“Think about a place like Cincinnati,” Sandy’d tell me. Well, I’d been there and swore I wouldn’t go back. My sister Woodie had made an unfortunate marriage to a preacher from there, a man who said he was a preacher, anyway. I’d made the mistake of accepting an invitation from him to attend a revival he organized. But this fellow was just a trifler, and I took a train all the way to Cincinnati just to find that out. So few attended that the revival turned into a shambles. And I soon discovered that Woodie, who had left a very fine teaching opportunity behind in Atlanta when she fell in love with this man, was living a wretched life. She was doing whatever seamstress work she could, because her husband really didn’t know how to make a dime. I gave her all the money I had in my pocket when I left and told her to review very carefully in her mind what the alternatives were to this kind of an existence. Soon afterward I was happy to hear that she’d left the man when he started to become abusive. Eventually she remarried happily and moved to the city of Detroit.
This episode had left a bad taste in my mouth, not just for Cincinnati but for the whole myth of northern opportunity. Up there I saw for the first time that streets weren’t paved with gold as I’d thought they were when, as a child, I visited some of our relatives in Ohio. They had shown me the better-looking houses and shopping areas and had made the North into a rosy picture for a wide-eyed country boy. Now I could see things clearly—I had a better view, a more honest look at what was real.
“Nothin’ up North I’ve lost,” I told Sandy. “I’m a part of Georgia. I know my way around here.”
As it turned out, Sandy’s first call to a pastorate was at LaGrange, Georgia. He did get out of the “down home” area after that, however, going to churches in Chicago and in Columbus, Ohio, after serving at two more in Macon, Georgia. His major call, though, the one that anchored his career as a minister, was at the famed Cornerstone Baptist Church, in Brooklyn, New York, where he distinguished himself in the pulpit for more than forty years.
SEVEN
Bunch and I were married on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1926, in the sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church, by the Reverends James M. Nabrit, Peter James Bryant, and E. R. Carter. It was one of the grandest occasions of my life, seeing my family gathered with me along with Bunch and her folks, and several of my old mates from the boardinghouse who only showed up, I think, to blink their eyes in disbelief. I was just a little nervous during the ceremony, sensing that something, or someone, was missing. When I discovered that Sandy Ray wasn’t there, I was furious with him. Later, though, I found out that as much as he’d wanted to come, he stayed away because he had no clothes he considered good enough to wear to his good friend’s wedding. He hadn’t wanted to embarrass us by coming to the church in any patched-up outfit, so Sandy stayed home. It hurt me when I found out. So much of what we were seemed to come back again and again to how much money we had. And I began thinking, that very day of my wedding, that I should consider again whether to stay in the ministry or go on out into the business world, where I just knew there was a fortune waiting to be made!
But everyone was making a fuss over my being Reverend Williams’s son-in-law. Even though I was preaching at two churches at the time, folks who knew the Reverend A. D. Williams were certain he had plans for me as his associate pastor at Ebenezer.
But I resisted this, not wanting any suspicion that I was only after a new pulpit when I married Alberta Williams. In Baptist circles, family was extremely important. At conventions and revivals, a lot of conversations had to do with pastorates and marriages, the joining of congregations and families that had businesses or professions. I wanted no whispers about the reasons Alberta and I were first engaged and then married. I knew my heart, she knew hers. Our love was very deep, but rumors could bring a lot of distress into the strongest homes. I decided to stay with my own congregations, even after Reverend Williams made it clear that he’d be overjoyed to have me with him at Ebenezer. He was, after all, getting on in years, and a good, solid church like Ebenezer Baptist, he said, wasn’t a place to leave in the hands of someone who was not capable of handling such a responsibility.
Well, it pleased me no end to realize he had that sort of confidence in me. But I held back. Bunch loved her father, and she had the closest ties to his church. Gently, quietly, she would sometimes urge me to reconsider. I’d smile and say the folks at Ebenezer had an outstanding leader in Reverend Williams. They were in good shape. But out in East Point and College Park, people respected and needed my ministry. I had to stay with them.
We moved into the upstairs portion of the Williams home on Auburn Street and began our life together. What some people now call the extended family was very much a part of Negro life in those days, and Reverend and Mrs. Williams had always kept their home filled with aunts, cousins, friends of the family, boarders—anyone who required a place to live in solid Christian harmony.
In many ways it was an entirely new life for me. Bunch’s mother made me feel completely welcome there, however. I was a son to her—though not immediately, because both she and Reverend Williams had always maintained reservations about Bunch’s marrying and possibly abandoning her career in education. For his part, the Reverend kept a close eye on me, not just because I was now family, but also because of his deep interest in the direction of the ministries of younger men in Atlanta. It was through him that I came to understand the larger implications involved in any churchman’s responsibility to the community he served. Church wasn’t simply Sunday morning and a few evenings during the week. It was more than a full-time job. In the act of faith, every minister became an advocate for justice. In the South, this meant an active involvement in changing the social order all around us.
Reverend Williams made it clear to me from the time I moved into his home that he felt no sympathy for those who saw no mission in their lives, who could not understand, for instance, that progress never came without challenge, without danger and, at times, great trial. These obstacles, however, could not stop the true man of God. A minister, in his calling, chose to lead the people of his church not only in the spiritual sense, but also in the practical world in which they found themselves struggling.
Nobody could ignore the political framework that touched every life, Negro or white, in every state of the South in this period. There were blacks, of course, who settled comfortably into the pattern of segregation. And there were ministers who accepted the role of keeping peace between the races at any cost, which usually meant keeping Negroes calm in a crisis, or just keeping them out of touch with the way the rest of the world was moving.
And it is clear, to this day, why this attitude often prevailed. As the one black person in the southern communities of that era who could command any respect whatever from whites and passed for himself and those he might represent, the clergyman was extremely cautious in his dealings with whites. Losing that privileged status was something few clergymen were prepared to risk. Instead of championing the rights of their members, a lot of these ministers simply took their orders from whites and passed them along Negroes. And the message was simply one of accommodation and silence in the face of segregation’s brutal treatment of the Negro. Some church leaders never rocked the boat. They went along with the white establishment’s program, whatever it was, and were grateful for whatever little crumbs might spill off the white man’s table.
That was not Reverend William’s way, and neither would it be mine.
In September of 1927, our first child was born, and we named her Willie Christine. But our joy was tempered by a crisis. The little baby fell ill almost right away. A high fever rose in her and refused to subside. The doctors who came could do nothing, and so little Willie Christine suffered great pain and distress. She would cry so, and for such a long time, that in the night I would often put on a robe and go down to walk back and forth on the front porch, looking along Auburn Avenue but not really seeing it. The severity of this illness gave deep concern to both Bunch and me, although, alo
ng with her parents, I tried to keep as much worry from her as possible. Bunch was in a very weakened condition after giving birth. She knew, of course, that the baby was not doing well, and this placed some strain on her recovery. I prayed for the Lord’s help and wisdom, realizing again, as I had when my mother passed, that His are the final decisions; we will always go along with them.
For nearly two weeks the baby cried almost around the clock, often shaking violently. Finally, late one night, the crying stopped. I was downstairs on the porch by myself, and when I didn’t hear her anymore I rushed into the house and found her, wide-eyed and at ease in her body. I just stared. Like that, it was over, just stopped. And soon she was growing, like all babies, crying mostly when she was hungry, giving Bunch and me the happiness that is only for those who deeply love children.
Now, sometimes when I recall those frightening first days of Christine’s life, I feel that the illness, as severe as it was, may have strengthened her for the inordinately heavy responsibilities which would become a daily part of her adult years.
There was increasing pressure now to join Reverend Williams at Ebenezer. We were close as a family, and both Bunch and her mother took very active roles in the life at the church. It seemed peculiar, to all of us, that only I wasn’t involved there. But Reverend Williams was a very clever man. After supper, he and I would always find ourselves sitting in the parlor talking, whether or not this was what I’d planned.
“How’re you doin,’ Young King?” he’d ask. “How are those churches of yours comin’ along?”
Under his very clear direction, the conversation would go to the way in which churches had to be run as they became larger. Community service then became a priority. Youth activities. The organization and training of choirs and secretaries and church boards of various kinds. Money must be carefully handled. Visits to the sick and shut-in, the elderly. All these things had to be organized, he stressed. And I’d listen, because all the while he told me these things, there would be times when he’d digress and talk about himself in little spurts, before remembering that he was supposed to be lecturing a reluctant pupil.
A man of firm determination, strong self-reliance, and broad vision, Reverend Williams came to Atlanta on his thirtieth birthday from Greene County, Georgia, where he had been a “country preacher.” He inherited his gifts, he said, from his father, who had been a slave exhorter. Intrepid and enterprising, after he arrived in Atlanta he worked in a machine shop and pastored a small church in nearby Kennesaw, Georgia.
In 1894, Ebenezer Baptist Church, then a young, struggling institution in its eighth year, called Reverend Williams to its pastorate, where he remained the pastor until his sudden death in 1931. Under his leadership, the church became a forceful influence in the Negro community, and in the community at large, as I relate later in this chapter.
From the little boxlike structure where Reverend Williams began with the Ebenezer membership, to the church which they built near Auburn Avenue, to two other locations, Reverend Williams led the membership to Auburn Avenue and Jackson Street, where construction for the present building was begun in 1914 and completed in 1922.
Reverend Williams cut quite a figure. He was a tall man, with a frame straight as a steel rod and a complexion like oak. He was a great speaker, but he often had his troubles with the language. In the pulpit he was very impressive because of his powerful, thundering style. He was a very involved person, and in those early years, while I was still a boy out on the farm, Reverend Williams experienced the terrible racial violence that took place in Atlanta during the year 1906, when several Negroes were killed and many more were attacked and injured by the police. The causes of this outbreak were never entirely clear, but the South and especially Atlanta were shaken by it. In an effort to prevent any repetition, a number of Negro ministers formed an alliance that eventually was called the Atlanta Civic League, an advisory board that met with city officials to curb any racial conflict in the city.
But like many churchmen of his time, Reverend Williams was drawn to membership in a small but growing organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of whose founders, W.E.B. Du Bois, was a member of the faculty of the prestigious Atlanta University. For Reverend Williams, the cause of freedom burned deeply inside. The South had created the monster of segregation with enormous care and refused to consider other ways of life. If the spirit could abide it, life might simply settle quietly into a system where humiliation and danger were constant. Some folks learned to live with it, smiling or sometimes just never changing their expressions, every day going deeper into a world of futility and hopelessness, and going without a murmur. But others opposed this southern convention whenever and however they could. Throughout Atlanta, during those early years of the twentieth century, meetings took place that shaped the period that the United States would know half a century later as the Civil Rights Era. Those earlier years were not so dramatic, and the actions that resulted were never quite so prominent. But in the Negro churches, during the long hours of night, folks argued and planned and moved and persuaded others to join them. It was here that what became the South’s most effective weapon in later struggles may well have been born. In the years just after 1906, it became popular to characterize Negroes in very derogatory terms in the press. One Atlanta paper, The Georgian, went to great lengths to be insulting when people of color were described in its stories. In a bold move, Reverend Williams went one day to the offices of this newspaper and asked to see the publisher. The publisher was so startled that a Negro would be crazy enough to walk into a white man’s office for any reason other than cleaning the floor that he came out and talked. Of course, when the reverend told him why he was there, this fellow ordered him off the premises, yelling that no nigger was going to dictate editorial policy for white folks, not ever!
Reverend Williams moved quickly after that exchange, and within hours brought several churchmen together at Ebenezer. They came up with an idea and set it in motion. A lot of the advertising in The Georgian came from stores and other business patronized by blacks. The following Sunday, Reverend Williams and his fellow ministers added to their sermons an appeal that these businesses be avoided. In a few weeks, several hundred Negroes around Atlanta were altering their buying habits. They were very private about this, however, not talking about it in public, but just going about the task of protecting their own interests. Well, it didn’t take the local shopkeepers and store owners long to see what was going on, and it didn’t take them too much longer to notice the connection between The Georgian’s use of epithets when describing Negroes looked at the paper’s ad pages.
But, of course, a boycott is very tricky business. Folks participating in one had to be extremely cautious; their jobs, even their safety, could be put right on the line with such an action. A lot of pressure can be applied, and some folks will not act honorably. The history of the South is filled with betrayals of one kind or another. Reverend Williams was never turned away from his vision of a better day for his people, but he did see other efforts, other boycotts, come apart because of the factions that were formed, the jealousies, the competitive elements that scattered many movements before they could get off the ground. But the action against The Georgian worked. The paper collapsed financially several months later, bitterly denouncing the nigger troublemakers who were taking over Atlanta, and hinting that there were still some white folks left who knew how to handle them.
Through these years, the ways of southern whites became even more clear to me as I realized how complex the issue of race really was. Some whites claimed to want things changed, but not enough to work at it. Few realized how imprisoned they also were in a system that made them obey a set of laws only fools could take seriously. Whites, rich or poor, were chained to segregation as an ethic, bound up with it so tight they could scarcely breathe sometimes. But no one emerged from among the whites of the South who was strong enough to come out and say that this primitive de
sign for living had to end. No one came from among them. It could have ended sooner, far sooner, if someone had.
My studies at Morehouse were the toughest of my life. In the beginning I often seemed at a total loss when trying to grasp dozens of concepts in language, mathematics, and the sciences that some of my teachers felt I should have mastered years earlier. And at Morehouse there were no acceptable excuses. Everybody there was expected to achieve. Faculty members like Miss Constance Crocker, who taught freshman English, were proud of their skills as educators and had no patience with slow learners. She failed me in her course during my first term at Morehouse, flunked me again when I took it over in the second term, then finally gave me a D when I took it a third time in summer school.
I couldn’t quit because there were always so many other students there reminding each other every day that Morehouse men didn’t do that, Morehouse men didn’t quit. And so I stayed and flunked courses, took them over, passed them the second time around. Only in freshman English, Constance Crocker’s course, did I have to take something more than twice to pass it. She later became the wife of James Nabrit, the minister who had married Bunch and me. They’d all kid me about it years later as we grew to be good friends with the Nabrits.
Two more children were born while I was still in school: Mike, Jr., on January 15, 1929, and Alfred Daniel on July 30, 1930. I was still known as Mike King at this time, although my father insisted until the day he died, in 1933, that he had named me the day I was born and my name was Martin, for one of his brothers, and Luther, for another one.
I’d never had a birth certificate. They weren’t common around the turn of the century in places like Stockbridge, Georgia. During his last hours, Papa asked me to make my name officially what he said it was. When he was dying, we spent some hours together talking in his room at the house he and my brothers and sisters had moved to in Atlanta. He had tried so hard to change. He quit drinking, came to church, and seemed to make peace with himself and with his God. When he was gone I took out the necessary legal papers and was therefore called Martin Luther King, Sr. And little Mike became M.L. to his family, although his friends were still calling him Mike many years later. Alfred was always A.D. to us all.
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