalism. Instead, they were harmonious with the theme of the most popular religious book of the 1920s, The Man Nobody Knows, by advertising executive Bruce Barton, who added the subtitle Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s BUSINESS?
King was an earthbound preacher, bursting with energy. At a time when Negro evangelists like Father Divine and Daddy Grace were attracting great crowds on the strength of their ability to feed hungry people, he advanced the notion that Ebenezer must help its people prosper financially as well as spiritually. They must pull together, help each other, and establish the church as a place not only of refuge in a hostile world but as a group of people who were going places. His sermons mixed straightforward Christian fundamentalism with boosterism. If a barber joined Ebenezer, he would urge from the pulpit that the members patronize that barber. If the barber prospered, he would soon be reminded to make it known through his reciprocal contributions to the church.
Well aware that some people belittled him as a man who preached in his father-in-law’s church while living in his mother-in-law’s house, King risked everything on a message that promised at once to establish his authority and rescue the church’s finances: the members would reap great rewards if they pulled together behind him, their leader, on call to his word. Accordingly, he moved swiftly to centralize the control of the church. His first and most radical move was to abolish the independent budgets of the various smaller units at Ebenezer—the Sunday school, the Baptist Training Union, the clubs and auxiliaries. Henceforth, the new pastor decreed, all these scattered fiefdoms would contribute their money to the central treasury of the church. A corollary of King’s drastic reorganization was his break with the tradition of anonymous giving. There would be no more collection plates passed at church suppers or club functions, because he believed that the practice of anonymous giving made possible the practice of anonymous nongiving. To insure the greatest measure of control over the contributions of individual members, King established an open record system. Each member’s contributions were recorded in the official church ledger, and the ledger was available for inspection at all times. Anonymous donations, though welcome, received no credit in the ledger.
This new system shocked the sensibilities of many church members. There would be no more memberships “on the cheap,” no more “talking big and giving small.” No longer would the church clubs raise and spend money on their own favorite functions while letting the church fend for itself. Now Reverend King had exposed everything. Doubtless his gamble would have been impossible in better times, but King took over Ebenezer just as the Depression was changing from temporary hardship to permanent nightmare. After the shock of exposure, church members realized that the hard times were affecting everyone, not just themselves. The church ledger proved to be a powerful instrument in breaking down the social distances between people, as the members now knew one another as never before. From the pulpit, King praised every mite and every dollar in plain but thunderous sermons, promising that once they had torn down the walls that separated them, they would rebuild the figurative walls of Ebenezer Baptist Church into a mighty structure.
Having seized control of church finances by centralizing the budget, King created a whole new system of clubs—twelve of them, after the months of the year. All church members born in January were members of the January Club, and so on. He looked upon them as something like the twelve tribes of Israel. The clubs elected their own officers, sponsored their own events, and nominated their own entrants for such contests as Prettiest Baby and Best School Achievement. When a member contributed to the church, the amount would be credited not only to his or her individual account but also to the club’s total. The clubs made special donations and undertook special projects for the church. King encouraged any competition among them that would benefit Ebenezer.
One of King’s shrewdest innovations was based on his observations of the Negro insurance companies on Auburn Avenue, which were being hailed as a national showpiece of Negro capitalism. Most Negroes, not being large property owners, had no need of fire or automobile insurance. Negro insurance companies created their own market by inventing policies tailored to their clientele—small ones, designed to pay for funerals and doctor’s bills, occasionally for education. The companies hired armies of sales agents to collect premium payments from poor people in the most practical way: in small amounts, very frequently, often no more than a nickel a week. King recognized that this kind of payment schedule was precisely what a church should strive for in the hard times of the Depression. More creatively, he saw that if an insurance company could go door to door for its money rather than wait for customers to bring it to the office, so could a church. Therefore, King made every effort to recruit insurance salesmen and executives for membership at Ebenezer.
As always, his sales pitch envisioned many kinds of cross-pollenation: the salesmen would find new customers among the Ebenezer membership, while the members could handle their insurance needs within the church. Moreover, the shut-ins and sick people could make their church contributions directly to the insurance salesman on his rounds. A salesman born in March might well visit his fellow March Club members every week, returning with one nickel for Atlanta Life and another for Ebenezer. In yet another dimension, King saw how such an extension program could minister to members in their homes as well as collect from them. The salesmen on their rounds could read Sunday school lessons to the shut-ins and sick people, or, more practically, their wives or other Ebenezer members could come along behind them to read the lessons. Out of this notion grew one of the early church outreach programs.
From the beginning, Mike King projected his own dreams of prosperity and happiness onto the church as a whole, always speaking of himself as the essential, central leader. He boasted openly of the number of loans he had secured, the number of votes he controlled, the amount of mo
ney he had brought into the church building fund, of the advertisers he had found for the local Negro newspaper, the Daily World, and of the students he had gotten into Morehouse or Spelman. Few people seemed to resent his manner, partly because it was common to ministers and mostly because he produced. His bluster was the heart of the leadership for which he was loved and respected. If anyone suspected that part of it was compensatory, growing out of his humbler position within his own household, no one made an issue of it. He was simply Mike King—always shaking hands, encouraging and demanding, making himself the center of attention in any room, full of claims for the past and promises for the future. The key to his multiple roles and identities was always Ebenezer church, and King preached to the members as though they were one person: “I want to tell you this morning, Ebenezer. You can do it.”
He could safely say that he rescued Ebenezer Baptist Church from bankruptcy within his first few months as pastor. Membership increased geometrically from two hundred toward a Depression peak of four thousand. His gamble paid off so handsomely that the church made him the highest-paid Negro minister in Atlanta at the end of his first year. His second year at Ebenezer was FDR’s first in the White House, and while he might not have made quite as much noise in his world as Roosevelt made in Washington during the Hundred Days, he made considerably more headway in reversing economic calamity. In the spring of 1934—a little more than two years after taking the pulpit at Ebenezer—Mike King asked his membership to send him on a summer-long tour of Europe, Africa, and the Holy Land. It was a trip that the richest of people might have envied in those hard times, and for a Negro sharecropper’s son to step right up to such a fantasy so soon after landing his first full-time job, so soon after attaining basic literacy, stretched even the bounds of the American Dream.
Young Mike King was only five years old when his father said goodbye to his church, his three children, his wife, and his mother-in-law and set off to board an ocean liner bound for France. From Paris, Reverend King took a train to Rome, and later crossed the Mediterranean to Tunisia, making his way from there across North Africa to Cairo. After touring Egypt, he crossed the Nile and soon entered the Holy Land. There he visited biblical sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and elsewhere, before catching a ship back to Europe for the week-long Baptist World Alliance meeting in Berlin. This was a fitting end to a glorious trip for King, who took his seat among the delegates from nations scattered around the globe. The Berlin conference bristled with the excitement of past and present history. King and his fellow ministers heard rumors about the fiery new German leader, Adolf Hitler, and they toured historic sites in the land of their religious heritage, where Martin Luther had defied the Catholic Church and where the Anabaptists later had defied Luther.
Reverend King’s triumphant homecoming in late August 1934 was announced to Negro Atlanta in a banner headline in the Daily World: “Rev. King Is Royally Welcomed on Return from Europe.” The story listed all the speakers who had paid tribute to him at the Ebenezer reception, as well as all the dishes served. This was King’s moment, the watershed of his life, and he honored the occasion by changing his name from Michael to Martin, becoming Martin Luther King. For consistency, he also changed the name of his older son to Martin Luther King, Jr.
The change of name was one of the most important events in the younger King’s early life. For him it would be the mark of great expectations, a statement of identity that honored traditions in both religion and race. Name changes have always been part of religious history, used to announce the existence of a “new person.” Jacob became Israel, Saul of Tarsus became Paul, Simon became Peter, and the first act of every new pope is to choose a special name for his reign. During the civil rights movement the most obtuse white person would be obliged to learn the difference between a nigger and a Negro, later between a Negro and a black person. Subtle arguments took place about the difference between a Negro-American and an American Negro. The ado over name distinctions during the years of acute political crisis may have obscured a pattern that had run deep in the culture through many generations. The collective and individual identity of slavery’s descendants never was a settled matter, but fluctuated with circumstances, resulting in frequent shifts of name.
Under slavery, a name was the property of the master and not of the slave, so that a slave’s name frequently changed at the auction block and sometimes on the whim of the master. Among the joyous feelings most frequently mentioned by freed or escaped slaves was the freedom to choose a name. A name was no longer incidental. “For it is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world,” Ralph Ellison wrote. After the war, the new publications of the former slaves quickly took up the issue of what to call themselves as a race. The terms “black” and “negro” (the latter traceable to the earliest slave traders, who were Spanish and Portuguese) were widely disparaged because the slavemasters had preferred them, and also because their literal meaning excluded hundreds of thousands of mulattoes, whose color was not black. “Colored” was thought to be more inclusively accurate, but among other drawbacks it failed to distinguish the former slaves from Orientals and Indians. Moreover, the term “colored” implied that whites were not colored, or that coloring was a property added somehow to basic human qualities. Alternatively, some argued for the word “African,” but this only raised a continuing dispute as to whether the term referred to race or the place of origin. By the late nineteenth century, the term “Negro” came to be widely accepted, after newspapers in New Orleans mounted a campaign to capitalize the first letter. (White newspapers were slow to adopt this dignifying practice. The New York Times did not begin to capitalize “Negro” until 1950.)
The name question was never settled to everyone’s satisfaction. The NAACP adopted the respectable-sounding “colored people” at its founding in 1909, but the next year the first Negro-owned daily newspaper to circulate throughout the nation tossed out all the contending names in favor of its own invention, the word “Race,” which was the semantic equivalent of a placebo. In the Chicago Defender, “colored men” became “Race men,” and “Negro achievement” became “Race achievement.” This novel practice was mainly the product of extreme color sensitivity on the part of the Defender’s founding tycoon, Robert Abbott. Born into slavery and then adopted into a white family after his mother married a German, Abbott hated the word “Negro” and anything associated with the color black—to the point where he refused to wear black, married women white enough to “pass,” and, when greeted by white people at the Chicago Opera, often gave a pathetic mumbo-jumbo reply in the hope that he would be taken for an African diplomat instead of an American. Yet Abbott became a great champion of “the Race.”
The name debate touched the deepest dilemmas of esthetics, values, and identity, sometimes in the most prosaic forms. One method Negroes used to keep whites from calling them by their first names was simply to have none. Moses “Cap” Meredith named his son simply J. H. Meredith. This required some courage, because many whites who asked the boy’s name did not like being told that it was “just J.H.,” which deprived them of the diminutive uses of a first name. Not until he enlisted in the Air Force in 1950 did the son bow to regulations and choose names to go with the initials, becoming James Howard Meredith. Only when he became nationally known as the Negro Meredith who applied to the University of Mississippi did lawyers and reporters ferret out the formal names and make them, by the sheer power of fame, the ones Meredith would use.
King acquired his given name Martin in the context of this history. There remains much reticence and confusion as to exactly how and why Reverend King changed the names, as inconsistencies plague the only two accounts released. The first version appeared in L. D. Reddick’s excellent 1959 biography of King Jr., which was written with extensive cooperation from the King family.* According to Reddick, Reverend King’s parents disagreed on his name from the time he was born, with the stronger Delia King’s choice, Michael, prevailing until she died in 192
4. Then King began calling himself Martin, the name his father had always preferred.
Reddick himself recognized the problem with this story, which was to explain why Reverend King named his son Michael Luther King, Jr., in 1929, five years after King himself had switched to Martin. The family answer he recorded was that “Michael” appeared on the birth certificate because of a communications mix-up between the father and the doctor who delivered the baby. Furthermore, Reddick reported, King discovered the error a few days after the birth and made a special trip to the hospital to make sure the first name on the certificate was changed to “Martin.” This was not done, because of still another mix-up at the hospital, Reddick reported, which was not rectified until 1934.
In his own 1980 autobiography, Reverend King recalled that he had continued to use his mother’s preferred “Michael” until sometime after his father’s death in 1933, when he changed his name and his son’s from Michael to Martin in keeping with his father’s deathbed wish. This version has the advantage of eliminating the ten-year delay and the hospital mix-ups, but the conflict between the two stories tends to cast doubt on both of them. The import of Reverend King’s version is that he changed the name by which he and his son had been known for thirty-five years and five years, respectively, solely on the request of his alcoholic father, with whom his relations had varied between murderous estrangement and chilly civility, and that he did this in spite of his beloved mother’s lifelong campaign to call him Michael.
These accounts seem implausible, or incomplete, partly because the particular name chosen evokes the founder of the Protestant faith. One fact that Reddick and King seem to agree on is that the change was formalized in 1934, the year King went to Europe. (Of this there is independent confirmation. King Jr.’s birth certificate remains a family secret, but State Department records indicate that it was filed on April 12, 1934, in the name “Martin Luther King, Jr.” This indicates that King Jr.’s name was recorded officially when he was five years and three months old.) This trip was the culmination of King’s stupendous feat of will, by which he had raised himself out of illiteracy into Morehouse, into a prominent marriage, and finally into stunning success at Ebenezer against the tides of the Depression. For Mike King, who had come to Atlanta smelling like a mule, the switch to Martin Luther King caught the feeling of his leap to the stars.
Parting the Waters Page 7
