Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Nesbitt’s offer put King in a strong position to bargain for anything except delay. On April 14, 1954, he wrote a letter to Nesbitt accepting the call. “However,” he added, “I find it necessary to predicate my acceptance upon the following considerations.” He asked that the parsonage be put into good living order, that the church pay for his commutation between Boston and Montgomery until he completed research for his Ph.D. dissertation at the end of that summer, and that the church understand his expectation of salary increases “as the Church progresses.” King’s approach was businesslike, but he probably did not drive as hard a bargain as Dexter would have allowed. After a quick meeting with the selection committee on April 18, Nesbitt accepted his terms in full. The church had ended one of the longest pulpit vacancies in its history.

  King underwent a complete physical examination at Boston’s Lahey Clinic. Dr. Rosemary Murphy measured him at 5’6 1/2”, 166 1/2 pounds, pulse 70, normal and strong in all respects. He was fit and confident, which was fortunate because he needed all his strength to overcome objections to Dexter on the part of his wife and father. Segregated, backward Alabama was among the last places Coretta wanted to live, as she had spent her entire life struggling to get away. In Boston, while King negotiated with Nesbitt, the New England Conservatory presented her as one of the soloists in the premiere of Cuban composer Amadeo Roldan’s “Motivos de Son,” with orchestra. She sang regularly in the choir of a white Presbyterian church. In Montgomery, she knew, both these distinctions lay beyond the realm of dreams, and therefore she lobbied strenuously to get her husband to choose a position in the North more in keeping with their attainments. Although King tried to reassure her that the Dexter position would be temporary, she forced him to invoke what he called his authority as head of the household. King’s idea of the wife’s role in a marriage was traditional, much like his father’s, and he reminded his wife that he had made this clear before she accepted his marriage proposal. Even so, Coretta did not resign herself to Montgomery for months after she was physically there.

  Reverend King, still wounded because his son was rejecting his natural succession at Ebenezer, tried to strike fear in him. The notorious barons of Dexter would trample him, he warned; nothing but danger, humiliation, and career disaster lay ahead in Montgomery. To this, King responded with more than his usual mixture of filibuster, charm, and stubbornness. Dexter was his first test, and he would master that church the way Reverend King had mastered Ebenezer. “I’m going to be pastor,” he told his wife and his father, “and I’m going to run that church.”

  King began his career at the age of twenty-five, in the year that witnessed the invention of the TV dinner and the microchip, the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, and the closing of the immigration center on New York’s Ellis Island. The first news films of a hydrogen bomb test showed shirtless American engineers smoking pipes and wearing pith helmets as they adjusted the rigging for a blast far out in the Pacific Ocean. At a ceremony for the official insertion of the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, President Eisenhower commented that the American form of government makes no sense without a “deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” This statement annoyed liberal and conservative intellectuals alike, but the general public seemed to approve. A Gallup poll showed that 94 percent of Americans believed in God, 68 percent in an afterlife.

  On May 17-two weeks after King’s first sermon as pastor-designate of Dexter—Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down the Court’s decision in the Brown case, without advance notice. News hunger on the matter was so intense that the Associated Press issued a flash bulletin at 12:52 P.M. noting simply that Warren was issuing the opinion, another at 1:12 P.M. saying that he “had not read far enough into the court’s opinion” for reporters to discern its conclusion, and a final bulletin at 1:20 declaring that the Court had struck down school segregation as unconstitutional by a vote of 8—0.

  The earth shook, and then again it did not. There were no street celebrations in Negro communities. At Spelman College in Atlanta, sophomore Barbara Johns continued her longstanding silence about her role in the case, sensing muted apprehension among her fellow students. They seemed to worry that the great vindication might mean the extinction of schools like Spelman. The day after Warren’s announcement, President Eisenhower informed the District of Columbia that he wanted the nation’s capital to set an example of compliance with the law by desegregating in advance of specific court orders. James Reston of The New York Times attacked the Brown decision as a venture into sociology, saying that “the Court insisted on equality of the mind and heart rather than on equal school facilities.” Southern politicians first announced that they would obey the Court and then changed their minds.

  Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, was preoccupied with political images, wanting to make sure that the Democrats could not blame Republicans for the decision by pointing to Ike’s appointment of Warren. Experts in various fields were unsure of themselves, largely because the gap between the two races was so wide as to preclude vision, or even imagination, across it. Ironically, Americans seemed surer of what they wanted foreigners to think of the Brown decision than of what they thought themselves. The Voice of America immediately translated Warren’s opinion into thirty-four languages to broadcast the good news overseas, but some domestic media outlets fell silent. Universal Newsreels never mentioned the most important Supreme Court decision of the century. It was too controversial.

  Ten days before the Brown decision, the French command at Dien Bien Phu had surrendered, causing an extraordinary wave of emotion across the United States. Its focus was a young French nurse who had been stranded amid the battle as the lone woman within the doomed garrison. After the victorious Vietnamese rebels—still commonly called “natives” or “Reds” in news dispatches—released her to French-held Hanoi, no one was more surprised than Geneviève, daughter of the Viscountess Oger de Galard Terraube, to discover that she had become a rallying symbol in the West. The story of the fresh-faced French nurse had everything—heroics, war, sex, purity, noble birth, political and ethnic symbolism. When she arrived in New York two months later, The New York Times hailed her on page one as the “Angel of Dienbienphu,” and a quarter-million New Yorkers turned out for a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. Still somewhat dumbfounded by it all, the reluctant heroine proceeded to Washington, where she received the Medal of Freedom from President Eisenhower. She became the first foreign citizen invited to address a joint session of Congress since General Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution.

  King was preparing to move to Montgomery. From Fort Valley State, a small Negro college in Georgia, Walter McCall wrote to complain of a record-breaking heat wave that was drying up lakes and rivers all across the South. The drought seemed to compound a touch of self-pity in McCall, who told King that “all things seem to be going your way.” “I thought that you had forgotten the Ole Boy,” he added, before turning to the main subject on his mind, which was “the lady angle.” McCall announced that he intended to marry a young woman from South Carolina, and asked King to serve as his best man. But McCall was a restless man, as King and his friends well knew, and two sentences later he was describing for King his “other chick” from North Carolina. “She works in N.C. and holds residence in Albany, Ga.,” he wrote. “Doc., really she is beautiful, but she does not have what this girl has. I hate to break off from her, but I am ready to be married, so I am not willing to continue playing the field.”

  McCall turned to the painful matter of the woman he had refused to marry and the child he refused to support. He had sent the woman fifty dollars to help with the child, which turned out to be a mistake because it gave her “a ray of hope” for marriage. “She has already worried the very daylight out of me by long distance phone calls and a host of letters,” McCall fretted. “So, instead of continuing that support, I have cut it off already. Never do I expect to help in any fashion. Man, [she] will haras
s me to death if I give her the least o’ consideration. Hate to take that attitude, but I think I am wise in so doing.” He closed with a bare “hello to Coretta,” who was too formal for his taste.

  The letter itself was pure McCall—exposed, hot and cold, sentimental and also hard as porcelain, vexed by the nature of women. King knew well that the wedding announcement was far from definitive. In a letter to McCall ten weeks later, he would inquire discreetly about “the marriage situation.” By then he was living in Montgomery and preaching at Dexter. His chief purpose in writing McCall—as in writing almost everyone else he knew—was to seek help in the campaign to take his new church by storm.

  On September 5, 1954, when King rose to the Dexter pulpit for the first time as resident pastor, he held in his hand a surprise document: “Recommendations to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the Fiscal Year 1954-1955.” He announced to the congregation that he was going to distribute copies of his recommendations for their prayerful consideration, to be acted upon at a subsequent business meeting. After the worship service, members took their copies and saw from the very first sentence that the boyish-looking young man in the pulpit did not intend to become another victim of the church fathers. “When a minister is called to the pastorate of a church,” King declared, “the main presupposition is that he is vested with a degree of authority.” From there, he proclaimed himself on the single theme of authority in a ringing preface worthy of Moses, Augustine, or Luther.

  The source of this authority is twofold. First of all, his authority originates with God. Inherent in the call itself is the presupposition that God directed that such a call be made. This fact makes it crystal clear that the pastor’s authority is not merely humanly conferred, but divinely sanctioned.

  Secondly, the pastor’s authority stems from the people themselves. Implied in the call is the unconditional willingness of the people to accept the pastor’s leadership. This means that the leadership never ascends from the pew to the pulpit, but it invariably descends from the pulpit to the pew. This does not mean that the pastor is one before whom we must blindly and ignorantly genuflect, as if he were possessed of some infallible or superhuman attributes. Nor does it mean that the pastor should needlessly interfere with the deacons, trustees or workers of the various auxiliaries, assuming unnecessary dictatorial authority. But it does mean that the pastor is to be respected and accepted as the central figure around which the policies and programs of the church revolve. He must never be considered a mere puppet for the whimsical and capricious mistreatment of those who wish to show their independence, and “use their liberty as a cloak for maliciousness.” It is therefore indispensable to the progress of the church that the official board and membership cooperate fully with the leadership of the pastor.

  Had it stood alone, King’s preface would have sounded defensively audacious. Most probably, he could have gotten the congregation to adopt it as a resolution, but the church powers on whom he served notice would have bided their time and in the long run the resolution would have had little effect. King did not take that chance. He followed his preface with thirty-four specific recommendations toward a complete financial and organizational mobilization of the church. The first one he borrowed directly from Reverend King’s invigoration of Ebenezer in 1932: all church members shall belong to one of twelve clubs, according to the month of their birth. “Each club shall be asked to make a special contribution to the church on the last Sunday of the month for which it is named,” wrote King. “Also, on the Church Anniversary each club shall be asked to contribute at least one hundred dollars ($100.00).” Next, he proposed that the church begin a “four year renovation and expansion program.” He named specific goals, from a new carpet and “electric cold water fountain” for 1955 to an entire new religious education building for 1959.

  After these two financial shockers, King recommended the establishment of a host of new committees, boards, and councils. A social and political action committee would promote membership in the NAACP and sponsor “forums and mass meetings” before elections to discuss the issues. “Every member of Dexter must be a registered voter,” he wrote, at a time when less than 5 percent of Negroes in Alabama were registered. One new committee would raise money to give a Dexter high school graduate a small college scholarship, another would establish a nursery so that parents of small children could attend church more easily, a third would seek new members. Contented Dexter had never done such things.

  His final dozen recommendations returned to the pivotal subject of finance and church control. He proposed that each deacon be assigned twenty-five church members who lived near him (“It shall be the duty of the deacon to persuade the member to catch up his or her pledge”), and he outlined the same centralized treasury and budget that his father had used so successfully at Ebenezer. Henceforth, there would be no more ad hoc rallies, special collections, or anonymous giving. “I recommend that all money in the treasury of each auxiliary be turned over to the general church treasurer by November 1, 1954,” he wrote. Dexter would operate by check instead of cash. The pastor alone, and not the deacons or the trustees, would decide how much to pay guest ministers. No one would take collections home to count them; all money would be deposited in the bank immediately. If all this and more were done, King concluded with a flourish, “Dexter will rise to such heights as will stagger the imagination of generations yet unborn.”

  His plan was to claim leadership and to demonstrate it in one swift stroke. In perhaps the most critical and daring tactic, King named specific people for all the appointments to his plethora of committees. He showed that on the first day he already knew his congregation well enough to take a huge risk in one of the minister’s most delicate areas, personnel assignments. Among those he appointed were Dr. Adair, whom Vernon Johns had denounced for murdering his wife, Dr. Pettus, whose daughter Johns had embarrassed by selling watermelons at her wedding, and Rufus Lewis, the funeral proprietor and former football coach who had accompanied Johns on his fateful watermelon run to the Alabama State campus.

  The list, along with the whole package, would be voted up or down. By listing the names in advance, King gave a large number of the most influential church members a vested interest in his reform. By tying both the committees and the finance plan to Moses’ definition of pastoral authority, King gave the members a clear choice: they could validate his authority along with his recommendations, or could challenge them both. It was Thermidor, a royalist counterattack, with implicit warning that if the nobles resisted, King would leave Dexter before they could celebrate his arrival.

  King was proud of his coup. He had spent months preparing his recommendations, going so far as to consult the organizational reports of successful Negro churches around the country. Even after Dexter capitulated, he sent copies to other clergymen for their comments and advice. Those who responded singled out for applause King’s description of the pastor’s preeminence. Melvin Watson referred to the preface as “beautifully and appropriately formulated.” Another friend wrote simply that King had done “a very good job” on the authority question. There was little disagreement among pastors on this point. Their one common criticism was that King might be taking things too fast, with too much organization, too many overlapping committees, too much busywork. “Hectic activity in the church is not necessarily an indication that the cause of the Kingdom is being promoted,” cautioned Watson.

  King believed that hectic activity could bond him to the congregation and to the town. He had more than enough energy. Every morning he was up by five-thirty to work for three hours on his dissertation. Then he was off to the church, where he might preach at a funeral, supervise the painting of the basement, or play musical chairs with the members of the June Club. He went to NAACP meetings, made social calls on the other Negro ministers in town, and joined the local Morehouse Club. Montgomery was a haven for Morehouse alumni—so much so that one of Alabama State’s nicknames was “Little Morehouse”—and King soon discovere
d that Elliott Finley, a Morehouse acquaintance, had a pool table in his home. He played pool there in the evenings (“Old Finley thought he could whip me at Eight Ball, so I had to give him a lesson”). Late at night, he often worked another few hours on the dissertation. That first year at Dexter, he made two trips back to Boston to confer with DeWolf and to defend his dissertation before the Ph.D. examining committee, attended no less than ten conclaves of the National Baptist Convention, preached forty-six sermons at Dexter, and delivered twenty addresses at churches and colleges from New York to Louisiana. Proud of his blinding schedule, King reported to the church that on top of everything else he had read exactly twenty-six books and 102 magazines.

  Even the stolid R. D. Nesbitt was telling the deacons that the new pastor had “revolutionized” Dexter within the first two months. King kept committee members so busy working on projects they liked that they had no time to oppose those they disdained. Six weeks after making his recommendations, King was able to report the collection of more than $2,100 on a single Sunday. This amounted to half his annual salary and was considered by his fellow clergymen to be an amazing feat for a church with only three hundred members on the books. Predictably, King encountered the most foot-dragging, the most ingenious delay pattern of missed deadlines and slipped minds, against his dictum that all monies from the bank accounts and cigar boxes of the scattered church auxiliaries be surrendered to the new central treasury by November 1. But he collected it all on time, on the strength of his mandate and his persistence.