Daddy King

by Martin Luther King Sr.

  This drive to freedom often hurt. The cost was high for every step forward we took. And while violence was kept away from Atlanta to a greater extent than in many large cities in both the North and South, the pain was felt everywhere that our struggle continued. There were still times when I shouted in meetings or walked out of them. But I think a solid, progressive leadership saved a lot of heartache in Atlanta—not all of it, but a lot.

  M.L. and the SCLC were in disagreement with such men as Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP’s legal counselor, and later a Supreme Court Justice, who felt that SCLC proposals to use high-school students in the demonstrations against segregated schools were unwise. This was the start of a continuing disagreement on tactics between M.L. and the major leaders of the large civil-rights groups: men like the NAACP’s longtime executive director, Roy Wilkins, and Lester Granger and his successor as head of the Urban League, Whitney Young.

  Basically, I believe, these men felt that M.L.’s efforts to bring the poor directly into the process that would eventually liberate them conflicted with their own plans to leave planning and implementation of rights programs to professionals. This was a division that never subsided. But some of us did feel that after a brilliant victory in the Brown v. the Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, the NAACP tended toward a conservative path. They had placed more faith in the U.S. courts than those institutions might have deserved in America’s twentieth century.

  Even so, when M.L. first returned to Atlanta, and he and Coretta and their babies stayed with us awhile, we argued about his choice of methods. I felt I knew more about southern danger than he did, but he’d respond by saying that if this were true it still could not move him away from the responsibility he’d assumed. Both M.L. and his brother inherited a lot of stubbornness from somewhere in the family. And where I had succeeded in convincing A.D. that he should return to his studies and to eventual pastorates in Newnan, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, and Louisville, Kentucky, M.L. moved through his adult life without my instruction.

  “It is clear,” M.L. had written back in 1956, “that the Negro is in for a season of suffering.”

  Although the Civil Rights Movement never sought to tear down the United States, those of us who participated actively in it were often regarded as traitors and subversives. Black people in this nation know that the season M.L. spoke of has not yet ended. In the Sixties it seemed to appear anew every day. The murders, the bombs in homes and churches, the killing of little children should ofter more than enough evidence as to just who was subversive. The movement in all of its phases and various philosophies recognized a deteriorating United States of America that was ripping itself in half across the color line. The survival of Negroes was basic to the survival of this country. And for this reason our battle could not end quickly; there were so many issues connected to the unity of people in this country. Divisions had brought us close enough to disaster. Negroes could not move forward without the rest of America moving in the same direction. Whites did not always think of us as patriots, but that’s what the Civil Rights Movement really was made up of . . . men and women who believed in this society when it did not believe in them.

  One vital dimension that was often overlooked in the assessments of this period was the concern throughout black America for excellence, scholarship, and the general advancement of Negroes within a nation that was itself advancing. And we saw so many people ignoring U.S. racial policy, or looking at it as an insignificant matter. These things weakened the country. American kids began to question whether anything they were being told by their parents was true if the lie of race was so nakedly displayed. The generations lost contact with one another. Confidence was lost and in some instances not restored. Americans became suspicious, isolated, and violent. The lie kept on devouring us as a country because we would not slay the dragon that it was, we would not move to the basic truth that until all of us were full citizens, none could be, and that any who thought otherwise played on themselves a terrible deception.

  We could end the deception. But as a people we’d have to be stronger than we’d ever been before.

  FOURTEEN

  August 1960 was an extremely joyful month for our family. Christine was now teaching at Spelman College, and doing very well. Sometime during 1957, she’d met a young journalist from Missouri, Isaac Newton Farris, at a wedding reception of some mutual friends in Atlanta. He was a good-looking young fellow, and I liked his confidence, his solid hold on personal convictions. They began dating. Christine had brought a few suitors home for me to meet. I hadn’t been terribly impressed with any of these fellows. But an incident one evening convinced me that this young man Isaac Farris was made of a little better stuff. They’d gone to see a movie and stopped for coffee afterward. They were in love. Time passed, and Christine, who was living at home with us, got in pretty late.

  Now there were a few young men who’d heard my voice get big when they brought Christine and the boys back late from dances and parties when they were teenagers. I was waiting up for her, thinking that my sharp words were going to be for my daughter’s ears alone. But young Farris had come in to be sure I understood that he’d bear any responsibility for the lateness of the hour. And he wasn’t humble about it, either. He stood straight up, looked me in the eye and said, “Good evening, Reverend King. I’m Isaac Newton Farris from Eolia, Missouri, and I’m in love with your daughter and plan to marry her if she’s agreeable and you are.”

  Well, I chuckled, he was such a solid young fellow, a true man, I felt right away. More than anything else, he seemed like family from the first moment we talked.

  On August nineteenth, her brothers performed Christine and Isaac’s wedding at Ebenezer. And to this day I’d like to meet the man who’s ever gained a finer son-in-law. His strength would become a rock in times of need we’d be experiencing up ahead. What I like about him most of all, I think, is that he knows how to hold on to who he is without making any fuss, quietly, firmly, with a lot of old-fashioned American spine.

  The South had changed a great deal during William Hartsfield’s administration as mayor of Atlanta. He was returned to office term after term, serving twenty-three years altogether. The Atlanta airport was named after him, which was fitting because I think he always considered bringing major airline terminals to the city his most important achievement. In my view, he had accomplished other things. He’d been an unusually effective leader during an especially difficult time. He tried to walk a line between two opposing forces and he did that as well as any elected official could have done it at that time. When he stepped down as mayor, I realized the years had rushed past. I had entered my sixties, and I knew the time was now coming when my participation in church and civic activities would have to be cut back.

  What I wanted more than anything else now was to play out the grandfather role my own children had been creating for me. A.D. and Naomi were now proud parents of nine-year-old Alveda, eight-year-old Alfred Daniel Williams King II, and Derek Barber and Esther Darlene who were six and four. And in M.L. and Coretta’s home there were Yolanda Denise and Martin III, and Dexter Scott was on the way. Yolanda and Marty had been born during those especially trying times in Montgomery. And there were more grandchildren to come. Bernice would be born to M.L. and Coretta in early 1963, Vernon to A.D. and Naomi in the fall of 1960. Christine and Isaac would have their Isaac, Jr., in the spring of 1962, and Angela Christine during the spring of 1964. So I felt I had a career. I started my new life as Daddy King.

  I was helpless before the little ones; children just fascinated me. Bunch tried to keep me from spoiling the whole crowd as it grew, but I knew they’d always look to Grandaddy for the soft touch in their lives; I just couldn’t resist them. So much seemed to be contained in the presence of that generation. All the work, the years gone by in great struggle, I would always see in their little faces, in those climbing, jumping bodies as they grew up all around me. I knew I’d never tire of them as long as I was here, a
nd I planned with each arrival to be around just that much longer. God was on His job when He made me. The Lord, I was certain, had been plowing deep ground when He put me together there in the country. I was put here, as the old folks would say, on a purpose. I’d been sent here to preach, and if I had sold me back in those times when I thought about being in some sort of business operation, the riches might have come to me in another way—in cash dollars only.

  My present riches were far more valuable. Because it took more than breath and britches to be a preacher who brought a church along and grew, as the church grew with him. And so I measured my life in gladness. I had been bothered, worried and disturbed, but I had never used any of this as an excuse to hate anyone. I was most proud of that. When it came to what we’d had to struggle to achieve, I’d fussed about all things and never pulled back from arguing about them. And if I wasn’t a great preacher, I sure was a good one, and I put myself forth as best I could, always. My memories were valuable. I’d always have them as my personal wealth. And it could only increase.

  As the Sixties unfolded, the great well of passion stored up in this country for so long simply spilled over. M.L. and A.D. were moving the South with their efforts and those of the young men and women who marched America far beyond its own expectations for a time. And whether the location was Albany, Georgia, or Birmingham, Alabama, or Chicago, Illinois, the message was clear. The cause of integration in America was served by the nation’s aristocrats, farmers and students, by workers and preachers, men and women, young and old. The costs were accepted when they came and they were often very high. But we moved through.

  Ivan Allen, who succeeded Hartsfield as mayor, had the courage to stay in office for a couple of terms, and it took courage through the Sixties. The Voters’ League was with him and with Sam Massell, the city’s first Jewish mayor, who succeeded him. And coming into the present, Atlanta has a black mayor, Maynard Jackson, whose grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs, and I labored together in the Thirties and Forties to make it possible for our people to vote. I’ve supported that line of succession with the long-term feeling that it may be the most interesting series of city officials in the nation’s history. So I have lived in Atlanta, and go on doing so.

  I also lived to be at Oslo, Norway, to bear witness when M.L. received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. And I prayed on the plane trip over there that the Lord would keep me humble, the son of a sharecropper and father of a man who, at the age of thirty-five, had been presented the most prestigious of world awards. God surely had looked down into Georgia. And He must have said, Well, here are people I will give a mission and see how well they can carry it out. And I felt He must have looked down into Oslo, Norway, and simply said, Yes, they have shouldered the weight part of the way. A people had been led by a young man who could have found comfort elsewhere, yet stayed where he was needed, bearing witness. And as M.L. stood receiving the Nobel Prize, and the tears just streamed down my face, I gave thanks that out of that tiny Georgia town I’d been spared to see this and so much else. M.L. was my co-pastor now, and A.D. would soon be joining us in serving Ebenezer. I knew the movement was far from finished with its work, but I did feel M.L. had given so much, reached so deeply inside himself to be up in the front lines, where the glory was thought to be, but where danger held the real dominion.

  Killing is a contagion. It begins, then rushes like fire across oil, raging through emotions out of control. America will have to remember the early Sixties when the guns came out, when small children were blown to pieces while in church, and the blood seemed destined to flow until it became a river. The nation seemed to lose its way, as though it stumbled for a while through some dense forest where nothing could be seen clearly. How could we not have realized what was coming when those four young girls were killed by the explosion at their church in Birmingham? Was it not any clearer when civil-rights workers began disappearing, and when Medgar Evers, over in Mississippi, was shot down without any real concern about punishing the man who supposedly murdered him? How could a nation have not understood the terrible path it was walking when the President of the United States could be gunned down while riding in an open car through an American city?

  The turmoil continued. The Sixties were a time of battle for jobs and housing and the winning over of whites, who came now to understand how their lives, too, were being bent out of shape.

  What we learn, with God’s help, is that there is no safety. Therefore, there can be no danger we are not willing to face. A great passion stirred this nation in the Sixties, bringing violence and rage with it, but focusing on the hypocrisy that was at the root of America’s racial condition. Our struggle against that racist part of the nation’s personality was recognized, in some instances, more quickly and with a great deal more understanding in other parts of the world than it was at home.

  When M.L. asked me to join him in 1964 at Oslo for the Nobel ceremonies, all over Europe folks had been clearly aware of what my son was trying to accomplish against enormous odds. But in the United States, a campaign to destroy his leadership was conducted within the government. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, made no secret of the fact that he held M.L. and his work in contempt. And the Civil Rights Movement received little active support from church leaders, many of them close enough to the struggle to see how important M.L.’s nonviolent protests had become among young people. When he was in jail, there were those who turned their backs, who criticized and rebuked him. He carried on.

  It was a time when strong churchmen needed to reach out to embrace the American public as it huddled against its pain and tried to pretend that everything was still under control. We had moved to establish the sense of freedom any people must have to remain civilized. I had entered civic affairs as a young man because I thought everyone wanted a better world and that nobody would have one if I didn’t put a shoulder to all the wheels that turned justice and dignity. A preacher, as I understood the term, was called for life. And there was a wondrous harvest in those fruitful years. But I could hear the ticking that was fast replacing the American heartbeat in our daily lives. And as M.L. expanded the movement, I became more and more concerned and less and less able to get him to pull back even for a time. Bunch was deeply affected, of course. She grew ever more apprehensive as her sons became rooted in the struggle and the cause.

  By 1968, there was great anxiety throughout our family. No matter how much protection of any sort a person has, it will not be enough if the enemy is hatred that cannot be turned around. Not even the forces of law can control such hatred in a society. When evil is organized, it becomes a cup more bitter than the one given Jesus . . .

  In April 1968, my sons went to Memphis to help organize a struggle by the city’s sanitation workers to achieve better wages and working conditions. I wondered about M.L.’s involvement in this, whether or not he was spreading his concerns and his energies too thin. But again he was right. There could be no real separation between exploiting a man because of his color and taking advantage of his economic condition to control him politically. Exploitation didn’t need to be seen only in terms of segregation. It involved all people, white and black, in the continuing human drive toward freedom, toward personal dignity within a just society. In Memphis, M.L.’s joint efforts with the workers brought out the old charge that he was, inside, more Communist than Baptist, which may have been the silliest thing anybody ever said about any person in America.

  M.L. had been able to convince his brother, who was extremely skeptical in the beginning, that he too could make a difference in the kind of America that would enter the twenty-first century. The nation could be changed. The cracks in the armor of racist attitudes were visible all over the South. Maybe the time had been ripe before, but M.L. could see that now was an excellent moment in history to move a nation beyond itself. He sensed that Americans would respond emotionally to what he was now doing, that their passions could be cooled, then turned around into a force that would make the country into the
place it should always have been. We have the resources, he would explain to me. We have the means, and the human energy needed is at its peak. . . .

  The tension of those months took a heavy toll on Bunch, who was always aware of the pressure both the boys were under in their daily lives. The sound of a telephone, our doorbell ringing, any call that brought with it some news, edged up on us like a series of loud, sudden alarms. M.L. knew he had to share with his mother the changing nature of events as they involved him. Each moment he was away, out of touch with her, became an eternity of waiting for the next indication of any kind that he was all right.

  He came to Atlanta and had dinner one evening with his mother and me. Some of the things he’d told me earlier came as no surprise, but both of us understood how difficult the information was going to be for Bunch to handle. Several reliable sources, both private and from within the federal government, concluded that attempts would soon be made on M.L.’s life. Money was involved. Professional killers were being recruited.

  After dinner, the three of us sat out on our patio and enjoyed the late-setting sun of a warm, clear evening. Had I chosen M.L.’s words, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so blunt. He felt, though, that out of respect for his mother, he couldn’t be less than candid with her. “Mother,” he said, “there are some things I want you to know.”

  She didn’t want to listen, not then, on that quiet Sunday when it was so good to laugh about childhood, and remember tears easily replaced with laughter back when everything seemed so much less dangerous.