Daddy King

by Martin Luther King Sr.

  At the time, I owned a Model T in pretty fair condition. That was how my mates and I traveled all around the state, and sometimes over into Alabama or Florida, to learn all we could about the art of Baptist preaching.

  We’d gone this particular night to hear a keynote address at the convention. The very highly regarded pastor of Ebenezer Baptist of Atlanta, Reverend Williams, was scheduled to speak, and we all looked forward to hearing the inspiring words he always offered to young churchmen. But the evening had turned out to be a disappointment. Reverend Williams had gone up to Cleveland, Ohio, to look into a possible pastorate for himself there, and he was delayed on his return by a disabled train. He wasn’t able to reach Jonesboro in time for the convention and went directly on home to Atlanta. A very young local preacher filled in for him, and got so tongue-tied that he just stumbled and mumbled most of the night away, until somebody had the wisdom to call on one of the choirs to cover up the embarrassment.

  By the time Bracey got through with an imitation of this poor guy’s mumble . . . erha, that is to say, I, um . . . ah . . ., my car was rocking with laughter all over again. I was into it myself this time. I’d been impressed by one part of this Jonesboro preacher’s talk, though. When he mentioned the Reverend Williams’s daughter, his voice just seemed to take on a glow as he described her gracious manners, captivating smile and scholarly manner. She was an excellent musician, he went on, and a student at the Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, and she had also organized a fine choir in her father’s church.

  Well, look out, King, I thought to myself as the fellow was speaking. Sounds like the woman you been lookin’ all over Georgia for!

  So I told my friends I planned to get married to this lovely girl from Atlanta, not bothering to tell them that she’d never met me and wouldn’t know me from Adam if she saw me walking past her on the street. But then I figured they didn’t know me . . . yet. But she would, I was sure of it. I’d made up my mind that very night. No doubt about it.

  “King,” said Eddie Cooper, “you sound like you’re absolutely positive about this.” Then he started laughing again.

  But I was.

  I’d arrived in Atlanta with little more than a reputation as a pretty good country preacher. But I soon found out this didn’t mean a whole lot in the big city. There were more preachers in Atlanta than anybody could count. I was just one more. Even so, it never did enter my mind that I wouldn’t become successful. My greatest strength had always been my confidence, even that part of it I never shared with anyone else but kept carefully and quietly tucked away, deep inside. Even that was shaken up a bit, though, when I started hearing sermons day after day, night after night; enough to realize how stiff the competition really was. A bunch of us were living at this time on a little dead-end street off Auburn Avenue. It’s gone now, but in those days there was a big wooden house on that street that belonged to an elderly widow—Mrs. Laster was her name—and she rented rooms to the young, ambitious fellows who seemed to stream into the city constantly, looking to make good. Some did, and a lot didn’t. Others stayed for a while, then packed up and went back to the little farm towns they’d left, thinking they were going to conquer the world of cities. For a lot of them, the dream turned out to be bigger, harder, or tougher than they were—too much or much too difficult.

  My first few months in the city were often very discouraging. I couldn’t say anything, it seemed to me, without someone laughing or correcting my speech.

  Down at home, in the country, everybody I ever heard sounded something like me. I never knew how we were mangling the language. But my buddies made sure I found out—and never forgot. Knowing was one thing, though—doing was another. Oh, I tried hard enough, imitating all the smooth talkers I heard around town. But I was so rural that my speech style just ran the English language ragged.

  And the fellows living at Mrs. Laster’s could ride you, oh, how they could get on your back about anything you didn’t know or handle properly. Soon I developed another style—total silence, thinking that I’d escape all their jokes. This didn’t work out at all though. If anything, it made them work overtime to get under my skin.

  “My, my,” Bracey would start off. “I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a silent preacher.”

  “Yes, I hear you, Brother Bracey,” Tisdale said in his distinctively high, thin voice. “Seems to me that a young man named King would know just a small amount of the King’s English, now wouldn’t you think so?”

  “Actually,” young Cooper’d say, always anxious to get in the last word, “it’s very basic, very old, it’s been said many times before. You can take the boy out of the country, but Lord knows it’s a lot harder to take the country out of the boy.”

  Now this talk was mostly in fun and had to be taken in that spirit. But it had very serious points about it as well. To be “country” was to be backward, unsophisticated, and hopelessly ignorant. It was true that I had a lot of rough edges, but to my mind they were only temporary. I planned to be as smooth as the most polished people in town. But I really didn’t have the first idea just how I was going to accomplish this.

  My older sister, Woodie Clara, had lived in Atlanta for about a year when I came up from the farm, and she made one thing very clear to me right away. “There’s nothing you can do here without an education, and you might as well get that through your stubborn head, brother, as soon as you can.”

  Well, she’d hit one nail right on the head. I was stubborn. Thought I knew it all. Preaching was what I did, and I figured I did that pretty well. There was also a notion rolling around my mind that I’d make one mighty fine businessman if I set my sights on that field. And if hard work got it, I’d have a big bank account in no time at all.

  “Well, whatever you decide,” Woodie cautioned me, “you had better make up that mind of yours to some long hours of book learning. Otherwise, you’ll be nothing but another straw in a big wind. . . .”

  I resisted all this talk about schooling at first. Why, I’d been the smartest thing ever walked down in the country school I attended as a farm boy. Learned faster and better than anybody.

  “You’re not on the farm, anymore,” Woodie reminded me. “This is Atlanta, little brother. Being the smartest here is a whole different matter.”

  Well, I went on being hardheaded for a while. Found a job, then another, and then an even better one, and every time I made a little money, preaching drifted off a little further from my thoughts, and being a business tycoon crept a little closer.

  Fortunately, it didn’t take me forever to see just where my hard head was leading me. I was green as the proverbial grass, a backwoods Bible thumper with a gift for a lot of hollering and a little sense. And the more I got around the city the more I was reminded of some sad, aging men I’d grown up watching down in the country. These fellows were preachers in name only, and then only because they said they were. Many of them couldn’t read, let alone write, and I could recall how they’d shuffle all around towns out there in rural Georgia, carrying a coat-pocket full of pencils they didn’t know how to use, trying to impress the local folks with all the “writing” they had to do. Remembering them, it was very hard to see the future. Without so much as half trying I’d end up just like them—coming into town as somebody’s guest preacher for one Sunday, then hanging around for another couple of weeks, because they really had no place else to go and, often, no way to get anywhere they wanted to be. God, I wanted more than that.

  But it took me a while to understand that wishing wouldn’t make it happen. What I wanted, I was going to have to work and work some more to get. And biting off more than one could chew was a ritual being played out every day by those whose reach was so much better than their grip.

  So I hitched up my belt and went to work.

  As it happened, I was in for a rude awakening. I was then driving a barber-supply truck from dawn till dusk, and my sister Woodie had talked me into stopping in at Bryant Preparato
ry School, where she was taking classes. Well, I knew I needed that high-school diploma she always talked about—I just didn’t feel like taking the time to get it. But I had agreed to take the little tests they gave, and after that I sat down to talk to the registrar.

  “Mr. King,” he said, “if you want to study here, we’ll have to start you in the fifth grade.”

  I nearly fell off the chair. My twenty-first birthday was only a few weeks away. What on earth would I look like, a great big grown man, sitting in a fifth-grade classroom? No, I couldn’t do that, it was asking too much. But Bryant had students much older than I was in even lower grades. At that time—1920—Georgia provided no free education to Negroes beyond the eighth grade; there was not a single high school in the city of Atlanta with a black student enrolled in it. The only way to get that diploma was to pay for your studies.

  I wrestled with the idea of whether all of this would be worth it to me, and I told the registrar I’d get back to him. And on my way home with Woodie I argued with her about it. All those years in the country schoolhouse back home hadn’t meant a thing, she said. My background was so poor that I was considered almost illiterate.

  It was like a pail of cold water thrown right in my face. But finally I said to myself, Just handle it, King, just go on and do what you need to.

  I started at Bryant School. In the first couple of weeks, my confidence was nearly shattered. It sometimes seemed that I knew practically nothing at all, even at the fifth-grade level. A grown man, out on my own, and I could scarcely read books intended for a ten-year-old child. Bracey had been so right. If I tried to court a young woman like Alberta Williams, Lord, it would be an outright disaster—and now I knew it. But she was on my mind every day of the week. I tried not to think about how long it might take me to finish the courses at Bryant because that only reminded me that Alberta was already studying in college. Lord, Lord, I thought.

  But nobody had said it was going to be easy, any of this life of mine. So I just went on. After the initial experience of being so embarrassed by the exposure of my ignorance in those classrooms, I just dug into the work, over and over, working all the time, carrying my books with me wherever I went, reading, going over the lessons until they were ready to pop out of my ears—and then reviewing them all once more just to be certain I knew everything perfectly. I’d sometimes have to drive those barber chairs I delivered out into the smaller towns around Atlanta. All along the way I’d be reciting my lessons to myself. I’d walk down the street practicing my rules of English grammar, tangling them all up at times, yelling at myself for being so slow, and getting all kinds of funny stares from folks who just knew I was clean out of my mind. But it didn’t matter what anybody thought—except, maybe, one person. I had things to get done, and I went about it with all the energy I could find in myself.

  Having been so cocky about my “impending marriage,” as my mates were calling it, I now had to find a way to meet my bride-to-be for the first time. And it seemed as though the Lord just started putting in a little overtime on my behalf when my sister Woodie told me one afternoon that she was moving from the house of one of our mother’s cousins into the very comfortable home of a local minister there in Atlanta.

  “You’ve probably heard of him,” she told me. “Reverend A. D. Williams of Ebenezer.”

  It seemed that the Reverend and Mrs. Williams had decided to take on another roomer when their daughter, Alberta, went off to begin her studies at Spelman Seminary, over on the other side of the city. Rather than have her commute, they decided to let her stay in a dormitory on the campus. In those days, church people were very generous about providing living quarters for young single women, especially those pursuing an education. In the Williams home, a very spacious old Victorian house on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, there were usually some relatives or boarders being given an opportunity to make themselves at home. The house was neat, and Mrs. Williams and her sister, who lived there too, were known throughout the church community for their fine cooking. I wasted no time telling Woodie how lucky I thought she was to have this opportunity to live in such a fine home, and I encouraged her to stay right there for as long as possible.

  Unfortunately, Woodie’s being in the Williams house never did give me an opportunity to meet Miss Williams. So I tried walking by her house on my way to the Bryant School, which was then just a few blocks away. I would move as slowly as I could in the hope that Alberta might come out, on her way to church for choir rehearsal . . . anything, it didn’t matter, just so I had a chance to talk with her. But mostly I’d see her father out on the porch, relaxing or taking a stretch after dinner, getting some fresh air. I never saw Alberta, though, and I’d just about given up.

  Then one evening, she was there. I walked past quickly when I saw her, then turned around and came back. I stood down on the sidewalk, several feet away, and tried to wave just enough to catch her eye. But she never moved. I wondered whether her father was nearby, maybe in the parlor of the house or upstairs in one of the darkened windows, watching every move I made.

  Finally I decided I was just going to go ahead with it, and I walked right on up the pathway to the porch at the front of the house.

  She didn’t look up for several minutes—at least it seemed that long, perhaps because I wanted to have this chance to exchange a few words with her.

  Finally, she glanced up from her book, watched me for a few seconds, then smiled. I guess something began happening right there; she seemed so tiny, and so warm, completely gracious and at ease.

  “Hello. You’re Reverend King, aren’t you? Woodie’s talked about you. How pleasant it is to meet you, finally.”

  Well, I mumbled something back that probably didn’t make a bit of sense, I was so tongue-tied. She spoke so well, so clearly, and she put so many words together so well in one sentence, I just couldn’t get my answers to stand up and sound right. She asked me about my churches.

  “Well, I’se preachin’ in two places,” I told her, and I thought I noticed her eyes narrow very quickly during the middle of my sentence. Now I knew that I was country, and I figured she knew it too. But I was there and she was, too, so if I was going to say anything to her the way I’d been promising myself I would the first chance I got, well, I was going to have to go right on and sound just as country as I actually was.

  “Ain’t been here but a short while,” I tried to explain. “We from down the country, me and Woodie, an’ we got a buncha brothers an’ sisters.”

  For a while she stared. Looked right at me. I could tell she was shy, but she wouldn’t flutter her eyes and keep looking away. Just wouldn’t. And I liked that. And soon she was smiling again and I felt fine . . . just fine.

  I couldn’t make a habit of dropping by the Williams house, however, so I had to find some other way to see Alberta Williams. Again, it seemed that the Lord was willing to lend a hand.

  Woodie had a friend named India Nelson; she was Alberta’s closest friend. That’s all I needed to hear. India sometimes went over to Spelman on Sunday afternoons, when the students there could receive guests—it was a very old-fashioned, strict place, where socializing was considered a distraction from a person’s studies. Well, India was a friendly sort of person, and I’d often given her and Woodie rides in my car to wherever they might be going, especially on Sunday afternoons.

  Finally I got lucky. India asked one day if I’d mind driving her over to Spelman the next Sunday afternoon. She was going to visit Alberta and chat with her for an hour or so, maybe take her some cookies or something that Mrs. Williams had baked. I told India that I’d check my schedule and see if I could get away. Then I rushed back to the rooming house so fast I was out of breath when I hit the door.

  Some of the fellows were headed out and asked me to carry them somewhere, but I had other things on my mind, mainly checking on my meager wardrobe to see what I’d wear that Sunday for this momentous occasion. First I knew I’d have to get a couple of boards to put my trousers between, then
slip them under my mattress so there’d be a nice crease in them by Sunday. Then I needed to borrow a little lard from Mrs. Laster’s kitchen so I could mix it with a little ice water and apply this to the toes of my old shoes to get a good shine started on them. A little lard, a little water, a lot of elbow grease as I buffed and shined, would put them in pretty fair shape in a few days. Then I scrubbed my good shirt so hard I could practically see through the cotton before I put some starch around the collar and asked Mrs. Laster if she could find the time to press it for me.

  “Why, Reverend King,” she said to me, “you must be fixin’ to court some nice young lady . . .”

  “No, ma’am,” I told her. “I’m fixin’ to get married.”

  TWO

  I had been a licensed preacher at the age of fifteen. Out in the country, this really wasn’t unusual, young boys pursuing rural ministries. It was just a matter of getting a board of deacons at a church to test you on the Bible, then offer you a chance at a trial sermon. Well, I had always been close to church. My mother was a deeply religious woman, and from my very earliest days I was with her at the country services or the many revivals, baptisms, and funerals she attended.

  My parents were poor farming people, sharecroppers working the land around Stockbridge, Georgia, when I was born there on the nineteenth of December, 1899. My father, James Albert King, was a lean, tough little fellow, very wiry and strong. As a young man, he’d worked in a rock quarry near town, but lost part of his right hand in an explosion one day. He became quite bitter about this in later years. Quarry work paid fairly good money in those days, more than any Negro was ever going to make farming someone else’s land. James King never got so much as a thank-you for the years he put in at that quarry. As soon as he got hurt, they waved him right off the company’s property; told him he was through. Nobody’d ever heard of workmen’s compensation back then. A man took his chances. If things went wrong for him, the bosses felt no responsibility whatever.