King was “elated” with the decision. It seemed to betoken a speedy end to the hated Jim Crow system in which he had grown up. He pronounced the Brown case “a world-shaking decree,” a “noble and sublime decision” that would help right his troubled land with its own ideals. It seemed an auspicious time to be going home to the South, a time when good things seemed about to happen there.
But then came the southern reaction. Across Dixie, segregationists raged at the “tyrannical” court and branded the day of the Brown decision as “black Monday.” In Mississippi, a former football star named Tut Patterson stormed: “There won’t be any integration in Mississippi. Not now, not 100 years from now, maybe not 6,000 years from now—maybe never.” And he helped form the South’s first White Citizens’ Council to preserve the “Southern way of life.” Meanwhile fiery crosses burned against Texas and Florida skies, and random Klan terrorism broke out against blacks in many parts of Dixie. In Georgia, a gubernatorial candidate stood in ninety-degree heat and expounded his “three school” plan to defeat integration: one for whites, another for colored (“the way they want it”), and a third for those insane enough to want their children in integrated schools. In Montgomery, Alabama, the State Board of Education voted unanimously to continue segregated facilities through the 1954–1955 school year; and the state legislature “nullified” the court decision, vowing to preserve white supremacy come what may.
With the white South mobilizing against school desegregation, King took Coretta down to Montgomery, to show her the church and the parsonage and to tour the Negro section where they would have to live. It was truly another world from Boston. With falling hearts, they saw black people riding in the backs of buses and realized that Coretta would have to sit there, too, if she wanted to shop while he had the car. Coretta, who had wanted badly to remain in the North, tried to be brave. “If this is what you want,” she told King, “I’ll make myself happy in Montgomery.” It was what he wanted. But he had no idea whether they could ever be happy here.
PART TWO
ON THE STAGE OF HISTORY
THE PARSONAGE STOOD ON A SHADED STREET in a Negro district, several blocks southwest of the capitol. It was a white frame house, with seven rooms and a railed-in front porch, and tall oaks hovered about it like sentries. Inside, the pastor’s wife had added personal touches to the furnishings provided by the church: a television set and a baby grand piano resided in the living room, two African “heads” hung on the wall there, and West Indian gourds and art pieces decorated the mantel above the close-in fireplace.
Each morning the young pastor arose at 5:30, made coffee, and went through the painful ordeal of shaving. Because his whiskers were tough and ingrown, he could only remove them with an old-fashioned English straight razor and a special shaving powder that gave off a terrible odor. The face in the mirror had a neat mustache now, small ears, and immaculately clipped hair, and lit up in a boyish grin when he remembered something humorous. Ready for the day, he secluded himself in a book-lined den, with its scholarly disarray, and wrote for three hours on his thesis. At nine he breakfasted with his wife and then drove downtown to Dexter Church. He felt a special fondness for the old red-brick church, with its twin doorway lamps and bell tower. It stood on the corner with an aura of unembellished dignity, unintimidated by the white government buildings that loomed across the street.
Here the young pastor ministered to the brothers and sisters of his congregation, who came to him with all manner of spiritual and secular needs. He served as their character witness, negotiated with whites in their behalf, married and buried them. He cautioned any Negro who harbored violent impulses that the strong man was the man who could stand up without striking anybody. He counseled couples with marital troubles that maybe they could not get along because they didn’t understand one another and were afraid. They must get behind appearances, he said, must “discover the meaning of soul beauty before they can really discover the meaning of love.” For him, divorce was “a court of last resort,” but if it was unavoidable he would do what he could to help both parties adjust to “this unfortunate break in their marriage.” He also did what he could for unwedded young mothers, but “it is always a frustrating experience,” he said of the problem. “I feel so helpless.” When the parents of such a girl came to him, he would explain that “her emotions are fraught with deep hurt, shame and pride. Hurt because the boy does not want to share the same responsibility as she is sharing; shame because she feels that she has done something that society looks down upon.” But he did not encourage a forced marriage, because the baby “would be the victim of a set of parents who did not love each other and would probably be brought up in an atmosphere of strife and tension which would play more havoc on its personality than if it had to face the fact that it had no legal father.” It was best that the baby receive “a double amount of love from its mother and her relatives.” Still, he was never satisfied with such advice, and when the opportunity came he joined a committee of the Planned Parenthood Federation, which disseminated literature on unwanted pregnancies.
At prescribed hours during the week, he closed his office door and devoted himself to his sermon for the next Sunday. On Tuesday he would sketch an outline, on Wednesday do research and decide what illustrations and life situations to use, and on Friday and Saturday write the sermon on lined yellow pages. His breadth of historical references might range from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas to Alfred the Great, Thomas Carlyle, James Russell Lowell, Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, Niebuhr, Freud, and Gandhi. Then on Sunday he would preach without notes for thirty-five to forty minutes, quite as though he were extemporizing, and his congregation would clap and cry in appreciation.
At first his sermons tended to be sober and intellectual, like a classroom lecture. But he came to understand the emotional role of the Negro church, to realize how much black folk needed this precious sanctuary to vent their frustrations and let themselves go. And so he let himself go. The first “Amen!” from his congregation would set him to “whooping” with some old-fashioned fireworks, in which he made his intellectual points with dazzling oratory. For what was good preaching if not “a mixture of emotion and intellect”? As a preacher in his own right, free from entanglements with his father, King learned to appreciate the southern Negro church as never before. Here in their church—the only place that was truly their own—black people could feel free of the white man, free of Jim Crow, free of everything. Here they could be spiritually reborn and emotionally uplifted, exhorting their preacher as he in turn exhorted them, both engaging in a call-and-response dialogue that went back to their African ancestry. And young King, observing this at Dexter, seeing now what he had been blinded to in his youth, became a master at call-and-response exhortation: “And I tell you [tell it, doctor] that any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men [well awright] and is not concerned with the slums that damn them [amen, brother] and the social conditions that cripple them [oh yes] is a dry as dust religion [well]. Religion deals with both heaven and earth [yes], time and eternity [uhhuh], seeking not only to integrate man with God [clapping, clapping], but man with man.”
His congregation adored him. He was “suave, oratorical, and persuasive,” said one member. And he was such a young man to be so smart and confident. “You mean that little boy is my pastor?” said one woman the first time she saw him. “He looks like he ought to be home with his mamma.” In truth, women members tended to mother him. For them, he was an idealized son, so educated, charming, and handsome. “I love Dr. King like my own son,” said one elderly matron. “His own mother couldn’t possibly love him any more than I do.”
His reputation as a preacher spread beyond Montgomery, and invitations to speak fell on his desk from as far away as Pennsylvania. “I understand you are developing into a good preacher in your own right,” a family friend wrote him. “Remain careful of your conduct. Steer away from ‘trashy’ preachers. Be worthy of the best. It may
come to you some day.” The friend teased Daddy King: “They tell me you have a son that can preach rings around you any day you ascend the pulpit. How about that? If it is so, it is a compliment to you.” “Every way I turn people are congratulating me for you,” Daddy wrote King in December. “You see young man you are becoming very popular. As I told you you must be much in prayer. Persons like yourself are the ones the devil turns all of his forces loose to destroy.”
Determined to practice what he preached, King launched an ambitious social-action program at Dexter. Under his supervision, committees formed to tend the sick and needy, help artists with promise, and administer scholarship funds for high-school graduates. At the same time, a social and political action committee held forums on political developments and kept members apprised of NAACP activity in Dixie. Soon Dexter was contributing more to the NAACP than any other Negro church in town.
Within a year, King had earned himself a reputation as a social activist. He was elected to the executive committee of the NAACP’s Montgomery chapter, comprising mostly professional and business people whose incomes were independent of whites and who had little fear of economic reprisals for their “radical” NAACP work. King also belonged to the Alabama Council on Human Relations, the only interracial group in town. But he observed that overall “the vital liaison between Negroes and whites was totally lacking. There was not even a ministerial alliance to bring white and colored clergymen together.”
It was clear why. White people wanted no contact on an equal basis with blacks. In this complacent Deep South city, 90,000 whites and 50,000 Negroes largely went their separate ways, kept apart by a rigid racial caste system that relegated Negroes to the gutters of the social order. A local statute even forbade blacks and whites to play cards, dice, checkers, or dominoes together. Yet the two races entered inexorably into one another’s lives—most black adults, for instance, toiled as maids and menials in white homes, public accommodations, and other businesses. Montgomery whites, of course, told themselves that “our niggers are happy and don’t want integration.” In their barber shops and beauty salons, their clubs and restaurants, white folks damned integration as the work of Communists, called the NAACP “the National Association for the Advancement of the Communist Party,” and denounced the U.S. Supreme Court as a tool of Moscow. They expected “niggers” to know their place and the mass of them to stay away from the polls and out of politics.
To King’s dismay, most local Negroes accepted all this with appalling apathy. The majority of educated blacks seemed complacent and terribly afraid of angering the white man. And domestics and day laborers seemed as passive as stone. Some of them, King understood, feared white retaliation if they stood up to the system. But many others suffered from a “corroding sense of inferiority, which often expressed itself in a lack of self-respect.” As a consequence, many poor Negroes really did think themselves inferior, really did think they belonged in the gutters of Southern life. And then there were the black preachers—historically the natural leaders of the Negro community. There were fifty Negro churches in and around Montgomery, and yet most of their pastors practiced “dry-as-dust religion,” contending that their job was to get people into Heaven, not change things down here.
What a defeatist and distressing attitude this was. Yet the attitudes of the activist leadership troubled King, too. There was, he noted, “an appalling lack of unity among the leaders,” as too many committees worked at cross purposes and without cooperation, which resulted in a “crippling factionalism.” About the only thing the black leadership seemed to agree on was the need to observe Emancipation Day on January 1, when prominent Negroes would talk eloquently about Lincoln and Negro rights—and then do nothing about gaining them. As King surveyed Montgomery’s divided and phlegmatic Negro community, he doubted that meaningful social reform could ever occur in this old Confederate city.
Still, his social activism was not without rewards. He became fast friends with Ralph Abernathy, pastor of the First Baptist Church and an activist preacher, too. Socializing together in their churches and homes, they and their wives talked about building a new Christian order somehow, someday. Now twenty-nine, four years older than King, Abernathy was short and stocky, with “the wily charm of a hand-shaking, Black-belt politician,” as an acquaintance later put it. He was born in black-belt Marengo County, about ninety miles southwest of Montgomery, and was one of twelve children from a sharecropping family with mixed-blood ancestry. Abernathy tickled people with stories about his first “goggle-eyed and breathless” visits to nearby Selma, the biggest town he’d ever seen as a boy. He jocularly called himself “the barefoot boy from Marengo County.”
His father was a proud, perceptive man who realized that a Negro had to own his land before he could be free of whites. Plowing the white man’s field all day, he saved money so that he could buy his own. Once he did, he became one of the leading black citizens of the county: he was a church deacon and the first Negro there to vote and serve on a grand jury. He also built the county’s first Negro school and furnished its firewood himself. He was soon so prosperous that he had black tenants working his own place. But he died when Abernathy was sixteen—a shattering loss from which Abernathy never fully recovered. Behind his witty, unruffled façade, Abernathy was an extremely sensitive man who needed recognition and approval. Yet he never forgot two things his father always told him: that “if I ever saw a fight to get in it” and that “preaching was a job of a man and not a boy.” Unlike King, he had come to the ministry by way of Negro schools in the South—Alabama State in Montgomery and Atlanta University.
To a lot of people, King and Abernathy seemed an odd pair. Largely northern educated and a scion of Atlanta’s black middle class, King was learned, fastidious, and urbane. Abernathy, by contrast, came from a bucolic background and was so slow and earthy that some thought him crude. How could two such dissimilar individuals become friends?
The truth was that they complemented one another, each providing something the other needed. In King’s friendship, Abernathy found an acceptance he yearned for—the acceptance of a brilliant and educated member of the black middle class. In Abernathy, King found a country boy who had risen from an impoverished background and had earned his right to champion Negro improvement. In point of fact, Abernathy personified Negro improvement. And King, who was born into a privileged Negro life, felt something special in the companionship of a man who had worked his way up to King’s position entirely on his own. Even their styles were complementary. “King would strike a deft, graceful jab,” one observer said, “while Abernathy slugged and walloped.”
What was more, the two men shared a keen sense of humor. Friends recalled how they could cut up at the dinner table, swapping jokes until they had each other and everyone else in tears. “I declare,” one woman told them, “you two could be on stage.” King, for his part, was an expert at mimicking other preachers, recounting their follies in one hilarious parody after another. Once, during a birthday party, he and Abernathy took the floor to imitate a swinging gospel show that came over the radio. They dedicated their first number to Miss Coretta King, “a dear sister over there in Montgomery,” and swayed and pranced about arm in arm, slurring their words and singing off-key until they collapsed from laughter.
And so King passed his first year in Montgomery, fraternizing with Abernathy, tending his flock, getting involved in life’s adversities. Over the winter, he completed his thesis—“A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman”—and successfully defended it at Boston University. He received his doctorate at the end of the spring term in 1955. DeWolf pronounced the thesis “quite a searching philosophical and theological study,” a difficult comparison ably done. Later, King preached to an interracial congregation in Boston, with his former teachers from the Boston University School of Theology sitting in the front row of the balcony. “He called them by name, one by one,” a white woman remembered. “He than
ked them individually, told them how much he owed them, how he would never have been where he was without them, how grateful he was for their loving concern.”
King reached another milestone in the spring of 1955: Coretta broke the news that he was going to be a father. There had been some question as to whether they could have children, and King had vowed to adopt if they could not. Now he was beaming. He wanted eight children before they were through, he gushed. “We’ll compromise and have four,” Coretta said.
King hoped the baby would be a boy. If it were, he would christen him Martin Luther King III.
STILL, IT WAS NOT AN AUSPICIOUS TIME. From Virginia to Texas, White Citizens’ Councils were springing up to block school desegregation, and southern state capitals were ringing with cries of interposition and nullification. Faced with stiffening white resistance, the Supreme Court shied away from immediate compliance with the Brown decision and called instead for action “with all deliberate speed.” Like many other Negroes, King was deeply disappointed, for the new court order seemed to invite indefinite postponement. And that was precisely what the white South had in mind. Mustering its own legal forces, white officialdom promised to tie up the Brown decision in “a century of litigation.”
White reaction was voluble and violent for another reason, too. Since World War II, the number of black voters in Dixie had risen dramatically, thanks to NAACP victories in the federal courts that removed one obstacle after another to Negro enfranchisement. With more and more Negroes trying to vote and go to school with whites, southern segregationists caught a glimpse of the apocalypse: if the “nigger-loving” federal courts got their way, “niggers” would soon be taking away white jobs and copulating with white daughters. The white man’s South—the South of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis—would disappear in an orgy of interracial violence and sex in which the “niggers” would come out on top.
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