Daddy King

by Martin Luther King Sr.

  “There’s a chance, Mother, that someone is going to try to kill me, and it could happen without any warning at all.” M.L. said this quickly, then stood up and walked to the far end of the patio. We sat silently, knowing that for this moment at least there couldn’t be any words. The same emotions that caused Bunch and me to urge M.L. to leave the movement more than ten years before were all still there. But saying these things now could bring no relief, only an intensity to the suffering we all carried. The great weight of that, I still believe, came from the certainty all of us had that what M.L. had chosen to do was unquestionably right.

  We had been aware of the dangers, each out of our own experiences with the South we knew—M.L., his mother and I. A time had come. To avoid it was impossible, even as avoiding the coming of darkness in the evening would have been impossible. But word was moving through our part of the world. People were reporting conversations overheard in restaurants, in taverns, on street corners, that indicated serious efforts to plot against M.L. as a leader of this movement that was changing so much in America so quickly. Police departments had been alerted. The talk of hired killers being on the loose and following M.L. was now past the stage of rumor and hearsay. Police officers who had never been in sympathy with our cause were nevertheless concerned about anything happening to my son in one of their towns or cities. It simply wouldn’t have looked good, I suppose, for all these law-and-order advocates to be unprepared for lawbreakers whose intention was to commit murder.

  “But I don’t want you to worry over any of this,” M.L. said, returning to his mother’s side. “I have to go on with my work, no matter what happens now, because my involvement is too complete to stop. Sometimes I do want to get away for a while, go someplace with Coretta and the kids and be Reverend King and family, having a few quiet days like any other Americans. But I know it’s too late for any of that now. And if mine isn’t to be a long life, Mother, Dad, well then I respect that, as you’ve always taught us to respect it as God’s will.”

  We ached when he left that evening, deep inside, and though we tried to comfort each other with small talk about neighbors and church folks and even our earliest hours together, nothing could remove the unspoken pain we were sharing.

  M.L. went back to Memphis, and Bunch was cheered by the consideration he and A.D. showed for her in this difficult time by calling during the day, just to assure her things were going fine. They seemed closer to each other now than at any time while they were growing up. A.D. grew strong in his role as brother. M.L. could now depend on him as never before, and even with all his trusted and valuable staff, the presence of his family in A.D. kept his spirit up so much of the time when this, more than anything else, was needed. They would both be on the phone with their mother, laughing and riding each other about their huge appetites and what they were doing to their respective waistlines. But that did not stop M.L. from saying, “Mother dear, I will be in Atlanta on Saturday, and I want you to cook some barbeque for me. I’ll come to your house for dinner.” It must have seemed that with all the power that affection generated, there would be some haven of safety.

  A.D. now had found his calling. He was firm in his own sense of ministry, confident both in what he could and could not do. He was not his brother, and not his father either, but now it was finally clear that he was going to be the finest Alfred Daniel Williams King the world would ever know.

  Bunch was in good humor as we drove to Ebenezer that Thursday evening of April fourth, 1968, although our Ebenezer family had been saddened during the week by the unexpected death of Mrs. Ruth Davis, who had been one of M.L.’s Sunday school teachers, and the passing, in Detroit, of Mrs. Nannien Crawford, a trustee of the church. The next week, Mrs. Crawford’s daughter died, and I knew it was my responsibility to preach the funeral of each of the members, and God gave me the strength to do what I had to do. The boys had called Bunch twice before noon, just to pester her, they said. M.L. was going to speak that night, and he wanted more than anything else for his mother to know that she shouldn’t take the television reports of the danger he was in too seriously. Things were shaping up much better than he had expected. Several Negro police officers were looking after him, even during their off-duty hours. For the moment, anyway, there seemed very little to worry about.

  Ebenezer is a busy church, and we were there almost every evening for a scheduled activity. When we arrived at the church, Bunch and I found our car’s path into the parking lot next to the church blocked by a driver who kept honking the horn and pointing to me as she yelled something neither of us could understand because her car window was up. I motioned for her to roll it down, but several other cars were now backed up along Auburn Avenue and the woman suddenly pulled away, thinking, I suppose, that we’d understood what she was trying to tell us. I parked, and Bunch and I rushed into the church building. We went upstairs to my study without exchanging a word, and I turned on the radio near my desk. M.L. had been shot, an announcer was saying, and he’d suffered a very serious wound.

  I turned to Bunch. She was calm, but the tears had started pouring down her face. No sound came, though. The crying was silent as we waited for more specific news. I began praying, filling the study with my words. Soon more news had been received by a local radio station that indicated M.L. was hurt but still alive. Another report came through, saying the bullet had struck him in the shoulder, and I heard myself asking, “Lord, let him live, let him be alive!” But moments later the newscaster had a final, somber bulletin: Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot to death while standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Again, I turned to Bunch. Neither of us could say anything. We had waited, agonizing through the nights and days without sleep, startled by nearly any sound, unable to eat, simply staring at our meals. Suddenly, in a few seconds of radio time, it was over. My first son, whose birth had brought me such joy that I jumped up in the hall outside the room where he was born and touched the ceiling—the child, the scholar, the preacher, the boy singing and smiling, the son—all of it was gone. And Ebenezer was so quiet; all through the church, as the staff learned what had happened, the tears flowed, but almost completely in silence.

  Christine and Isaac flew to Memphis with Coretta, in a private airplane graciously provided for our use by Senator Robert Kennedy. It was a difficult experience for two women not used to the rush of questions from reporters, the blazing TV lights, the crowds pressing everywhere to get a look at a family in distress. I still often wonder how Christine and Coretta held up so well, but they stood proud and composed throughout so much of the frenzy that followed the report of M.L.’s death. Isaac provided a quiet, firm presence, and his great strength in the middle of so much pressure was invaluable. They were accompanied on the trip to Memphis by Jean Young, Andy’s wife, and some other friends, including Dora McDonald, Fred Bennette, and Ralph Abernathy’s wife, Juanita.

  The outpouring of sympathy was the greatest that the city of Atlanta had ever witnessed. Atlanta was magnificent! The eyes of the world were on the city, and it was at its best. I am told that if an organization had been planning a convention at which there would be as many people as had come to M.L.’s funeral, the planning would have started at least five years in advance. Atlanta had only a few hours to prepare for the multitude that thronged the city—a multitude of humanity, the influential, such as Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, governors, mayors, senators, congressmen, high officials of every major organization of goodwill in the world; and the nameless poor, those valiant men and women who had marched with M.L. from Montgomery to Memphis—they all came, and Atlanta opened its heart to them. It was the city’s finest hour.

  They brought my son home to Atlanta, to a funeral that gathered up America’s attention for a day. One day in exchange for so many others. Yet we said again that God is good. I reached down for my son during the services and cried out to him: “M.L.! Answer me, M.L.”

  But that hour when w
e could speak is gone. And that ache I thought would not ever leave gradually subsides. I remember the children, and all the work we must continue doing so that they never lose faith in the rightness of what’s been done in their names.

  M.L.’s death was a terrible blow for all of us. I came to admire my wife’s great personal strength during this period. She suffered enormously, but never neglected to be available to others in the family who needed her. Our marriage had always been rather exceptional, I think. We seldom argued, we shared laughs with each other, we had cried together and never exchanged bitterness or hatred. Couples who are together a long time come through these ways. I counseled many of them as a minister. More than a few surprised me with the antagonisms they felt for each other. How, I often wondered, have these people managed to live together in the same house for five minutes, let alone a lifetime?

  So, I had always felt marriage was an institution that had provided me with many blessings. The warmth and quiet passion that moved between Bunch and me gave me a grand and often wondrous life on this earth. I have never stopped feeling that grandness, that fortunate state I was able to occupy.

  We traveled, Bunch and I, to places that were not so special in themselves at times but that gave us an opportunity to be alone with our contemplations and, at times, our pain. In the months after M.L. died, of course, we stayed with family matters, answering thousands of expressions of sorrow from around the world. But at some point, I realized that even at sixty-eight years of age, I still had a lot of preacher in me. So I went on with that, and lived my life with Bunch and the family. The grandchildren were growing faster than their parents had, it seemed.

  In September of 1968, A.D., my second son, was installed as co-pastor of Ebenezer. A.D. was an able preacher, a concerned, loving pastor, and he endeared himself to the members. To those who had known his mother and me before we married, he was a son. To those who had grown up with him, he was a brother. He continued to work with SCLC and went to several cities on SCLC’s behalf after all returned from the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. He was implementing his plans at Ebenezer, and Ebenezer was responding to his leadership. Bunch and I were happy about what we were witnessing, because indeed we believed “that God never closes one door but what He doesn’t open another.”

  For the first time, all of my grandchildren were in Atlanta. Their presence was a healing balm for me. We all felt that Coretta and her children needed us, and we gave her our love and support. It was hard without M.L., but we had to “keep keepin’ on.”

  Then tragedy came to us again!

  A.D. drowned in his swimming pool during the night hours of July 21, 1969. His oldest boy Al found him at dawn. It was Al’s seventeenth birthday.

  The morning he died, his son Al called my home, shouting into the phone that there was so much trouble at his house, trouble, trouble, he kept repeating. I dressed quickly and drove over there. Bunch could not go with me. She had to wait. It was too much, at that point in the early morning when Al called us—too much for her to think about. It was an answer to a question she just could not bring herself to ask. So I left her sitting there at home, alone, silent. I reached A.D.’s home as a fire department unit was arriving. They did all they could do, but he’d been in the water for several hours by then. Alveda had been up late the night before, she said, talking with her father, and watching a television movie with him. He’d seemed unusually quiet, she said, and was not very interested in the film. But he had wanted to stay up, and Alveda left him sitting in an easy chair, staring at the TV, when she went off to bed.

  Now he was gone, and for me, of course, there was the instant rush of memories, the laughter around the house of those two little boys chasing and teasing their older sister. And the arguments, the changes in both A.D. and myself that brought us closer together, and brought him into the movement his brother was leading, a ministry that gave America the chance to become free. And so I missed them both. Standing there in A.D.’s yard, as neighbors began to gather, wanting to know what had happened, it struck me suddenly that I had to carry this terrible message back to Bunch, this message of how much she and I would have to miss both the boys now. Help me, Lord, I heard myself ask, and I started walking back home. I need just a little help, my Lord, I said to Him, as I started off to hold Bunch and tell her what had happened.

  I had questions then about A.D.’s death, and I still have them now. He was a good swimmer. Why did he drown? I don’t know—I don’t know that we will ever know what happened.

  I spent many days after A.D.’s funeral thinking about what had brought all of these things down upon us. God had willed us great opportunity, I felt, not great tragedy. We needed to be stronger, for weak people cannot face the sort of future this nation has already created for itself. The will to be better is needed, not just the tools, the mechanics and the machinery. These were the times when I thought hate might find a way to enter my heart. But Bunch and I were now duty-bound to keep each other’s spirits from falling down. We had to keep the rest of our very young but emotionally matured family intact. And I worked at this as a life. I found so much strength in Al, A.D.’s oldest boy, who had to assume much responsibility with his father now gone on. Coretta surrounded her children with love and guidance during a time when a lesser person’s feelings might have torn her apart and plunged her into the depths of a despair she couldn’t escape.

  Again, Atlanta showed its heart, as did persons known and unknown to us from around the world. Our own faith in God, added to the outpouring of love and sympathy that was showered on us, sustained us.

  I refused to be bitter, and I refused to question God. At A.D.’s funeral, I told the world that “I had lost much, but I thanked God for what I had left!”

  I still had a son, of course, in Isaac, and he was an anchor for the family in these great storms, not only for Christine, but for each of the rest of us. God had sent him all those years earlier, knowing we would need a man of character in times of hardship and sorrow. But it would be several years before I felt some ease to the agonizing the family was experiencing.

  FIFTEEN

  Back in the country, I had been a traveling preacher going from town to town, from pulpit. In each place I’d find out what kinds of things had been going on, so that whatever topic I picked for a sermon would bring something to build up the spirit of those who heard me. This was a natural style in rural ministry, though not the only one. Some preachers tried to scare folks half out of their minds, keep them under control through fear. But I always enjoyed seeing a happy gathering leave my sermons, and if there were tears in anyone’s eyes, I always wanted them to be tears of joy. Oh, the rumor is that I was very stern in the pulpit at Ebenezer, especially when I got on folks about their contributions. I’d pin down a successful businessman who joined our church and just tell him that the spirit of Ebenezer embraced the notion that members of the congregation made every effort to do business with one another whenever this was possible. There were more than a few folks at Ebenezer who prospered as a direct result of this spirit of community. And so I expected people who prospered in this way to be generous in support of their church. Most of them were; a few had to be reminded now and then. We had a fine church. Lord, Ebenezer has been a wonderful place.

  But after my seventieth birthday, I had to give some serious thought to retiring from active life as a minister. I was planning to do a few lectures a year, some guest preaching now and then, but mainly I wanted to spend most of my time quietly in Atlanta, close to my wife. I was tired a little more often now. The race wasn’t over, of course, but I knew it had been run for a lot of years.

  The lectures took me flying a lot. This was the major difference for me between preaching when I was a young man and preaching during this period later in life. I’d be at a college in California one evening, and having dinner with Bunch and Christine and Isaac and their children in Atlanta the following night. To travel that far when I was a boy in Stockbridge would have taken more than
a week. But the audiences weren’t all that different. The things I had to say didn’t change so much. People needed comfort and assurance, this has always been true all over this country. I told them simply that I was glad to be a part of America, and especially a part of the work that would make this a better nation. That was good work, that was a fine job to have.

  And the response was always exciting. Young men and women at the colleges, couples, children, older folks in churches, many of whom came through the terrible fires of the American Sixties, managed to survive, and wanted others to know that it had been worth doing. And I certainly agreed with them, and told them so. There was a lot to talk about as America began moving through the Seventies. My words were spiritual, not political. I told folks that I never believed in political action that did not come out of a set of ethics, a sense of fair play, a high regard for the humanity and the rights of all people. There were students in northern colleges, for instance, who expected me to harbor a lot of anger and a lot of hatred for white people. And I said to them, as quietly as I could, that this wasn’t true and never would be. My mother saw to that.

  All those years back in the country, my mother, who had never learned to read or write or hear about philosophies and governments, told me things that moved across all the history of this nation as great wisdom. She told me not to hate. And this was something that kept me living. I found that after a time I even lost the capacity I thought I’d once had for hating. All people were my brothers and my sisters. And the feeling this gave me around people was a feeling of great strength and great pleasure. I enjoyed seeing so many people, and sharing with them. It made me believe deeply in the notion that if people talk to one another long enough, they can solve any difficulty that ever existed on the planet. But it takes time, and it takes an effort.