Daddy King

by Martin Luther King Sr.

  There were constant reminders of just how widespread and how evil segregation actually was. Negroes who considered themselves well off in terms of social station or economic security had only to go into downtown Atlanta to discover again just how little those things meant in a racist environment. In fact, a grim little joke about this often made the rounds of Negro gatherings as a brief, pointed reminder of what we were all up against. Blacks would pose the question to one another in a whisper: “What do white folks call a Negro who’s got a Ph.D., a new home, and a fine automobile, along with lots of money in the bank?” Answer: “A nigger.” I had no problem remembering what segregation meant. Instances of it surrounded me.

  When M.L. was six years old, I took him downtown with me, and we enjoyed a very pleasant ride in the family car. In those days we seldom shopped outside the Negro business community, but on one of the bigger streets near the center of town, M.L. spotted a pair of shoes in a window and asked me to buy them. Well, he needed a pair, and so we went inside the store where the shoes he liked so much were displayed. A clerk appeared as soon as we stepped past the door and very coldly announced that we should go to the back of the store where he’d help us in just a few minutes. I told him we were quite comfortable in the front of the store, and if he didn’t want to sell us any shoes there, we wouldn’t be buying any.

  The young clerk’s face reddened. He insisted again that we go in the back, the way all Negroes who came in there were happy to do. No exceptions. No exceptions were ever made to this rule, he told me. “You take it like everybody else, and stop being so high and mighty!” M.L. was looking up at me. I could see he was confused by what was going on. After all, he only wanted a pair of shoes to wear. When I told him we were leaving, he seemed ready to cry. In trying to explain, I became angry—not at him, but the little fella didn’t know that and became very frightened. As we drove back toward Auburn Avenue, I was able to speak quietly about the whole episode in the store, but the questions, the confusions, remained in his eyes.

  This was the ridiculous nature of segregation in the South. A grown man could make no sense of it to a very bright six-year-old boy. M.L. just couldn’t understand why it was all right to buy shoes in the back part of a store and not in the front. Because people come in so many different colors in the Negro community, it was hard for him to figure out how anybody could use the color of a person’s skin to separate him from others. In M.L.’s world, some Negroes looked white. Others were very dark, still others fitted somewhere in between. Why would anybody have an advantage over others on this basis? And who really knew whether some folks were white or Negro, just on the basis of what their skin color seemed to reveal?

  M.L. stared at me in the car and asked me to explain the whole thing again. And I said to him that the best way to explain it was to say that I’d never accept the stupidity and cruelty of segregation, not as long as I lived. I was going to be fighting against it in some way or other as long as there was breath in me. I wanted him to understand that. He still looked puzzled. But he nodded his head and told me that if I was against it, he would help me all he could. And I remember smiling and telling him how much I appreciated his support. He was such a little fellow then, but sitting there next to me in the car, M.L. seemed so thoughtful and determined on this matter that I felt certain he wouldn’t forget his promise to help.

  Bunch’s mother, Mrs. Jennie Celeste Williams, passed away on May 18, 1941. M.L. was hit especially hard by her death. He’d slipped away to watch a parade when he was supposed to be studying. And when he got back, he discovered that his grandmother had gone on home to glory. M.L. thought God was punishing the family for his “sin” of having gone out of the house without telling anyone. He cried off and on for several days afterward, and was unable to sleep at night. I sat in the bedroom he and A.D. shared, explaining for nearly all of an afternoon that God wasn’t that angry about M.L. neglecting a little homework or going to see a parade. Death, I told my sons, was a part of life that was difficult to get used to, no matter how many times it visited our families or those we knew. “Don’t blame what has happened to your grandmother on anything you’ve done,” I told M.L. “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.”

  Later that year I moved the family to a large yellow brick home (which had been owned by a Negro doctor) on Boulevard, only a few blocks from where we had lived. This was the kind of house I had been dreaming about since the first time I ran away from the country, shaking my fist at the house where my little white friend Jay lived. I would never forget how embarrassed I was one day when Jay and I were playing together and went to his house, a large red brick one, and I was told, “You can’t come in the front door.”

  I vowed then that one day I would own a brick house, and now I owned one—larger and finer than the one in Stockbridge. Earlier, I made an effort to buy that house Jay had lived in (when he was grown, he owned a lot of property around Stockbridge). I gave him $500 earnest money, but Jay gave me the money back several weeks later. I learned that his wife worried that folks around Stockbridge wouldn’t think too highly of a Negro who’d grown up there as a sharecropper’s son coming back to buy one of the biggest “white” houses in town.

  Once I saw the house on Boulevard, none of that business with Jay bothered me anymore, although I’d been very angry when it had happened. The South had simply reminded me again that Negro people, even if they prospered and could afford to buy certain things, were still to be refused many of them on the basis of color.

  The area around Boulevard was a comfortable residential community. Negroes who lived there were by no means fabulously wealthy as some people in other parts of Atlanta imagined. The black middle class worked hard. But as economic security was being achieved, it was often necessary to withstand certain jealousies that arose within the black community, where success by some was often greeted with mixed emotion by others. There were Negroes who believed that a black person with anything couldn’t have gotten it honestly, that is, without selling out his soul to whites, “tomming,” betraying his brothers in the ghetto.

  During the late 1930s, black and white leaders began meeting fairly regularly to discuss mutual roles in maintaining what whites liked to call the “excellent” race relations in our city. A few of us in the Negro community felt these informal gatherings could have been more constructive if everyone involved had been committed to basic social change. But whites were fond of claiming that patience was all Negroes needed to weather a storm that would surely end . . . sometime, as every storm does.

  In 1940, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays was the new president of Morehouse College. He wasted no time letting whites in power know that he felt enormous pride in being part of a city with the will to be great. Whites were pleased to hear what they considered an endorsement of the status quo. But Dr. Mays was very much in favor of change. He was also a scholar of considerable reputation, and a compelling orator. Whites in government and business began to listen. Dr. Mays, in turn, called for a wider dialogue between white and Negro Atlanta. A small coalition formed. But very little came out of the initial meetings. There was an uneasiness as two wary groups circled each other verbally. Although Atlanta was at that time one of the South’s most segregated cities, the white businessmen who met with us saw little need to interfere with the “gracious Atlanta way of doing things.”

  I joined with several prominent members of Atlanta’s Negro leadership in creating our part of the coalition. My neighbor John Wesley Dobbs; Dr. Mays; A. T. Walden, an attorney; and C. A. Scott, publisher of the Atlanta Daily World, were all family men with careers to consider. But freedom had special meaning to all of us. Walden had fought the Klan as a young man in rural Georgia. Now he was prominent in the NAACP as a legal counsel. Walden knew how hard-headed crackers could be, and how violent they could be on the subject of race. He knew how to fight on more than one level, toe-to-toe with enemies who forced him to that
method, and also reasonably, with a knowledgeable use of the legal apparatus available to all Americans. Dobbs was a shrewd negotiator, able and quite outspoken. C. A. Scott was a successful businessman whose newspaper was one of several enterprises operated by his family. Scott, above all, was an American who believed deeply in this country and its people. He did not believe in activism in the sense of public demonstrations. Leaders, he felt, should handle problems among themselves, make decisions, and pass them along to the public.

  My view, though I certainly didn’t avoid acting in a leadership capacity, was that the masses had to take part in social change. Voter registration drives, in which I believed strongly, were only part of that involvement. The picket line, in my opinion, was the best weapon we had. Certainly it meant bringing folks out into the streets. True, it invited opposition from those whites who became crazed over the possibility of “race-mixing.” But this kind of action had an effect on a vital part of our city’s life—its economy.

  Atlanta, of course, was always the South’s center of finance, trade, and transportation. Its large middle class, both black and white, was separated by old and useless laws instead of being joined by many mutual interests: regard for family life, for church, education, and law-abiding citizenship. Instead of growing into what it might have been—the finest and most completely American city in the nation—Atlanta allowed the narrow interests of some of its people to dominate the good sense and charitable spirit of others. The business community had always been a solid force that controlled Atlanta’s political and social destiny. Any change that affected the city’s economic, social or political atmosphere had to come through the businessmen; their point of view was always crucial.

  But the business community, though very dynamic in its quests for new markets and increased profits, did not always spend that much passion and energy on the cause of human freedom. Businessmen were pathetically slow in Atlanta when it came to using their refined mechanisms, so good for making money, to achieve some sense of purpose in life beyond dollars and cents. The moral issue within the business community in the South always started and ended with segregation. White Christians could not read a Bible that said “. . . what you do unto the least of my brethren you do unto me,” and sense that God was watching the South and asking for courage from white folks as well as black. On the issue of racial discrimination, there was no white leadership at all. Black leaders operated in a vacuum. Whites were only maintaining a holding action, trying to see how much they could get away with and for how long. The political economy of segregation made it a difficult system to oppose. Negro wages were lower than white wages. Negroes were strictly confined to certain neighborhoods. Slick businessmen made a lot of money from situations like that, as they have all over America throughout the twentieth century. Things were controlled. The poor, black and white, were taught to hate each other. Businessmen made money from both sides and used the controls of segregation to create an economy that always brought advantage to them. With so much money involved, none of them was about to change this. And so there was no leadership among the businessmen, who were so powerful in Atlanta. And when the powerful have no leaders, everybody is in trouble, because a lot of mediocre people begin to twist and turn and manipulate a society in the absence of strong, dynamic and, above all, reasonable voices.

  In terms of the moral climate among any people, the direction provided by society’s visionary people is vital. Like the businessmen, Atlanta’s white clergy was without a true leader who could have influenced thousands of people to change before the crisis became more serious. No one came forth.

  Only one white politician made what I still consider the most sincere effort of that time. And if he hadn’t been alone so much of the time, his name might be even better known outside the South.

  William B. Hartsfield was an Atlanta lawyer who entered local politics during the late 1930s. He brought with him an unusual campaign style and a very astute sense of the direction in which the South was then headed. Before Hartsfield ran for mayor, Negroes had been ignored by the candidates in Atlanta’s municipal elections. Because of the white primary system, which barred us from participating in state and city politics, the only real contact Negroes had with elected officials or candidates for public office came through the occasional and informal meetings held between white and black leaders. The role of the Negro in these talks was strictly advisory. We depended on the goodwill of whites because no actual power was then in our hands, unless you consider the power to disrupt through demonstrations.

  When Hartsfield made his bid for mayor in 1946, he had a reputation that brought him scorn from whites and some admiration from blacks. He campaigned in the Negro community. He addressed black men and women as Mr., Miss, or Mrs., in defiance of an old southern custom that called for whites to speak to Negroes the way they spoke to children. Hartsfield was even photographed shaking hands with Negroes. That was unheard of in those days. But unlike most other white Atlantans, Hartsfield was paying attention to the tide of history. He knew that the days of the white primary were numbered. And in a city with the large Negro population that Atlanta had, a politician’s appeal would soon have to be directed to all people in the city, regardless of skin color.

  Except for Hartsfield, few whites seemed fully aware of what was ahead in Atlanta’s political future. But in 1946, they all found out. During that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Primus King v. The State of Georgia, that the white primary was unconstitutional in depriving citizens of the right to vote on the basis of race. King, no relation to me, was a preacher from the town of Columbus, Georgia. He had worked with lawyers from the NAACP for several years as the case dragged through the lower courts. But he refused to give up, even in the face of threats to his life and actual attacks made upon him by whites.

  Primus King’s victory changed the South for every person living here, black or white. The immediate effect of the Supreme Court’s decision was a doubling of the number of Negroes registered to vote in Atlanta, from 3,000 to nearly 6,800. The Atlanta Urban League conducted a registration drive under the direction of Grace Hamilton and Robert Thompson. By 1947, their efforts would place the names of 21,000 Negro voters on the rolls in Atlanta. Change now seemed to be in the very air we breathed. A new day had dawned. Bloc voting by Negroes would now have an effect on every politician, every campaign, and every political issue put before an enlarged constituency in Atlanta. Hartsfield had anticipated this, and he benefited handsomely. As mayor of the city, he would eventually hold office longer than anyone else in Atlanta’s history.

  The recurring dispute was over tactics: Should we try for negotiated settlements as opposed to divisive applications of political pressure? The difficulty that Negroes disposed to quiet counsel always ran into was that whites were often elusive and vague; they seemed to develop a lack of concentration almost as frequent as the common cold. To negotiate with whites meant coming to know that comment—I don’t understand what you want—which was as regular as hello. When it came to understanding what we wanted, whites in the church, in government, industry, in every walk of life, really, claimed ignorance more than any other defense. Negroes demanded to be treated like human beings, not pieces of property, and whites just stared, as if to say, How can you ask us to do this? Why change things, when we’ve been so happy with the way they’ve gone?

  Very few whites in the South ever asked themselves to account for what it cost to maintain their privileges. If any of them questioned what they had taken from others, or how much pain this taking caused, they kept peace with this awareness and never came forward to bear witness to their experience.

  We pushed, but very gently by any modern standard, most of us accepting the premise that half a loaf was better than none, so long as the division was just temporary. What we were calling progress others saw as the end of a glorious way of life. We did not always take issue with that view so much as we tried to have whites—especially those who now had to campa
ign in districts with an increasingly large bloc of Negro voting precincts—urge the changes among their white constituents. After the League carefully checked a candidate’s position on items of interest to Negro Atlantans, we would decide whether to endorse him. If we did, the endorsement would appear in Scott’s newspaper, the Daily World, for as many voters as possible to see. But the major work of black leaders came in keeping the word alive, especially from our various pulpits and other forums, that voting was powerful as an agent of change. Registration drives never let up. Folks got bored, but the activity still went on throughout Negro Atlanta.

  After the end of the Second World War, northern dollars began to be waved toward a developing South. In conversations with members of the League, Hartsfield often spoke of Atlanta as the nation’s true city of the future. He walked a delicate line, though, hoping that in the long run everybody would benefit if he could keep encouraging the establishment of business ties with other parts of the country—especially the industrial North—while keeping a lid on some smoldering racial questions.

  And while the effort on Hartsfield’s part was never to be entirely successful while he was in office, very little progress in the city would have been made without him. The atmosphere he was instrumental in maintaining can be translated into statistical references that now seem antique. But the figures were anything but that when, in the year 1947, there were 24,000 registered black voters in Fulton County, Georgia, and 21,000 of them lived in Atlanta. These drives, directed by people like Grace Hamilton and Robert Thompson of the Urban League, didn’t resolve the racial crisis, but laid the groundwork for all the possibilities of later civil-rights activity.