King entered Morehouse planning to become a doctor, but he soon dropped the idea after deciding that the biological sciences were too cold and mathematical to suit him. Then he, like his friend Walter McCall, set his sights on the law. Dirt poor, McCall toiled in the basement of Groves Hall as the unofficial campus barber, cutting students’ hair for a dime. He subjected all his customers to complaints about a host of physical ailments, especially arthritis, and about his financial plight. When King once told him after a haircut that he could not pay his dime right away, McCall became enraged that this privileged, suave, and polished kid professed to have money troubles. The two of them “went to the grass” outside, drawing a crowd, and King prevailed in the wrestling match even though he gave away many pounds and five years to the Army veteran. Having won McCall’s respect, King convinced him that his parents really did not give him very much spending money. He soon paid his dime, and the two antagonists became almost inseparable friends, known to everyone as “Mac and Mike.” They were a humorous pair of opposites. The gruff, confrontational McCall seemed possessed of a harder rebellion in what he later called a “revolutionary stage.” He abhorred religious tastes—especially the happy chatter about heaven and the cross—and looked upon religious ideas as a point of departure. When he and King and other members of their small group went to church, they always sat in the balcony and looked down on the proceedings like anthropologists.
King would remember being startled by Morehouse and its reverberations on his own racial identity, when “for the first time in my life, I realized that nobody there was afraid.” This realization is paradoxical in two respects: it contradicts his own memory that Reverend King had always shielded him at home and at Ebenezer from racial cowardice and most racial humiliation; and it is literally untrue. Morehouse students had hardly escaped racial fear, which was a component even of their subordinate relationship to the white Miss Read. Few if any students felt comfortable with whites or challenged Atlanta’s segregation laws, and everyday episodes of fear often intruded upon King’s dormitory bull sessions. What was new to King at Morehouse was not an absence of fear but a willingness to question the fear that was there.
He had never known such an attitude at home. Reverend King was not disposed to discuss the race issue. On the few occasions when segregation openly challenged his dignity, he had defended himself bravely in episodes destined to become part of the King legend—as when he indignantly walked out of a shoe store after a clerk insisted on serving him and young M.L. in a segregated section. While boasting of his own fearlessness, the elder King had devised a philosophy and a daily routine that avoided precisely that sort of episode, whose emotional charge was always rooted in fear. He made the race issue simple: he was right, segregation was wrong, and the hatefulness of white people was a mystery best left to God. His son had grown up with this attitude, but was startled to find that Morehouse people freely undertook to solve the mystery themselves. King had his first frank discussions about race on the More-house campus. Many of the countless theories about it emanated from the sociology department, whose professors thought of race behavior as a subcategory of all social behavior. They tried to reduce racial fear from a taboo to a branch of knowledge, penetrable by logic. King decided to prepare himself for a legal career by majoring in sociology. Walter Chivers, his adviser and primary teacher in the department, conceived of racism in vaguely Marxist terms as a necessary byproduct of an economic system that benefited whites.
As to religion, much of the pressure King felt was a deepening of the denial that had begun to overcome him when grandmother Williams died three years earlier. He recalled a few years later that his first two years of college pushed him steadily into a “state of scepticism,” during which he regretted his church background. He made it clear that this was extremely painful, but it was also liberating. At Morehouse, he wrote, “the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body.” The More-house atmosphere initiated King to the mixed thrills of freethinking. In his case, the growing pains were compounded by factors personal to him—the unusual bond to his late grandmother, and the convergence of both racial and religious fears in the person of his father, whose attempts to banish them on the strength of his own naked authority seemed alternately fraudulent and all too human. In the cycles of perception, Reverend King appeared now and then as one whose strengths transcended his fundamentalism. He was still the father, who had shown how to run a church and make his way in the world, daring to dispense answers that thousands found serviceable.
These pressures, which introverted King in the classroom and at home, never threatened to paralyze him in the company of his new friends. He and McCall spent a lot of time experimenting with some of the tamer sins against Baptist doctrine, such as dancing and card-playing. They would sneak out of church early to play cards. At Morehouse, King worked hard to develop the accouterments of urbanity. One of his campus models was Professor Gladstone Chandler, who smoked a pipe, wore a smart tweed jacket, and invented ingenious games to help his English composition students learn new polysyllabic words. This was one course in which King was no underachiever, because the flamboyant pedantry of the word games brought him no end of fun. If Professor Chandler called on King with a simple “How are you?” he would reply, “I surmise that my physical equilibrium is organically quiescent.” To friends around the Mac and Mike clique, King was an affable personality resting on a foundation of decency, moving politely but steadily away from the religious straitjacket of his youth toward the Morehouse ideal of the successful, fun-loving gentleman. When Bob Williams, who finished Morehouse at the end of King’s second year, heard some time later that his young friend had decided after all to become a preacher, his first reaction was to laugh out loud in disbelief.
During the summer of 1946, King quit his job as a laborer at the Atlanta Railway Express Company because the foreman insisted on calling him “nigger.” Whites were using the epithet with greater frequency then, as increased racial hostility was merely one of many new rumblings when the whole world began to adjust to the meaning of the great war. Amid runaway inflation and fears of a return to the Depression, economic warfare broke out into a chaos of general labor strikes, company goon squads, and emergency government programs. The Soviet Union and the United States began to split the globe into two warring camps, each claiming to represent idealism against an empire of evil ambitions. Colonized peoples in Asia and Africa denounced the hypocrisy of the democratic nations that doggedly reasserted sovereignty over them, and in a similar spirit America’s Negro soldiers demanded that they be given at home the rights they had fought for overseas. Whites resisted these demands, especially in the South, with a ferocity that put lynchings back into the headlines. Mobs assassinated no fewer than six Negro war veterans in a single three-week period that summer. In Georgia’s first multiple lynching since 1918, one of those six veterans died when a group of hooded men pulled him, his wife, and another Negro couple out of a car near Monroe, lined the four of them up in front of a ditch, and fired a barrage that left a reported 180 bullet holes in one of the four corpses. In the aftermath, state investigators in Monroe complained that “the best people in town won’t talk about this,” but they and the FBI would compile enough evidence to take before a grand jury, which declined to return an indictment. Local Negroes called in Rev. William Holmes Borders from Atlanta to conduct the funeral.
The story of the Monroe lynching was one of many that the NAACP’s Walter White told to President Truman in the Oval Office that September. “My God!” exclaimed Truman. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that.” He promised to do something, and soon thereafter appointed a special commission to recommend legislation dealing with all deprivations of Negro citizenship rights. At a time when Negro leaders had trouble getting themselves into the White House at all, much less getting a delivered promise out of it, Truman’s action made him an overnight hero. King’s friend Samuel Cook helped organize the first campus chapter of the NAAC
P, which was soon sponsoring debates on such questions as whether Negroes should protest segregation by refusing to serve in the armed forces. The campus mood changed drastically that fall with the major influx of returning war veterans, who, having seen combat in foreign lands, now mingled with the “babies” Morehouse had recruited in their absence. Cook, though only seventeen, faced the challenge of serving the amalgamated student body as its president, having been elected the previous spring on the strength of his popularity as a football star.
King showed little interest in the campus agitation about public affairs. Now a junior, he was spending more and more time in the company of Larry Williams and Walter McCall, studying preachers. It was a tight little trio. As time and practicality seasoned their religious rebellions somewhat, they sought to answer the question of whether the ministry could be cut to the shape of their ambitions. They could be found in the Wheat Street balcony as often as three Sundays a month that year, studying Borders’ mannerisms, his organizational style, and above all the high-toned sermons in which he aroused his congregation without merely repeating the homilies of eternal life. Not surprisingly, Borders welcomed their attendance a great deal more than Reverend King appreciated their absence. When Larry Williams, an Ebenezer member, grew so close to Borders over the year that he asked to be apprenticed to him as a Wheat Street assistant, Reverend King took it as proof of intrigue. He asked his son to cut off his friendship with Williams.
M.L. refused, which made his position in the jumble of private belief and family harmony more delicate than ever. Actually, his gropings toward a conscionable brand of preaching made him look beyond Borders toward something much less orthodox, but he could not say so to his father. Reverend King’s dissatisfaction was real and close to him personally. In addition, he could not ignore the possibility that any religion vague and secular enough to satisfy him would be too mushy to sustain a church. Reverend King always talked about sustaining the church. M.L. was trying to steer through treacherous psychological waters in many respects. By the end of his junior year, he had given up talk of becoming a lawyer and was noncommittal when asked about his future.
Pressures at home were so severe that King rejoined the Morehouse tobacco program for the summer of 1947. As a fund-raising venture during the war, the college had contracted to supply Connecticut growers with student laborers for the harvest. King had made the trip three years earlier, mostly to get out of Atlanta, but this time it was less of an adventure, more of a work gang. Having been voted one of the two laziest workers before, King now channeled his natural exuberance into playful but determined resistance. There was beer around the barracks at times, and for King the antics culminated abruptly when a policeman accosted him during a nighttime foray. As scrapes go, it was rather civilized; he did not see the inside of a cell. Still, for any young person, let alone Reverend King’s son, the mere thought of explaining such an incident at home caused great consternation. Reports were sure to reach his father.
Back in Atlanta, he told some of his closest friends that he had decided to soften the blow by first telling Reverend King what he most wanted to hear: he would follow him into the ministry. The news overjoyed the patriarch, who made a show of weighing the sincerity of his son’s intentions but then scheduled M.L. for an immediate trial sermon. He told the news to the Ebenezer congregation in the only acceptable way—that his son had been “called by God to the pulpit.” The younger King’s friends knew he was too sensitive to be teased about these circumstances at the time, but later they joked about how it was really the “hot sun of the tobacco field” that had called him.
On the appointed Sunday afternoon, a sizable crowd filed into the church basement, where trial sermons were traditionally held. Then others came, and still more, until Reverend King, in his glory, finally shouted, “It won’t hold ’em! It won’t hold ’em!” and waved everyone upstairs into the main sanctuary. Young M. L. King did not have the commanding presence of his much larger father in the pulpit, as some noticed, but he already spoke with an authority that made people forget his small stature. Although he talked less of Jesus and used more big words than many of his listeners would have liked, the trial was a great success. The boy was only eighteen, they said, and youngsters always talk more about living a good life than about heaven. Clearly, he was gifted, for he seemed to project his entire being in the expression of his sentiments, the sonorous baritone making music of his convictions. The Ebenezer congregation rose up in celebration. On a word from Reverend King, young M.L. was quickly ordained as a full-fledged minister and made assistant pastor of the church. No one but young King and a few of his Morehouse friends knew that his first pulpit oration had been borrowed from “Life Is What You Make It,” a published sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick of the Riverside Church in New York.
The last year at Morehouse was a heady one for King. He and Larry Williams, now assistant pastor to Borders, walked around the campus like young lords. Whenever Borders asked Williams to conduct one of his funerals, Williams would ask King to stand in with him. If the two of them were not preaching sermons, they were marrying and burying people, while still going to classes and doing homework, and basking in fresh admiration from local females. Walter McCall teased his friends for getting carried away at times, but he was on the same path. All three of them felt the honor of being an out-of-town guest preacher at the churches of King’s uncle Joel in Shade Grove, South Carolina. King once flew home from his uncle’s church, becoming the first member of the family to travel by airplane. He and Williams made the trip so often that they gave each other new nicknames. King became “Shady” and Williams “Grove.” Morehouse students called the two of them “The Wreckers,” in tribute to their reputations as ladies’ men. King’s friends still saw fit to call him Tweedie, noting the affectation in his habit of closing his sermon folder just as he stepped into the pulpit—so that everyone would know he was preaching without notes. This practice greatly annoyed Reverend King, who wanted his son to preach from a manuscript.
The big news during King’s last year at Morehouse came out of Washington. Truman became the first American President to address an NAACP convention, and when the commission he had appointed the previous year released its report, “To Secure These Rights,” most observers expressed shock that Truman allowed publication of an agenda so far in advance of public opinion. The report brought the phrase “civil rights” into common political parlance, replacing “the Negro question.” There was even greater shock the following February, just three days after the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in Delhi, when Truman sent a special civil rights message to Congress asking for a federal anti-lynching law, among other things. Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, the South’s most responsible liberal on the race question, attacked the legislation as too radical for the white South, which stimulated the NAACP’s Walter White to call McGill a “weasel.” These two men then felt obliged to go through a minuet of apology and redefinition on liberalism’s shrinking territory of comfort. At Morehouse, a majority of realists saw the new bill as a desperate effort to revive Truman’s reelection hopes in the North. They predicted correctly that the bill would go nowhere, but still there were distant rumblings indicating that the postwar world might become an altogether new age. The new mood was an old battered faith, now buttressed by the goodwill that follows a war and by the harsh realities of a shrinking globe.
King took his first public stands that winter on issues far removed from the dominant ones, beginning with an article for the campus newspaper titled “The Purpose of Education.” Most Morehouse students, he wrote, were in danger of pursuing education as an “instrument of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses.” Properly conceived, he argued, education provides “noble ends rather than a means to an end” and rescues learning from the moral vacuum of “efficiency.” “The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.” As an example of such a creature, he cited no less a fi
gure than former Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, who, King wrote, had a Phi Beta Kappa key and “one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America…yet he contends that I am an inferior being.”
The article was vintage early King—taking a broad swipe at a topic of his own choosing, making provocative connections (in this case linking the selfishness of Morehouse students with the racism of Talmadge), working toward a synthesis of religion and intellect, and struggling against himself to express original ideas while indulging a fondness for platitudes. Education was very much on his mind that year. Now that he had made a career choice, there was indeed a purpose to his own education. He knew that he needed big ideas to go with his big words if he wanted to elevate his ministry above fundamentalism without sinking into permanent skepticism. In this crucial respect, his training had only begun. He wanted to go to seminary, as had Borders, Fosdick, and Johns, among the finest of the preachers he had studied. He wanted to go specifically to a white seminary, so that while answering the burning questions he could also prove to himself what he had always been taught—that he was as good as anyone. Finally, he wanted to get out of Atlanta for a while, and away from Reverend King. By entering the ministry, he had taken a step or two back under his father’s control. That year, Reverend King did with his new assistant pastor what he could not have done a year earlier with the politely rebellious student: he made M.L. apologize publicly to the Ebenezer congregation for the sin of going to a YWCA dance with Larry Williams. King also tried but failed to prevent his son from joining a new interracial council of students from Atlanta’s white and Negro colleges, arguing that M.L. should stay among his own and not risk “betrayals” from the white students. King thought this was absurd.
Parting the Waters Page 10
