Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  What became a forty-year rivalry between Borders and King started briskly, as Borders promptly borrowed money to tear down the old scaffolding at Wheat Street and renew construction. Breathless newspaper stories followed progress on the building, until, only nineteen months later, huge crowds jammed Auburn Avenue trying to gain entry to the dedication service at the newly completed church. (King would not finish rebuilding Ebenezer for another two years.) Borders did not hesitate to compare himself favorably to his fellow pastor up the street. Nor did he shrink from public criticisms of King’s politics and morals, as evidenced later that year in a clash over Gone With the Wind.

  In 1939 Hollywood marked the attainment of full maturity the same way it had marked its birth a quarter-century earlier—with a milestone film touching the subject of race and the Civil War. Like The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind contributed heavily to a national consensus that for sixty years had been building on a foundation of nationalism, Social Darwinism, and psychological avoidance. The result was that no remotely accurate history of post-Reconstruction race relations survived in the majority culture, even in advanced scholarship. Gone were the odysseys of Spelman and dozens of schools like it, along with the stories of hundreds of lesser schools, thousands of missionary educators, and scores of Negro statesmen whose forbearance was recorded in unknown speeches of florid Victorian eloquence. Gone also was unbecoming realism about the reestablishment of legal white supremacy. The national consensus became so strong that the very subject of race was reduced to distorted subliminal images—as captured in the two films—and sophisticated white Americans took it for granted that the Civil War sprang from causes that had little if anything to do with race. After uncomfortable reality was bleached from recognized history, what remained, ironically, was the very thing the new film claimed was gone with the wind—the romance.

  The opening of Gone With the Wind swept aside ordinary life. Even the theater critic of the Daily Worker wanted so badly to praise the film that the U.S. Communist Party had to fire him for capitalist heresy, as The New York Times rather gleefully reported. In Atlanta, Clark Gable led the grand parade up Peachtree Street as Army technicians installed the antiaircraft spotlights that would bathe the arriving stars at the next evening’s premiere. The parade made its way to the City Auditorium, where the Junior League was holding a Gone With the Wind Ball for the film stars, gathered celebrities, and selected Atlantans. The City Auditorium was the center of the universe that evening, and Reverend King found a way to be part of it as the only Negro preacher there. The Ebenezer choir, under the direction of Mrs. King, performed four stirring spirituals for the guests.

  The following Tuesday, at the regular meeting of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers’ Union, Borders and several other ministers launched a ferocious attack on King for allowing his choir to appear at a function that was not only segregated but also plainly sinful, inasmuch as its advertised purpose was to dance and drink whiskey in violation of Baptist doctrine. The more militant ministers decried the indignity of Negro choir members dressed in aprons and Aunt Jemima bandanas to serenade an all-white audience that not even Hattie McDaniel, who played “Mammy” in the film, was allowed to join. More conservative ones stressed the evils of dancing. Hemmed in on left and right, King argued that the extraordinary circumstances justified this one association with sin, but he could not stave off a resolution of censure.

  This embarrassment, though it did nothing to improve relations between King and Borders, had little impact outside the argumentative world of preachers. King’s string of tangible successes grew longer. His community service and economic influence were such that Morehouse College elected him to its board of trustees, as did the Citizens Trust Bank. More important, the year of Gone With the Wind was also the year that the Baptist World Alliance brought its worldwide convention to Atlanta. This was the same event King had attended five years earlier in Germany. As one of relatively few Atlanta ministers of either race with experience in the World Council, King served prominently as an organizer. For race relations, the week’s crowning achievement occurred when a Negro preacher, Rev. J. H. Jackson, addressed a crowd of some 35,000 cheering Baptists jammed into previously segregated Ponce de Leon Park. Jackson was pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, which had succeeded Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist in Montgomery as the largest Negro Baptist church in the United States. Jackson also was considered a prince of the national Negro church. During the convention, he lived with the King family on Auburn Avenue, and would return there frequently as a houseguest in later years, when he reigned at the National Baptist Convention and King served as one of his lieutenants. Young M.L. knew and revered Jackson from the time he was ten years old, unaware that the famous orator was destined to crush him within the church as a blood enemy.

  As a Morehouse trustee, Reverend King knew Dr. Benjamin Mays, a former Morehouse teacher who had earned such a reputation as a theologian that Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich included him in the private brain trust they had created to address the great issues of God and mankind. Mays, who had distinguished himself during the 1930s as head of the School of Religion at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was the leading candidate to become president of Morehouse when a vacancy occurred in 1940. A conspiracy intervened briefly when a Rockefeller associate, who was a vice president of the University of Chicago and board chairman of Spelman College, offered Mays instead a chance to become the first Negro president of Spelman. The Rockefeller associate wanted to oust the dictatorial Florence Read, saying that she was anything but a professional educator and had been only a Rockefeller secretary. He appealed to Mays to take Spelman, which was a much bigger job than Morehouse. This introduction to the intrigue within the Rockefeller camp caused Mays to stall for time. In the end, he declined the Spelman offer, not wishing to stake his whole career on winning what was certain to be a bitter battle on ground that was unfamiliar to him, and chose Morehouse.

  Young M. L. King and Benjamin Mays arrived at the campus together—King as a seventh-grader at the Atlanta University Laboratory School, Mays as president of Morehouse. M.L. saw President Mays fairly often that year, as it was his father’s custom to attend concerts and lectures at Morehouse or Spelman with all three children in tow. After the events, Reverend King always made his way to the stage or dressing room to congratulate the performers, adults and students alike, never failing to introduce himself and each of his children. The tenor soloist of the Morehouse Quartet was struck by the directness and energy of this powerful preacher who made pointed comments of encouragement to everyone, and who took such obvious pride in his children.

  To reach the Lab School each morning, young King rode a segregated city bus from Auburn Avenue through downtown Atlanta to the sprawling campus that Rockefeller and the Northern Baptists had bought in the previous century. Some mornings he took his violin to school for lessons, and the violin case, together with his proper dress, must have made him a prim sight for the passengers. The violin was his mother’s idea, to which M.L. responded with a sullen obedience that never advanced his violin music much beyond a scratchy whine. A.D. did better, according to family legend. M.L. showed relatively more promise on the piano, but his impatience with fundamentals and his desire to make impressive sounds quickly pushed him out of step with his lessons. As an adult, he would occasionally sit down among trusted friends and play snatches of the “Moonlight Sonata” and nothing more, professing it to be the only piece he knew.

  One Sunday afternoon in May, at the end of M.L.’s first year at the Lab School, grandmother Williams served as the Women’s Day speaker at Mount Olive Baptist. Back home, her grandchildren went upstairs to study, but sometime later M.L. slipped off to walk down Auburn Avenue for a downtown parade. This was a time of Lend-Lease and war news from Europe, and children could sense the rising excitement—the many military uniforms, the martial music, the parades. M.L. was watching the marchers when a young friend tapped him on the shoulder with the ne
ws that he’d better get home fast: his grandmother was dead.

  A heart attack had struck the family matriarch as she sat on the platform at Mount Olive. In the blur of tears and helpless grief that he found at home, young King discovered unforgettable feelings of anguish that went to the very bottom of him. His first blind reaction was to blame himself: if he had not sneaked off without permission to indulge his curiosity at the parade, Mama would still be alive. His special feelings for her collided with the first cold rush of human finality, so overwhelming him that once again he threw himself out the upstairs window. The family gathered him up again, but this time there was no good news to relieve him. For days he fell into long crying spells, and he could not sleep. His grief had been so pronounced that neighbors and relatives were surprised to witness his dignified composure at the funeral. People said he became a young man overnight.

  In his autobiographical sketch of a decade later, King identified the death of his grandmother as a childhood event having “tremendous effect on my religious development.” He recalled the personal impact at great length, with unreserved emotion that swept over gaping contradictions. In one passage, he wrote that his grandmother’s death provoked his first serious discussions “on the doctrine of immortality,” during which his parents assured him that “somehow my grandmother still lived.” “I guess this is why today I am such a strong believer in personal immortality,” he concluded. In the same sketch, however, he described a prolonged slide into religious skepticism that began about the time his grandmother died and reached the point of extreme public heresy at Ebenezer the next year, when at the age of thirteen, “I shocked my Sunday School class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus.” Such a statement from the preacher’s favored son in a fundamentalist church doubtless created a stir. King recorded nothing further of what he had said out loud, but he wrote that from then on, “doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly,” until, by his second year of college, he “regretted going to church.” The stress of his grandmother’s death, combined with his own questioning nature, put too much pressure on the fundamentalist edifice, which collapsed under him. His grandmother’s death brought young King for the first time to both belief and unbelief, and therefore to the sharp edge of religious inquiry. Her death also deprived him of the one person in the household who seemed to combine pure love with natural, unforced authority.

  For Daddy King, the loss of his mother-in-law was partially offset by the freedom it gave him to realize his lifelong goal of owning his own home. Shortly after the funeral, he bought a yellow brick house, “the kind I had been dreaming about,” only a few blocks away from the Williams home on Auburn Avenue, where his wife had spent nearly all her life and where their children had been born. Mrs. King, displaying some of her late mother’s independence, declined to sell or mortgage the house and apply the proceeds toward the purchase of the new home on Boulevard. As executor and sole heir to her mother’s estate, she took possession of the house in her own name and rented it out for the income. The family lived in the new King house, but she kept the old house in the Williams family.

  The new brick house was located on “Bishops’ Row,” where the Negro bishops had lived before the Methodist college moved across town to the Atlanta University campus in a further consolidation of that educational complex. It was no longer fashionable to live downtown near the Auburn Avenue business district, as moneyed pioneers were building modern houses on large wooded lots out beyond the combined Negro college campus, in an area known as Hunter Hills. Later it would be called simply the West Side. At the Lab School, M.L. came to know many of the sons and daughters of the Negroes living there, and the experience helped further sensitize him to social conditions. The prevailing rule was that the West Side was better than the East Side, with jokes running about how special an East Side boy had to be to get a date with a West Side girl. There were cross-cutting strata of income, family history, skin color, and religious denomination—running from the ultra-elite First Congregational Church, where extremely light-skinned Negroes sometimes held services with neither music nor preaching but only their own thoughts, which were assumed to be profound, down to the primitive Baptists and other churches for the illiterate. Negro society of that era was preoccupied with numerous gradations among the minority of the race that was healthy, working, and otherwise able to address such matters. Young King wrote defensively of his neighborhood as “a wholesome community, notwithstanding the fact that none of us were ever considered member[s] of the ‘upper upper class.’” A Negro writer characterized the area as “mostly lower middle class, and upper lower class.” One of King’s best friends in high school broke it down even further as “upper lower class and lower middle and middle middle class.”

  That same friend concocted the first nickname that stuck to M.L., “Tweedie,” in tribute to his penchant for tweed suits. Young King was something of a dandy—meticulously groomed and fastidious about his clothing. From grade school on, he had a reputation for elaborate, Victorian-style courtship—full of letters, gentlemanly maneuvers, and shameless panegyrics of love poetry. He pursued his finery and big words with such natural panache that he brought no scorn upon himself. Always unassuming, he slipped easily from tweeds to dungarees. His enormous social range meant that “Tweedie” was simply incorporated into the nickname pool of his neighborhood clique, along with “Shag,” “Rooster,” “Sack,” and “Mole.”

  World War II quickened the pace of his education. The Atlanta University Laboratory School, which had been created as an experiment to prove that high-quality teachers could turn out Negro graduates every bit as skilled as white ones, folded when the war drained off much of the student body at Atlanta University. As a result, young King had to attend the city’s only public high school for Negroes, which was also located on the West Side. His bus rides continued. After tests showed that the Lab School had pushed him ahead of his class at the public school, he entered Booker T. Washington High School in the fall of 1942 as a thirteen-year-old tenth-grader. He was there when the Allies landed in North Africa. By the following spring, Reverend King and his fellow Morehouse trustees faced something much worse than the usual financial crisis. The war was taking a high percentage of the students who might have gone to Morehouse, and not even the superhuman fund-raising efforts of President Mays—already known as “Buck Benny” for his practice of mercilessly hounding Morehouse men for fees and donations—could halt the losses that were pushing the college near bankruptcy. The board chairman suggested that Morehouse close for the duration of the war, but Mays devised an alternative that might allow it to scrape by: the college lowered its standards and its entrance age in order to admit younger freshmen. Later, King stated forthrightly that he was reading on no better than an eighth-grade level when he enrolled that fall, at the age of fifteen.

  At about this time, Spelman’s President Read finally triumphed in her ten-year guerrilla war against the chairman of the Atlanta University sociology department, Dr. Du Bois. Although she was neither a scholar nor an educator, her informal position as the Rockefeller representative gave her an overriding strength at all the schools, since she was also a Morehouse board member and the treasurer of Atlanta University, signing all its checks. Grumbling Negro faculty members nicknamed her Rockefeller’s white “overseer.” Her coup de grâce on Du Bois was simple and quiet: his name failed to appear on the faculty payroll list for the fall of 1944. The seventy-six-year-old Du Bois, who had written three books and dozens of scholarly articles since his noisy departure from the NAACP in 1934, came rudely to the end of yet another career. Nearly twenty years of writing and political turmoil still lay ahead of him when Atlanta University set him adrift without notice or ceremony.

  Earthshaking events—as spectacular as Hiroshima and as subtle as the early research on the birth control pill—generally failed to disturb the self-absorption of King and his peers at Morehouse, where it had become traditional to say that there were only two kinds of students
: those at Morehouse and those who wished they were. President Mays, in his weekly address to the student body, harnessed all his authority and eloquence to the task of arousing student interest in the issues of the outside world. By his own admission, he failed. Using one of many sayings that became part of his legend, Mays chided the students regularly for not getting excited about “anything larger than a hamburger.”

  Most of the close friends King made at Morehouse were in private rebellion against the ministry. Bob Williams, the tenor soloist who had met King years earlier and was now back at Morehouse after a stint in the Army, came from a family of preachers but was intent on becoming an opera star like his idol, Roland Hayes. Young Samuel Cook—only fifteen, like King—had determined not to follow his father in the pulpit, and Walter McCall was an Army veteran who had preached for money and decided that he hated it. McCall’s career plan was to support himself as a part-time minister but channel his considerable idealism toward his goal of becoming a lawyer like Thurgood Marshall, who could help his people. He considered it far easier to make ends meet as a preacher than as a lawyer, and easier to serve humanity as a lawyer than as a preacher. McCall’s perception—that idealists must look to the law, breadwinners to the church—would have baffled white students. This stark cultural reversal was part of the natural landscape for Negroes. So was the fact that some two-thirds of Negro college students always had been female, which meant that every male college graduate could expect at least two marriageable women among his peers.*