Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Changing his name meant a lot of trouble for King. On the legal formalities, he had to deal with Atlanta’s white bureaucracy. Then he had to tell his friends, his church members, and countless people with whom he did business. There are many indications of ambivalence on his part, resistance on the part of those around him, or both. In 1934, he changed his listing in the Atlanta phone book from the previous “King, Michl L., Rev.” to “King, M. L., Rev.” In 1936, he switched back to “King, Michl L., Rev.” Not until 1937 was he listed as “King, Martin L., Rev.” His listing on the bulletin board of Ebenezer, as well as his signature on letters and legal documents, remained the same, “Rev. M. L. King.” To friends, he and his son remained “Big Mike” and “Little Mike,” or “Reverend King” and “Mike,” or later “Daddy King” and “M.L.” The son never would list himself in the phone book by his formal name.

  If Reverend King did intend to make a proud statement with the new name, it is historically fitting that his peers and his son refused to bring it prematurely into common usage. To claim kinship to Martin Luther was characteristically overbearing of the senior King. His son shrank from it, commenting publicly only once, after the Montgomery bus boycott, that “perhaps” he had “earned” his name. Reverend King supplied the wish and the preparation, but it remained for strangers in the world at large to impose Martin Luther King’s new name upon him.

  In Depression Atlanta, roughly two-thirds of all adult Negro males were unemployed, and M.L.’s earliest recorded memories were of the long bread lines that stretched around many a corner in his neighborhood. Less than twenty years later, as a graduate student, he would begin an autobiographical sketch with his impressions of the bread lines, stating that the sight of them contributed to “my present anti-capitalistic feelings.”

  He also remembered his intense desire to imitate his older sister, Christine. In 1934, when a guest minister at Ebenezer made a strong pitch for the salvation of young souls, M.L. watched his sister rise to make the first profession of faith. Impulsively, as he later confessed, “I decided that I would not let her get ahead of me, so I was the next.” He wryly observed that he had no idea what was going on during his subsequent baptism. He knew the feeling of being special, and the intense pressure of churchly expectation, long before he had the slightest grasp of religion. His eagerness to keep up with Christine was so strong that he pestered his way into first grade with her that September, a year ahead of schedule. He remained there until the day he gave the teacher a vivid description of his last birthday party, showing five fingers for the five candles that had been on the cake. Thus undone by his own enthusiasm, he was sent home as too young. The next year he managed to skip a grade to catch up with Christine, but she skipped one too, and young M.L. would chase her all the way through high school.

  Christine, taking after her mother, was a quiet girl who possessed considerable strength of character and mind. A far better student than either of her brothers, she had gifts that greatly enhanced her stature in the eyes of young M.L., who aspired to her learning but would always trip over his bad grammar and spelling. Even as an adult, he would laugh about his jumbled spelling and seek guidance from Christine or a secretary. The youngest child, A.D., shied away from the precocity of his siblings, preferring to distinguish himself by daredevil feats of adventure and rebellion. He was a rock thrower and a bike crasher. M.L. much preferred to play than to fight, but he did once knock his brother cold by hitting him over the head with a telephone after A.D. harassed Christine beyond the point of endurance.

  A.D. once slid down a bannister at high speed into grandmother Williams, knocking her into a heap on the floor. As her relatives raced to her from all points in the house, and were shouting and moaning and wondering how to tell whether she was alive, a far deeper panic seized M.L. He ran upstairs to his room at the back of the house and threw himself out the window. A new round of cries from the children brought horror to the elder Kings, when, just as Mrs. Williams was beginning to revive, they had to run outside to their older son, who did not move until he heard that his grandmother was alive. Only gradually did it sink in that the shock of harm to the grandmother had driven M.L. blindly toward suicide.

  All the grandchildren felt something special for Mrs. Williams. As small children and later as adults, they called their own mother “Mother dear,” which was affectionate but formal and slightly humorous. They reserved the primal “Mama” for grandmother Williams. She and M.L. took this closeness a step further, and she let it be known that he was her favorite grandchild.

  In 1934, the year of M.L.’s baptism and Reverend King’s trip to Europe, the NAACP split asunder in an ugly public controversy that revealed once again the trick mirrors around the issues of race and racial identity, where perspective was so central as to affect vision itself. At the center, as usual, was W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP and editor for twenty-four years of its magazine, The Crisis. The brilliance of his attacks on Booker T. Washington’s policy of racial accommodation and his call for full-scale protest of all injustices against Negroes had positioned him to succeed Washington in national leadership after the latter’s death in 1915. As a scholar and essayist without peer, Du Bois was known for prose that gracefully mixed cold, unsparing analysis with lyrical passages on the noble heritage of the Negro people and the justice of their cause. As a political leader, however, he suffered all the liabilities of an elitist intellectual. Even his supporters described his personality as difficult at best, and his haughtiness was so extreme as to inspire collections of Du Bois stories. Once complimented on the honor of being Harvard’s first Negro Ph.D., Du Bois is said to have icily replied, “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s.”

  A variety of frustrations had swelled within Du Bois during the 1920s, and during the Depression he had come to focus most of his ire upon his nominal boss, Walter White. Since witnessing the 1906 Atlanta race riot as a frightened teenager, White had gone on to become a famous investigative reporter of lynchings—using his light complexion to infiltrate lynching areas in the guise of a white journalist. A gifted publicist and lobbyist who called several Supreme Court Justices and more than a score of U.S. senators by their first names, White was as vain as Du Bois and made no secret of his belief that the grand old man was too eccentric to play a constructive role in the NAACP’s new drive for legislation against lynching and Jim Crow. Du Bois, though ever more dependent upon White and the NAACP as the circulation of The Crisis fell steadily, refused to promote the NAACP’s programs in the magazine. He considered the programs mundane, and he made matters worse by commenting that White had no brains. In 1932, White brought the showdown nearer by hiring a young man named Roy Wilkins to control Du Bois within the New York NAACP office.

  The grandson of Mississippi slaves, Wilkins had been abandoned by his father as a small boy, shortly after his mother died. Taken in by a Minnesota uncle who had achieved solid status in the turn-of-the-century Negro upper class as the butler to the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, Wilkins grew up happily in Duluth until his vagabond father turned up a number of years later to claim him, obliging his aunt and uncle to defeat the father in a custody battle. Thereafter, at the University of Minnesota and as a successful editor at the Kansas City Call, Wilkins applied himself diligently to the task of becoming a self-made aristocrat. At the newspaper office during the day, he was a supreme practical realist who was not above crime stories or the corny headlines of the circulation drive, but at night he put on his tuxedo and broke into the tiny glittering world of Kansas City’s Negro upper class. He met his future wife at a fashion show sponsored by one of the exclusive women’s clubs, and “married up” splendidly after overcoming the strenuous objections of her parents, who, as light-skinned Catholics who counted both Booker T. Washington and Du Bois among their houseguests (at separate times), wanted little to do with an ink-stained lowbrow like Wilkins. But he succeeded then and later on the strength of his savvy versatility, always plainspoken an
d laconic in the style of actor Jimmy Stewart. He measured political choices by the standards of the common man, conceiving of the NAACP’s goal as the achievement of ordinary fair play between the races. Unflappable, he could speak of “the cards we have to play” in the middle of a riot. He would devote his life to the NAACP, but when the call came from New York he also was powerfully attracted by the idea of getting into an apartment at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, which he knew all the way from Kansas City as “the finest address in Harlem.”

  In New York, Wilkins swiftly recommended a number of changes—all of which were anathema to Du Bois—that he thought would turn The Crisis into a mass magazine capable of supporting itself financially. The first contribution out of Wilkins’ own typewriter was a sports story about Negro track stars, which, Wilkins dryly recalled, the beleaguered Du Bois allowed to run “tucked among the most august literary and sociological thinkers of the race.” After that, Du Bois tried to isolate Wilkins at the magazine, looking upon him with utmost condescension as a newspaperman and obvious bureaucratic ally of Walter White. Wilkins was obliged to create his own role as a publicist. In his first major campaign, after Will Rogers used the word “nigger” four times in his premiere broadcast over the new NBC radio network, Wilkins orchestrated a bombardment of protest telegrams directed at Rogers, NBC, and Gulf Oil, the program’s sponsor. Network officials stated that they were helpless to interfere, citing Rogers’ First Amendment rights, but two weeks later NBC Radio censored all mention of race, segregation, or lynching from a show about the twenty-fifth anniversary of the NAACP. Wilkins cranked up the telegrams again, but NBC found a way out of the crossfire: Will Rogers switched to the more acceptable term “darky,” and shows dealing with the NAACP ceased to be heard on NBC.

  By 1934, Du Bois had come to a rather bitter turn. His fame did not change the fact that he was sixty-six years old, with no savings, and being overtaken by younger, more practical men. In addition to these problems, he faced his own growing pessimism—telling himself that the South was just as segregated, and the North more so, than they had been before he and the NAACP began their labors. Such thoughts boiled up into his shattering editorial for the January 1934 Crisis, in which he turned the entire NAACP philosophy on its head. Negroes should face the fact that they would die segregated, he declared, in spite of all justice and their best efforts. Therefore, to hate segregation was inevitably to hate themselves, and it would be far better to embrace voluntary segregation in schools, colleges, businesses—both for reasons of psychic well-being and to build concentrated strength for later fights.

  This editorial touched off a storm not only within the NAACP but throughout the Negro press. Du Bois received very little support, as even his long-standing admirers believed his comments would bolster the old white racist argument that Negroes fared better under segregation. His bureaucratic enemies within the NAACP denounced him for the heresy of proposing to “embrace Jim Crow.” Roy Wilkins—even forty-five years later, after Du Bois’s reputation was revived by the black power movement—would always attribute the shocking editorial to childish frustration, claiming that Du Bois “picked up a brick and tossed it through the biggest plate-glass window he could see.” A scholar who knew and admired Du Bois would find evidence that his real motive was to say something nice about Negro colleges so that his friend John Hope would be able to hire him back at Atlanta University. (His attacks on Booker T. Washington had rebounded sharply against Du Bois among the white philanthropists who supported Negro education.) Then and later, people found it easier to dismiss Du Bois personally than to dismiss his arguments. Walter White and other NAACP officials knew that they could not denounce all segregated institutions without appearing to criticize the Negro church and the Negro college, and they did not want to support some kinds of segregation while opposing others, for fear of sounding inconsistent. In bringing these contradictions to the surface, Du Bois tied the NAACP in knots. NAACP board chairman Joel Spingarn decreed that the anti-segregation policy ruled out all meetings in Negro churches and schools and all fund-raising events at nonintegrated institutions. This policy would have shut down the organization entirely had it not been quietly reversed.

  Du Bois fought passionately on the pages of The Crisis during the first six months of 1934. Spurning all talk of appearances and strategies, he marshaled the raw prose for which he was famous: “We have got to renounce a program that always involves humiliating self-stultifying scrambling to crawl somewhere where we are not wanted, where we crouch panting like a whipped dog…No, by God, stand erect in a mud-puddle and tell the white world to go to hell, rather than lick boots in a parlor.” From there, he went on to insult his boss in print with the charge that White was really a white man anyway, who fought segregation because he wanted to be with white people. He published personal attacks on other NAACP officials and announced that his campaign sprang from internal politics as well as the merits of segregation. Privately, he demanded that a number of people be fired—Roy Wilkins first, then Walter White. But Du Bois, whose idea of bureaucratic craftiness was to speak to his confederates in French, was no match for his opponents. They counterattacked with stories about Du Bois’s own yearnings to enter the white world, and the affectations he borrowed from it. They tried to embarrass him by quoting his own attacks on Marcus Garvey’s nationalist arguments, and they even spread rumors about his sex life, stressing his preference for very light-skinned women.

  Out of phase with his times, Du Bois wound up the year out of the NAACP and back on the faculty of Atlanta University, where he commenced a long-running battle with Florence Matilda Read, the Spelman president and Atlanta University treasurer installed in 1927 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In New York, Roy Wilkins took over The Crisis and tried to make the best of the Du Bois scandal by publishing an article in which H. L. Mencken complimented Negroes above all other ethnic groups for their willingness to criticize each other in public. The net result on NAACP doctrine was that the organization repledged itself to fight segregation and reburied the fundamental contradictions in the face of white hegemony. At another level, the controversy showed, like others before and after, that racial isolation and racial outreach can each be taken as foolish and cowardly or as wise and brave, depending on historical mood and circumstance. Practically, Du Bois’s outbursts meant that local NAACP groups were freer for a time to choose targets without fear of censure, for no one at the New York office wanted to reopen the poignant debate with which Du Bois had said good-bye to the better part of his career.

  Down in Atlanta, Reverend King ventured into politics on both sides of the Du Bois issue. In 1935, he led several hundred people to the courthouse, where they registered to vote. The success of this traditional NAACP activity was marred, however, by the small numbers and by factionalism among the leadership. Many Negroes said openly that they would not register for fear of economic reprisals. Others opposed the march because it would “make trouble,” and still others because they believed it was part of a deal with white politicians. The march was not repeated. In 1936, King became the spokesman for a group of Negro schoolteachers who wanted to force the city to raise their salaries to the level of teachers in the white schools. This campaign was more in keeping with the thrust of Du Bois’s new challenge, and some people opposed it for that very reason, arguing that improvements in segregated institutions only strengthened segregation. Some of the poorer Negroes in Atlanta objected to the idea of making the relatively privileged schoolteachers a primary concern, when so many people had no work at all, and some of the teachers themselves shied away for fear of their jobs. All this, plus negative actions of various kinds by white liberals and conservatives alike, added up to more conflict than the teachers cared for, and King abandoned the project after a few meetings.

  Although there was no dramatic civic progress in those years, Reverend King was at the forefront of what movements there were, propelled by his continued success at Ebenezer. With great fanfare, the minister capped a fun
d-raising drive with an installation ceremony for a new Wurlitzer organ that featured two manuals and two thousand pipes. It became the pride of Alberta King, the church organist. Remarkably, the expansion at Ebenezer accelerated until the church caught and passed its older and more established rival on Auburn Avenue, Wheat Street Baptist, where the building program for a new church stalled and then collapsed in mid-construction. The renowned Rev. J. Raymond Henderson of Wheat Street finally resigned in despair, leaving his members to quarrel with one another over alleged embezzlement of church funds by insiders.

  Reverend King was master of Auburn Avenue less than six years after taking over a bankrupt Ebenezer, but his preeminence lasted only a matter of months. Wheat Street hired as its new pastor Rev. William Holmes Borders, who was in many respects a twin of Reverend King—a preacher’s son from rural Georgia who had begged President John Hope personally for permission to attend Morehouse, who believed so strongly in money as a measure of church and pastor that he listed the value of church real estate in worship programs. The principal difference between the two ministers was that Borders had obtained seminary and master’s degrees at Northern white colleges. Wheat Street hired him off the Morehouse faculty. His wife taught at Spelman. In degree-conscious Atlanta, the Borders family was several steps ahead of the Kings on the refinement index, and Borders highlighted the distinction by becoming the first Negro minister in Atlanta to have a regular radio program, “Seven Minutes at the Mike.” The show helped spread his reputation for polished sermons filled with commanding language and perfect diction. To the consternation of Reverend King, Borders became one of the preachers young Mike listened to in his eagerness to learn big words.