by Patrick Parr
This early embarrassment led ML to consider career possibilities outside the church, such as law and medicine. But as his mind fluctuated between potential futures, ML and his good friend Larry Williams started paying attention to the newly renovated Wheat Street Baptist Church, a couple blocks away from Ebenezer. For years, Daddy King had no rival when it came to preaching, but when six-foot-tall, muscular Rev. William Holmes Borders arrived on Auburn Avenue to take over Wheat Street, it began a forty-year competition for the hearts and minds of black Atlanta parishioners.
At Ebenezer, you had Daddy King, a preacher who’d come to Atlanta with a sparse educational background. His mother and father could not read or write. He called himself a “backwoods Bible thumper” and scraped his way through Atlanta’s Morehouse College, a highly regarded all-male institution known for forging young black students into “Morehouse men” devoted to living purposeful lives through the ideals of integrity, boldness, and spiritual brotherhood. It was with a sense of pride and accomplishment that Daddy King earned a bachelor’s in theology from Morehouse in 1930 at age thirty-one. If he could do it, anyone could. And so when Daddy King preached, it was as an everyman figure. He was direct, plain, and to the point. Ornaments were for Christmas only.15
Rev. W. H. Borders, on the other hand, believed in empowerment through education. “Being educated,” Borders once wrote, “no white man can take that away from you.” He fired off nimbly articulated sermons filled with illustrative stories. Within a few years of settling in to Wheat Street Baptist, Borders was asked to deliver weekly sermons on the radio, and his smooth yet rumbling voice was soon heard in thousands of homes. ML and Larry Williams took note; they would secretly listen to Borders’s 11:00 PM Sunday radio program, Seven Minutes at the Mike. Williams actually wedged himself into the orbit of Rev. Borders, becoming his assistant. ML’s father took his young parishioner’s move personally. Stay away from Rev. Borders, Daddy King advised his son.
ML didn’t. He resolved to learn as much as he could about this reverend. He soon discovered that Borders, who’d grown up in Macon, Georgia, and was also a Morehouse College alum, had spent considerable time in the North. While attempting to pay off his Morehouse debt, Borders had worked in the summer on a tobacco farm near Hartford, Connecticut, and later he attended Garrett Theological Seminary, a divinity school near Chicago. Daddy King, meanwhile, had made only brief visits to the North, never long enough to be transformed by its culture. ML’s father didn’t need to experience life in the North to know that segregation was an unjust system.
But to fifteen-year-old ML, fresh off his revealing ride from Dublin, such firsthand experience seemed vital. So in June 1944, as he awaited official word on his early admission to Morehouse for the fall, he followed in the footsteps of Rev. Borders and many other Morehouse students and took a train north to Simsbury, Connecticut, northwest of Hartford, to pick shade tobacco for the Cullman Brothers Tobacco Company. It would be his first extended trip away from his family in Atlanta—and an important step on his road toward the ministry and Crozer.
“It was not the Lord but the hot sun of the tobacco fields
[in Simsbury] that ‘called him’ to the ministry.”
—Christine King Farris, ML’s sister
On his way up to the tobacco farm, ML switched trains in Washington, DC. You could also say he switched cultures. He left behind the segregated passenger cars of the South, and as he continued his trip through New York City, he found himself staring out the window in awe: “[New York City] is the largest place I have ever seen,” he wrote to his mother. He saw integrated restaurants, schools, and movie theaters. As they reached Hartford, the “free North” continued to mesmerize. Again, to his mother, ML described his amazement: “I never though[t] that a person of my race could eat [at any location] but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Har[t]ford.”16
In Simsbury, ML attended Sunday services at the all-welcoming First Church of Christ. As the choir director of that church recalled, the Morehouse students came to the church “in an old pickup truck with benches mounted in the truck’s bed.” For ML, worshipping alongside a white congregation was again a surreal experience: “We were the only negroes there. Negroes and whites go to the same church.”17
After the romanticism of the North wore off, ML had work to do, picking the shade tobacco leaves used to make high-quality cigars. Under the shade tents that veiled the fields, the heat was intense, and to keep the sticky nicotine from coating his forearms, ML harvested the leaves in a long-sleeved shirt. His pay was around five to seven dollars a day on average, and he sent money home to cover his upcoming tuition costs; if his acceptance to Morehouse came through as he expected, he’d owe the school around forty-five dollars per semester. Unfortunately, how much he earned depended on the weather and the amount of overtime he put in: “We were paid by the hour,” said a summer coworker of ML’s, William G. Pickens, “and when it rained, we were not paid. . . . We did see our pay as very low [and] we did gripe about the loss of pay during inclement weather.” During a massive August thunderstorm, ML wrote to his mother about “losing plenty of money because of rain.”18
ML didn’t just write his mother that summer. One June 1944 letter to his father has a dutiful tone to it, as if he was writing because his mother told him to. ML made sure to tell his father what he wanted to hear: “I am the religious leader [and] we have a [b]oys choir here and we are going to sing on the air soon.” At the end of the letter, ML assured his father that he wasn’t causing any trouble: “I am not doing anything that I would not [be] doing [in] front of you.”19
It was true that ML sang at integrated churches in Hartford, and he was also selected by his peers (exactly 107 of them, according to ML) to read to them from the Bible each Sunday. ML was able to throw in a few sermons as well, since he’d spent most of his young life listening to preachers such as his father, his father’s friend Sandy Ray, W. H. Borders, and Harry Fosdick (on the radio). Though he didn’t yet have the core passion to preach, he knew how to capture the sound of a powerful sermon. Silas W. Davis, a Simsbury coworker and ML’s future Morehouse intramural basketball coach, recalled that King’s first dips into sermonizing “were always on a serious note. It was always about helping people, always about elevating people.”20 ML’s father would have beamed at the news that his oldest son was practicing the art of preaching on a northern tobacco farm.
ML’s 1944 Simsbury, Connecticut, Work Schedule
Times are estimates
6:00 AM
Get out of bed in a two-floor dormitory/bunkhouse
7:00 AM
Breakfast (sausage and grits)
8:00 AM–12:00 PM
Work under the shade tents picking tobacco leaves
12:00 PM–1:00 PM
Lunch; ladle out milk and other drinks to coworkers and hand out bag lunches (a piece of fruit and a bologna, peanut butter, or cheese sandwich)
1:00 PM–5:00 PM
Back to the fields
5:00 PM–6:00 PM
Dinner, a hot meal from wood-fired stoves
10:00 PM
Bedtime/lights out21
What Daddy King wouldn’t have wanted to hear was how much ML enjoyed living in the integrated North. At lunch, for example, young white women working on farms nearby sometimes sat with the Morehouse group. William Pickens, decades later, remembered how awestruck he and ML were: “It was just an unfamiliar situation, that one could chat with a white person who was a peer. . . . They were workers just like we were, and we could talk to them, briefly, during lunch time, and not get taken to jail for it.”22
During rain days, when there wasn’t much to do except play cards and wait out the storm, ML and other coworkers talked often about the problems back home. Silas Davis remembered the hours of conversation the Morehouse workers would have about changing their social system. ML in particular, Davis recalled, laid out his ambitions as a social reformer. “I think one of the major things that came out
of our bull sessions is that he always wanted to do something different.” To Davis, ML wanted “to contribute to society in ways that no one else had ever done.”23
After three months of manual labor under the tobacco tents, ML returned to Atlanta in mid-September. Christine, his sister, saw that the summer away had transformed his character: “My little brother had become a man.”24 Daddy King also noticed his son’s newfound sense of responsibility, commenting on how he came home “buzzing with stories about the integrated life of the North, and how different for the Negro such an existence was.” Daddy King could tell that his son “had seen . . . a freer society” and would never again be “able to look at segregation . . . without burning with a determination to destroy that system forever. . . . The North wasn’t entirely without racial discord, of course, but there was some relief from the presence of laws intended to turn people into things that were less than human.”25
ML had a more tempered recollection of his return: “It was a bitter feeling going back to segregation. It was hard to understand why I could ride whenever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington, and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta.” In another account, ML expressed his bitterness more fully, remembering how a waiter moved him to a different seat in the rear of the train and jerked down a dividing curtain. “I felt as though that curtain had dropped on my selfhood.”26
ML entered Morehouse in the fall as expected. Still reluctant to commit to a career as a preacher, he spent his first few years fluctuating between majors. At only sixteen, he was far more focused on teenage romantic pursuits. ML and his friends Larry Williams and Walter “Mac” McCall often hung out around the Yates and Milton drugstore on the corner of Auburn Avenue and Butler Street in Atlanta, enjoying the view of female passersby. The three young men spent the summer of 1945 chasing local women, dubbing themselves “the wreckers” for their ability to break a woman’s heart.
But these youthful adventures did not ease the resentment ML felt toward the injustices of Jim Crow, and he started looking more broadly at the society that empowered such a system. “I was at the point where I was deeply interested in political matters and social ills,” ML later said about this time in his life. “I could envision myself playing a part in breaking down the legal barriers to colored people’s rights.”27 After two years at Morehouse, he selected a major in keeping with his expanded perspective: sociology.
ML again stayed in the South for the summer of 1946, working for the Atlanta Railway Express Company. That experience ended in anger, however: after being called a “nigger” by a white foreman, ML quit, his tolerance for racism lower after his experiences in the North. That same summer, ML wrote a scathing letter to the Atlanta Constitution titled “Kick Up Dust.” He did not mention the incident with the foreman, but his anger is obvious. His letter may also have been motivated by a pair of racist crimes: In late July, former Army veteran Maceo Snipes was murdered after being the only African American to vote in his district during a Georgia primary. The next day, two married black couples were killed by a gang of white men on a bridge about sixty miles from ML’s home. The murders of these five individuals made the national news.28
The Atlanta Constitution letter makes it clear that ML, now seventeen years old, was beginning to find his voice. “We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens,” he wrote. He also criticized a “certain class of people” who are in a “hurry to raise a scarecrow of social mingling and intermarriage.” ML wanted to make it clear that black people in general are not “eager to marry white girls, and we would like to have our own girls left alone by both white toughs and white aristocrats.” According to Daddy King, ML’s angry 185-word letter “received widespread and favorable comment.”29
The following summer, ML decided against remaining in the South. He returned to the tobacco farms of Simsbury, a few years wiser and less inclined to be amazed by how much freer the North was. As in 1944, ML participated in the choir and sang at churches around the Hartford area, but in 1947 there was a new sense of restlessness about him. He was entering his final year at Morehouse, and he knew he’d soon have to make the difficult decision about his future.30
His restlessness manifested itself in a number of ways that summer in Simsbury. For one thing, according to his friend Emmett Proctor, he didn’t work as hard. In fact, Proctor and ML were voted the “laziest workers,” and instead of picking tobacco they often put up their nets and allowed the rest of the group to go ahead of them. They even fell asleep in the fields and had to walk home in the dark. ML also pulled a few pranks. Once, when a fellow worker was asleep, ML lit a match and slid it between the student’s toes. As the flame neared the skin, ML waited eagerly for the student to awaken and burst from his bed, stomping his foot.31
During his second Simsbury stint, ML had one of his first brushes with police. Unfortunately, we can never know exactly what occurred, but a few students who were there said it involved quite a bit of “horseplay, rebellion . . . and beer drinking.” Whatever transpired, it led to a confrontation between ML and a police officer, but that was the end of it.32
By the end of that summer, ML had made a decision about his future plans. After returning home, he officially informed his father that he was going to become a preacher. To some around him, it came as a surprise, but to his old friend Larry Williams, who’d stayed up with ML to listen to Rev. W. H. Borders on the radio, it seemed inevitable: “It was already kind of concluded that he was going in [to the ministry]. It was just a question of when.” Still, Williams believed that the incident with the police that summer may have altered the timing of ML’s announcement. By offering news Daddy King wanted to hear, ML would have deflected attention from what had happened and thus avoided punishment.33
Preachers often speak of receiving some sort of “call” to the ministry. Perhaps a powerful emotional moment fills them with conviction, or perhaps they hear God speak to them in a time of uncertainty. ML’s call was not one of these overwhelming moments of catharsis. For most of his young life, he’d chafed against the sense that becoming a minister was an obligation, and recently he’d flirted again with the idea of becoming a lawyer, along with best friend and Morehouse classmate Walter McCall—who would later play a pivotal part in his years at Crozer as well. But both young men finally concluded that the black pulpit, if used correctly, could have a far greater effect on society. In the fall of 1947, ML didn’t so much want to be a preacher because of his deep, abiding faith in God. Instead, he saw the ministry as the best way to combat segregation and inspire change.
And in order to do that, he chose to apply to a seminary in the North. He was following the example of Rev. Borders, who had shown him that there was power in education and value in new experiences and self-improvement. ML wanted to continue to improve himself. “Education,” he wrote in his final year at Morehouse, “must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”34
Mostly likely, ML at least entertained the idea of attending Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, during his earlier Morehouse College days. In fact, the president of Crozer, E. E. Aubrey, had delivered a baccalaureate speech to Morehouse students in 1945, when ML was in his second year. He had also taught ML’s Morehouse mentor—the school’s president, Benjamin Mays—at the University of Chicago. Aubrey promoted Crozer as a racially integrated, liberal seminary that accepted students from as far away as Greece, China, and Japan.35
But a far greater influence on King’s decision came from a family friend with a larger-than-life personality: Rev. J. Pius Barbour. Daddy King and Rev. Barbour likely crossed paths frequently at major Baptist conventions, and ML, who was often dragged along to these events from an early age, would have encountered the gregarious “northern” preacher throughout his childhood. In 1936, Rev. Barbour had become the fir
st black seminarian to graduate from Crozer, and he eventually put down roots nearby, at Calvary Baptist Church in Chester. Rev. Barbour not only knew Crozer’s course catalog, he also knew each of the professors at the school. Barbour was also a “Morehouse man” (class of 1917), and he understood ML’s desire to leave the South to pursue a broader educational perspective.36
In February 1948, the same month he was ordained as a minister at Ebenezer Baptist, ML submitted his application to Crozer. In it, he identified the summer of 1944 as a pivotal moment in his journey toward the ministry:
My call to the ministry was quite different from most explinations [sic] I’ve heard. This dicision [sic] came about in the summer of 1944 when I felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.37
The bus ride in Georgia that spring had ignited a fire within the young man, and those idyllic summer days spent with white and black students in Simsbury, Connecticut, had allowed him to believe in the vision of a more integrated society. And now, as ML would recall years later, he was ready to use the church to create the social change he hungered for: “Not until I entered Crozer Theological Seminary did I begin a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil.”38 That quest brought him out of the South, to a seminary on a hill.
Year I
Genesis
An aerial view of the Crozer Theological Seminary campus circa the 1940s: 1. Old Main, Crozer’s main building, where ML lived in room 52 on the second floor. The central perpendicular section housed the dining hall; the perpendicular section at the bottom was the chapel. 2. Pearl Hall, the campus library built in honor of Margaret Crozer Bucknell, who championed its construction. 3. Arrayed behind Old Main, the three buildings where many of the faculty, staff, and married students lived. 4. Ship Creek Woods, through which ML liked to walk when he had a break from classes in the spring. 5. Commencement Hall, most notable for being the site of Crozer graduation ceremonies. Courtesy of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, NY