He’d been shaken by the bombing, but he was also determined to continue his work.
The model that Montgomery created for the movement could not always be duplicated in other cities. There was no coalition politics in Montgomery, no alliances or arrangements to channel grievances or negotiations. The boycott was an expression of discontent by black Americans that could only be answered publicly. In Montgomery there was no real line of communication between whites and blacks except in confrontation—the races there were so far apart. The 1956 victory in the bus boycott was a triumph over the coalition of ignorance and evil. The boycott gave black and white people a reason to see each other for what was really the first time. It required more than a year of people walking until many of them were nearly too tired to stand. But their determination was best expressed by the Negro woman who told a reporter asking her if the boycott wasn’t taking a toll on her physically, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested!”
The bus company stubbornly refused to accept the defeat of its segregationist policies and was eventually forced into bankruptcy after the Supreme Court ruled that its seating regulations were unconstitutional. M.L. had led the people of Montgomery in an achievement that ushered in the South’s rebirth. It cost so much. But when it arrived, and people knew how uneasy our course was going to be from then on, there was no turning away, only the search for guidance and strength. The road ahead was clear enough. I remember how difficult the winter of 1956 was. When the city of Montgomery had branded him a criminal and an outlaw, M.L. became a symbol of black aspiration and a clear target for white hatred.
Earlier that year, I had received several telephone calls from whites I trusted, and each of them said my son’s life was in danger. I just didn’t believe them, I didn’t want to. But while M.L. was speaking up in Nashville one night in February, indictments were delivered against him and several other members of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the group that had organized to coordinate the boycott. The Montgomery situation, I felt, was now out of hand, and when I picked M.L. up at the airport in Atlanta, where he’d come to be with Coretta and the baby, who were staying with us, I asked him not to go back. He said he had to. He’d accepted the MIA leadership and now he had to lead. I told him I thought it was too dangerous in Montgomery right now.
“Stay with us for a couple of weeks, M.L.,” I said, knowing before I got the words out what his answer would be.
“Dad, I know Mother is sick with worry, and I don’t want to add to that,” he said. “But I’ve got to carry through on this. I don’t really have a choice. We may not accomplish a great deal this time, I’m not sure. But it’s a statement, Dad, it says we disapproved of something we felt had wronged us.”
No one could persuade him to stay past the next morning. I invited several prominent men from our community over to talk with him, but their combined urgings to stay in Atlanta failed to sway M.L. Dr. Benjamin Mays, of Morehouse, whose influence had meant so much to M.L. when he was a student at the college, told him to go back if he had to and to expect his friends to help him all they could.
The others who spoke with M.L. that night included many old friends we both knew and respected. Their views, their wisdom and counsel meant a lot, although I knew by then that nothing in the world could change my son’s mind. Men who were considered influential figures in Atlanta’s leadership corps shared their experience and their knowledge with M.L. most of that evening. In addition to Dr. Mays, C. R. Yates, vice-president of Citizen’s Trust, the third-largest black bank in America, was there, T. M. Alexander, an insurance broker, A. T. Walden, an attorney, Dan Duke, a white Atlanta attorney, Bishop S. L. Green of the A.M.E. Church of Georgia, and Rufus Clement, president of Atlanta University. They all spoke eloquently, and were at times tremendously persuasive, but no one was going to change M.L.’s direction that night.
Now it was a matter of living with him in this commitment. Clearly, the issue was no longer just a bus company in Montgomery. There was bound to be more. And nobody could really predict just how far whites would go to try to stop what was now becoming a mass movement drawing attention from around the world. All this considered, Bunch and I found it impossible to quiet our own fears for M.L.’s safety. The bombing of his home with his wife and child inside had just about torn his mother up emotionally. The jeopardy he placed himself in constantly made us apprehensive now of every ring of our telephone.
It was the beginning of many unhappy, anxious hours we would spend, Bunch and I, waiting for word, hoping that no madman had found a way to M.L.’s door. But we could only support what he chose to do. Bunch often said that she would never fail to stand with him, though she was not always in agreement with the ways the movement chose to accomplish its work. But she’d grown up in her father’s house, hearing him preach and plan as he sought to bring about the fall of southern segregation. So, of course, she knew it was useless to try to persuade others to do what M.L. had now learned he was most capable of doing: providing leadership when it was clearly needed. His preaching was rich with spirit and power. He could move people with great, rolling thunder in his voice, the words moving smoothly from him and reaching people with the enormous conviction that all speakers who can move masses of human beings bring to the simplest sentence. He was becoming a national leader because it was time for this to happen, and time, of course, for it to happen to Martin Luther King, Jr.
I could only be deeply impressed with his determination. There was no hesitancy for him in this journey. M.L. told us all that he was returning to Montgomery because he would rather go back there and spend ten years in jail than not go back.
I drove M.L., Coretta, and the baby, Yolanda, over to Montgomery the next morning. I think we’d all spent a very restless, troubled night. It was very quiet in the car as we traveled. We were met by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, an early and close associate of M.L.’s in Montgomery, and elsewhere as the movement spread across the country. Along with several dozen others, M.L. and Ralph Abernathy had been charged with “interfering with the normal business of the Montgomery bus lines.” They were booked, fingerprinted and photographed as though the city wanted folks there to believe that my son and the boycott were some kind of menace to society. But it wasn’t until weeks had passed and the trial of the boycott leaders was under way and the nation and the world watched a cruel, immoral system unfold as the testimony of witness after witness spilled out of the Montgomery courthouse. M.L. had told me there was no way they could win the case given the law as it was established—the boycott leaders were “guilty.” But that trial, as many others would, laid bare the bones of the system and shocked some people who had been its strongest supporters.
Now, in the 1960s, M.L. had come back home. I again urged him to cut back on his activities, take a long look at the way things were developing before he exposed himself to the constant danger that gathered around him. Several times we argued. I’d grow angry, telling him how bullheaded he was being. He’d been scarred by the struggle in very serious ways. His schedule—the speaking, the organizing, the meetings—had exhausted him. In 1958, while signing autographs of his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, he was stabbed by a deranged Negro woman in a Harlem department store. After recovering, in 1959 he and Coretta accepted an invitation from the Gandhi Peace Foundation and spent several weeks in India, where they met and conferred with men and women who had known Mahatma Gandhi and who advised M.L. on the history and practice of nonviolent protest. He returned to the United States filled with energy, wanting more than ever to extend civil rights into America’s future.
By 1960, student involvement in the struggle was moving individuals and groups apart philosophically. At a student meeting held in Raleigh, North Carolina, that April, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed to continue the direct-action phase of the movement. In Raleigh, M.L. called for nonviolent sit-ins that would lead to mass arrests, filling the jails of the South with activists who would refuse to post b
ail. Other leaders there questioned the nonviolent approach. The division resulted in SNCC’s wanting to move with more haste than SCLC, though still nonviolent in its approach; less interested in the process of negotiation than in the power to unsettle the white power structure throughout the South. But with young people, the pendulum will swing back and forth. Often the students changed their tactics and veered between the two basic ideologies: encounter and debate.
M.L. was being arrested almost regularly now. A.D., who’d left business for preaching and had accepted a pastorate in Newnan, Georgia, joined his brother at a lunch counter sit-in in Atlanta during the fall of 1960. They were both arrested, along with seventy others. M.L. refused to post bail; so did the rest of those arrested. Hartsfield asked for a two-month truce on the demonstrations in exchange for releasing everyone from jail. The others were let go, but M.L. was detained by officials of nearby De Kalb County, who took him from Atlanta in handcuffs before Judge Oscar Mitchell in county court, charging that M.L. had violated his probation for an old traffic charge—when he first moved back to Atlanta, he had neglected to transfer his driver’s license from Alabama to Georgia. He had been fined and given a suspended sentence. When I appealed to Mitchell for a real hearing on this matter, he said, with a laugh: “I don’t have time, I’m going fishing . . .”
M.L.’s attorney, Donald Hollowell, was unable to convince the judge that convicting M.L. in this way was not an instance of justice being served, either for my son or for the people of Georgia. Mitchell sentenced M.L. to serve four months at hard labor in the state prison at Reidsville. Hollowell went off to prepare an appeal, and during the night, without any notice to the attorney or our family, my son was taken in chains to Reidsville. Now our struggle was against the history of the South, and there was deep concern among us regarding M.L.’s safety. Reidsville was several hours away by car. My son was being taken down there in the middle of the night along those lonely Georgia roads, where nearly anything dangerous was possible.
He arrived at the prison, and through contacts around the state I was able to learn that the authorities were hoping to create a situation that would result in M.L.’s being killed in a fight with another inmate at Reidsville. Later, according to this plan, much regret would be expressed over the incident, and it would be looked upon as one of those unfortunate things that sometimes happen. When Coretta called me the next morning—A.D. had gone to the county jail to see his brother and had been told he was on the way to Reidsville—she was fighting to remain composed. A.D. had called her as soon as he knew; his mood was one of anger and frustration.
Coretta was unaware of the reputation this rural prison had earned over a period of several years. It was a place for hard-core criminals, many of them in need of professional help with emotional problems, and it was also an institution with a staff that seemed at times to live for the possibility of forcibly controlling the prisoners.
“Dad,” Coretta cried, “what’s going to happen to him down there?”
She knew, as we all did, that M.L. was never comfortable in isolation. He enjoyed people too much to be cut off from others without suffering enormous anxiety. If they put him in solitary confinement, I felt, the effects on his well-being might be devastating. Worse than anything else, perhaps, they had taken M.L. away from Coretta and his family during her pregnancy with their third child.
I now made contact with Morris Abram, a prominent attorney in Atlanta and a man whose political contacts I felt would prove invaluable under the prevailing circumstances. And they were. I’ve been criticized severely over what happened next, but for all the years following those days, I’ve never regretted what I did. I knew the jeopardy my son was in. The Deep South was burning with a furious spiritual flame. For Negroes it was a fire lit for freedom. Whites experienced the heat of resistance. They were defending the impossible, trying to put a sack over tomorrow morning’s sunrise to keep it from shedding the light a new day was bringing.
I was headed out the door of my home on the way to a meeting with Mr. Abram when Bunch called me back to the phone. Coretta had received a call from Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic party’s candidate for President in the upcoming elections. For a number of personal reasons, I had been more impressed, at that point anyway, by the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, who was then Vice-President under Dwight Eisenhower. My political beliefs, then as now, included a willingness to vote man and not party.
Coretta described Senator Kennedy’s expression of concern over what was going on with M.L.’s imprisonment. The Senator was not alone in his apparent alarm over the clear violation of basic legal principles that Judge Mitchell had practiced. Word had also reached the White House, where both President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon moved back and forth between using their influence and saying nothing. Finally, they both declined comment. In their view, apparently, any intervention in what they regarded as a state matter would be unwise. They sat on their hands and never offered so much as a gesture toward Georgia.
Then Senator Kennedy’s brother Robert telephoned Judge Mitchell to ask why bail hadn’t been granted in a case that, after all, involved no serious crime. Suddenly papers were signed on M.L.’s behalf and a day later, my son had been released from prison.
A mass meeting was held at Ebenezer the night that M.L. was released. I told the crowd that I’d been deeply impressed by the Kennedys during this especially trying period. John and Robert had acted with moral courage, I felt, and stood up to be counted for what they, and all people of goodwill, knew was right.
And I said from the pulpit that, “Yes, if I had a suitcase full of votes, I’d hand them over to John Kennedy, hoping he could use them in the upcoming election.” I don’t know if that statement influenced many Negro voters across the country or not. Kennedy won, of course, and it is history that he won by a very small margin. I was pleased, frankly. Kennedy’s presidency opened some doors, although it left some others closed. But he acted when he saw an opportunity. And I said: More power to him. M.L. never offered a formal statement on behalf of Kennedy’s candidacy. He expressed his thanks and said very little more. He was out of Reidsville, but there was still so much work to do.
These were times when the nation and many parts of the world listened to much of what was being said in our southern pulpits. And I do recall saying that although I wasn’t urging anything on anyone else, I felt strongly now about the upcoming election and my support of a presidential candidate. And, I told the audience, stressing the word if: If I had a suitcase full of votes, I’d dump as many of them as he could hold right in John Kennedy’s lap!
I don’t know just who heard me. And I’ll never really be sure that those who did were seriously influenced. But John Kennedy did come from behind in the polls that year to beat Nixon by an extremely narrow margin.
It was said the Kennedys put one over on us because we weren’t really astute enough to see how we were being used. Oh, we were called blind and ignorant. But I remind those who said this then and may believe it now just what the alternative was. I did what I felt was necessary. And I still feel in my heart that anyone who would have hesitated to welcome the help the Kennedys offered has never had a son or daughter in the kind of danger M.L. faced at Reidsville. I’m quick to add, however, that I don’t believe the real danger came from the prisoners. When M.L. left the prison, after a brief press conference down there, several prisoners reportedly shouted after him: “Long live the King!” If it had come to that, I believe those men down there would have protected him as far as might have been required—all the way. So many folks, from so many parts of American society, looked upon this young King as somebody whose presence and whose safety was vital.
As M.L. continued to develop his leadership, Bunch and I felt a degree of jealousy emerging from people within our own community. Many felt M.L. was receiving too much personal publicity at the expense of others who were contributing significantly to the struggle. If any of this were true,
and I’ve never believed it was, M.L. certainly wasn’t to blame for it. He had no control over newspaper and television coverage of anything he said or did. Often he was misquoted, or partial statements were printed that didn’t carry the spirit of what he had to say.
An extraordinary group of young men and women was emerging in the Civil Rights Movement. M.L. was fortunate in having drawn around him numbers of people who possessed tremendous vision and skill. As the movement brought public attention to small towns like Albany, Georgia, and cities like Birmingham, young people left an impression upon the country linked to voting and integrated public facilities and schools. M.L. introduced me to such young people as Wyatt Tee Walker, John Lewis, another young minister named Andrew Young, to the Fred Shuttlesworths, the Ella Bakers and Julian Bonds who worked to keep this American society alive and healthy. The courage of young people like Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, who faced terror tactics day and night when they integrated the University of Georgia in 1961, made a big impression on all of us. Likewise all of the workers in all of the organizations that registered thousands of Negro southerners to vote when it could cost lives even to discuss the ballot box. To some this was a period of turmoil; I saw it as one of the great periods of America’s history. Atlanta began to grow as it never had before, attracting young men and women, blacks and whites, to bring their dreams and their hopes to the South and its future.
Daddy King Page 18