The church was M. L.’s second home. All his close friends were in his Sunday-school classes. In those classes, unlettered women in bright dresses and high-heeled shoes, smelling of sweet perfume, instructed him in fundamentalist precepts, exhorting him to accept the literalness and infallibility of the Scriptures. After Sunday school came regular worship in the sanctuary, a voltage-charged affair in which the congregation swayed and cried (amen, yes!, that’s right, well?) as Reverend King preached in remarkable oratorical flourishes, his voice ranging from a booming baritone to a near shriek. M. L. looked up to his father with a mixture of awe, respect, intimidation, and embarrassment. He thought Daddy awfully emotional.
After worship came Sunday dinner at church—succulent fried chicken, ham, blackeyed peas, and watermelon—and then more devotionals and religious activities that lasted into the night. The boy was at church all day on Sunday and part of the afternoons and evenings on weekdays. The church defined his little-boy world, gave it order and balance, taught him how to “get along with people.” Here M. L. knew who he was—“Reverend King’s boy,” somebody special.
Home was only three blocks away on Auburn Avenue, in a sedate neighborhood in a middle-class section of black Atlanta. The house was a two-story Victorian dwelling with a banister M. L. and little brother A. D. liked to slide down. One day M. L. was leaning against the banister and suddenly fell over it head first, plunging twenty feet to the floor and bouncing through an open door into the cellar. As though by a miracle, he wasn’t hurt. He seemed to have a propensity for accidents: twice cars knocked him down and once A. D. clubbed him in the head with a baseball bat. Later M. L. decided that he survived such mishaps because God was looking out for him.
Physically, M. L. was small for his age, but healthy all the same. At his birth, he wrote later, the doctor pronounced him “a one hundred percent perfect child from a physical point of view.” True, Mother often said he had given her a difficult time in childbirth. It was on a cold and cloudy Saturday, January 15, 1929, that M. L. entered the world, so quiet that the doctor feared him stillborn and had to spank him several times before he cried. The elder King, of course, wanted his first son named after him. Since he was called Mike (his mother’s name for him), the doctor entered Michael King, Jr., on the baby’s birth certificate. Five years later—the year M. L. joined the church—Daddy officially corrected both their names to Martin Luther King, Sr. and Jr. But Daddy still went by Mike, his son by M. L. In the big house on Auburn Avenue, there was room for only one Mike King.
To his father’s gruff delight, M. L. was an active, athletic child. He played baseball in an open field in back of the King home, flew kites and model airplanes, and pedaled a bicycle about the neighborhood. Neighbors sometimes saw him bouncing a ball off the side of the King home, lost in solitary reverie. As at church, though, the rhythms of home life centered on worship, and days began and ended with family prayer. On Daddy’s orders, M. L., Chris, and little A. D. recited Scripture at evening meals in the dining room, with its fireplace and white lace curtains. After dinner, Grandmother Williams regaled the children with vivid Biblical stories. “She was very dear to each of us,” M. L. wrote later, “but especially to me. I sometimes think that I was her favorite grandchild.” He thought her “a saintly grandmother” and called her “Mama.” Because she was warm and sympathetic and never hurt him, he loved her more than anyone.
Not that he lacked affection for his mother, Alberta. She was a short, subdued woman, quiet and deliberate and slow to anger. The children called her Mother Dear, their father Daddy. Family friends described Alberta as a perfect preacher’s wife, who dressed fashionably, knew everybody at Ebenezer by name, and tried to have a smile for every person she met. M. L. remembered that his parents lived together “very intimately” and seldom argued—“my father happens to be the kind who just won’t argue.” In any case, Mother Dear was content to let her husband have his way and be a placid ally in his decisions and judgments, setting forth her “motherly cares” behind the scenes.
M. L. greatly admired his Daddy, who always provided for the family and who set a “noble” example for the boy. In truth, Reverend King was fiercely protective of his children, determined that they should not suffer as he had. Raised on a sharecropping farm on a central Georgia plantation, he had spent his youth plowing behind a mule. Because he had to curry the animal every morning, he smelled like a mule and school chums teased him so much that he said he got “a mule complex.” “I may smell like a mule,” he cried one day, “but I don’t think like a mule.” Early on, of course, he learned what it was like to be a “nigger” in Dixie. He observed the vast discrepancy between the way white folks and black folks lived. He saw his mama toil as a cleaning “girl” for a white banker’s family in nearby Stockbridge, and he often went with her to their house, where he ran his fingers over soft drapes and luxurious chairs. “Why,” he asked, “do they have things and we don’t?” He saw his papa get cheated at the plantation commissary, saw whites beat black people and even hang one from a tree, and he vowed to hate white people until the day he died. Once a white man struck him for refusing to bring him a pail of water. Enraged, his mama whipped that man herself. But don’t tell your papa, she said, or he’ll “take it up” with the white man and get himself lynched.
Mike’s papa was a troubled fellow, an alcoholic who beat Mike’s mother after Saturday-night binges, taking out his rage on her and on himself. When papa abused her one awful Saturday night, Mike, then fifteen, grabbed his papa and wrestled him furiously around the room, finally pinning him to the floor with an arm locked around his neck. The next day, his father apologized and promised never to hurt mama again. But King had taken enough of rural Georgia life and set off for Atlanta with only a pair of shoes slung over his shoulder. As he passed the white banker’s house, he promised himself, “Some day I’m going to have a brick house as big as that—bigger. Someday I’m even going to be a director of a bank like that man.”
In Atlanta, Mike worked as a mechanic’s helper in a repair shop, then as a railroad fireman—one of the best jobs unskilled blacks could secure at that time. But it was the ministry that appealed most to him: in church, Mike King was captivated by the powerful and emotional preachers he heard. He discerned that they were the natural leaders of the black community, proud men who even commanded the respect of Atlanta whites. Feeling called to the ministry, Mike became pastor of two small churches—he preached in them on alternate Sundays—and attended night classes to earn his high-school diploma. In 1926, he entered Morehouse College, a privately endowed Negro school in Atlanta, to work on a bachelor’s degree in divinity. He drove around town in a Model T Ford, a stubborn, independent man who was quick with figures and alert to business deals.
Meanwhile he’d started courting Alberta Williams, daughter of the pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Reverend Adam Daniel Williams. Born in 1863, the year of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Williams had literally come up from slavery. He had taken over Ebenezer in 1894, in the dawn of the modern Jim Crow era, and with irrepressible zeal had built it into one of black Atlanta’s most prestigious Baptist churches. He served in various offices of the National Baptist Convention, received an honorary doctorate from Morehouse (his alma mater), and inspired his congregation with his “sulfurous evangelism.” Mike King very much admired Dr. Williams, a man’s man who charmed the women in his congregation and stood up resolutely to white people. After the Atlanta race riot of 1906, he became a charter member of a strong local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and served as its president. When an inflammatory white newspaper attacked Atlanta Negroes as “dirty and ignorant,” Dr. Williams helped lead a boycott that eventually closed the paper down. In addition, he was one of the leaders of a Negro citizens group that pressured Atlanta into building Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s only high school for blacks. By the 1920s, Dr. Williams was a visible member of Atlanta’s b
lack elite, an eloquent and elegant man who refused to let segregation cow him.
An affectionate, paternalistic father, Dr. Williams sent his daughter Alberta to the best available schools and tried to protect her from “the worst blights of discrimination.” By the early 1920s, Mike King was calling at the Williams home on Auburn Avenue and taking Alberta for drives in his Model T. There was a mutual attraction between this shy and diffident young woman and her explosive, gesticulating beau, and their courtship led inevitably to marriage. They were wedded on Thanksgiving Day, 1926, and moved into the upstairs of her parents’ house, a twelve-room structure with a garden in a respectable black neighborhood. Not long after, Mike King became assistant pastor at Ebenezer, and he and Alberta began to build a family in the house on Auburn Avenue: first came Willie Christine, then M. L., Jr., and finally Alfred Daniel, or A. D., named partly after Dr. Williams.
In the spring of 1931, Dr. Williams died suddenly of an apoplectic stroke. That fall, Mike King became pastor of Ebenezer, embarked on an ambitious building program that led to a renovated church, and eventually raised membership from six hundred to several thousand, complete with six choirs. Meanwhile, he continued to take courses at Morehouse, earned his degree while the children were growing up, and later won a doctor of divinity degree at Atlanta’s Morris Brown College. Because he had come up the hard way, he loved respectability and was attracted to wealth and power. As he’d vowed, he became a director of a Negro bank and amassed interests in other enterprises, thus earning himself a place in Atlanta’s black middle class.
By the 1930s, his hatred for whites had eased some, and he was one of several Negro spokesmen white city officials called on in times of crisis. Like Dr. Williams, Reverend King was active in the NAACP at a period when white America regarded it as dangerously radical. He served not only on the NAACP’s Executive Board, but also on its Social Action Committee, which ultimately won a legal battle to equalize teachers’ salaries in Atlanta. He went down to City Hall and challenged the tangle of Jim Crow laws and practices that systematically disenfranchised Negroes in Atlanta and everywhere else in Dixie. He put up with insult and evasion, paid his poll tax, passed Georgia’s severe “literacy” test for blacks, and finally secured his right to vote in national elections. In 1936, fed up with political discrimination, he led several hundred Atlanta Negroes on a voting-rights march to City Hall, a spectacle, he said, that “no living soul in that city had ever seen.”
As head of the house, Daddy was a frugal man who never squandered money. His constant prayer was “God, grant that my children will not have to come the way I did.” Thanks to his care and industry, the children never lacked necessities, never knew hunger or squalor or want. Daddy even gave them each a weekly allowance for ice cream and sodas, and he praised them for excelling at tasks he set for them.
In all, Reverend King ruled his home like a fierce Old Testament patriarch, certain that he alone knew what was best for the children and intolerant of dissent or rival viewpoints. In fact, he could be a tyrant, and Alberta and Grandmother Williams never dared dispute him. When the children broke a rule, became sassy or sullen, Daddy took a strap to them. He even made them thrash one another, to demonstrate that chastisement was personal.
Of course, stern discipline for children was nothing unusual in America in the 1930s; parents and principals alike spanked them as a matter of course. Still, M. L. was an extremely sensitive boy, and it hurt him deeply to be whipped by his awesome father; it aroused such guilt in him, such anger. Sometimes his anger found an external target: once when A. D. pestered Christine to tears, M. L. grabbed a telephone and clubbed him on the head, knocking A. D. cold. But most of the time M. L. endured his father’s strap without a word, relying on “stoic impassivity” to control the vortex of feelings it provoked in him. “He was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him,” Daddy remarked. “He’d stand there, and the tears would run down and he’d never cry. His grandmother couldn’t stand to see it.” In fact, she would go off to another room and sob uncontrollably, unable to bear M. L.’s mute suffering. It was no wonder that he loved her so.
One day when the King boys were playing upstairs, A. D. slid down the banister and accidentally knocked Grandmother down. She did not move. M. L. stood there in shock, certain that Mama was dead—that he and A. D. had killed her. M. L. was so distraught that he ran upstairs and hurled himself out a window, falling twelve feet to the ground. He lay there motionless as his relatives screamed his name. When he heard that Mama was all right, though, he got up and walked away as though nothing had happened. But his parents and family friends were incredulous: the boy had apparently tried to kill himself.
THE ADULTS REMARKED about how intelligent he was, how he could see and feel things beyond the understanding of most children, how he could drive you to distraction with all his questions. When his family rode through Atlanta, he observed all the Negroes standing in breadlines and asked his parents about them. It was the middle of the Depression, and 65 percent of Atlanta’s black population was on public relief. M. L. was deeply affected by the sight of those tattered folk, worried lest their children not have enough to eat.
Yes, the adults said, he was a brilliant child, a gifted child, who could talk like he was grown sometimes. My, how that boy loved language. “You just wait and see,” he once told his parents. “When I grow up I’m going to get me some big words.” “Even before he could read,” his Daddy boasted, “he kept books around him, he just liked the idea of having them.” And his memory was phenomenal. By age five, he could recite whole Biblical passages and sing entire hymns from memory. His parents and grandmother all praised him for his precocious ways, making him flush with self-esteem. In fact, he was so bright that his parents slipped him into grade school a year early. Daddy recalled what happened next. “He was always a talkative chap, you know. So he shot his mouth off and told them he was only five while the other children were six, so they booted him right out of that class.”
At six, he began singing hymns at church groups and conventions, accompanied by Mother Dear on the piano. Now he belted out a rollicking gospel song, now groaned through a slow and sobbing hymn. He sang his favorite with “a blues fervor.” It was “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus.” People often wept and “rocked with joy” when he performed for them. But he “didn’t get puffed up,” his Daddy related, and sat down quietly when he was finished. Frankly, all the fuss embarrassed him.
In his preschool years, M. L.’s closest playmate was a white boy whose father owned a store across the street from the King home. In September, 1935, the two chums entered school—separate schools, M. L. noticed. He attended Younge Street Elementary School with Christine, and there was not a single white child there. Then the parents of his friend announced that M. L. could no longer play with their son. But why? he sputtered. “Because we are white and you are colored.”
Later, around the dinner table, he confided in his parents what had happened, and for the first time they told him about “the race problem.” They recounted the history of slavery in America, told how it had ended with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, explained how whites eventually maintained their superiority by segregating Negroes and making them feel like slaves every day of their lives. But his mother counseled him, “You must never feel that you are less than anybody else. You must always feel that you are somebody.” He did feel that he was somebody. Everyone told him how smart and sensitive he was, praised him for his extraordinary ways. Yes, he had an idea he was somebody. Still, this race trouble was disturbing. “As my parents discussed some of the tragedies that had resulted from this problem and some of the insults they themselves had confronted on account of it, I was greatly shocked, and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person.”
So it was that M. L. began his real education in Atlanta, Georgia. Oh, he studied arithmetic, grammar, and history at school, passing easily through the lower grades and transferring in the sixth grade to
David T. Howard Colored Elementary School, where he was deferential to teachers, considerate of his peers, precocious and diligent as always. But as with other Negro children, his true education was to learn in countless painful ways what it meant to be black in white America. He found out that he—a preacher’s boy—could not buy a Coke or a hamburger at the downtown stores. He could not even sit at the lunch counters there. He had to drink from a “colored” water fountain, relieve himself in a rancid “colored” restroom, and ride a rickety “colored” freight elevator. White drugstores and soda fountains, if they served him at all, made him stand at a side window for ice cream, which came to him in a paper cup. White people, of course, got to eat their ice cream out of dishes. If he rode a city bus, he had to sit in the back as though he were contaminated. If he wanted to see a new movie in a downtown theater, he had to enter through a side door and sit in the “colored section” in the back balcony. Of course, he could always go to the decrepit “colored” movie house, with its old films and faded and fluttering screen.
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