Daddy King

  I knew there would be criticism of this unusual position which we were taking by calling and baptizing Joe, but I couldn’t let this stop me. I had to stand by what I felt was best for the church. We had endured too much, struggled too hard, and come too far for me to be constrained by denominational ties.

  Joe was based in Atlanta as a director in the Presbyterian Church, U.S., and he was introduced to us by a mutual friend, the Reverend William H. Gray III, pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia. In addition to his pastorate, Reverend Gray now serves as the United States Representative from the Second District of Pennsylvania. Occasionally Joe would come to Ebenezer to preach for us because I found my schedule too heavy to preach each Sunday. For the first time since 1960, I had been without a co-pastor; my sons were gone, and the Reverend Otis Moss, Jr., whom we called in 1970, remained with us only a short while. So I was alone, and I needed assistance.

  Very gradually, so gradually that we were hardly aware it was happening, Joe began to be a part of the Ebenezer family. Soon he was an integral part of the Ebenezer family. In fact, he and Bunch had developed such rapport that we asked him to officiate at her memorial service in Sisters Chapel at Spelman College. She had heartily approved him and knew of my plans to recommend him to the membership.

  I was confident that Reverend Roberts was the pastor and preacher Ebenezer needed. He was coming to us as a wise and experienced pastor who the Presbyterians were releasing with great reluctance. He would bring to Ebenezer the breadth of vision which a church of Ebenezer’s influence and fame would have to have if it were going to continue to grow. He would have no problems keeping his focus on the cross. The church had become such a tourist attraction that I had to be certain its mission was not lost. Finally, Joe had had broad administrative experiences which would be essential to the ongoing programs of the church.

  In an impressive and meaningful installation service, the Reverend Joseph Lawrence Roberts, Sr., delivered the installation sermon when his son assumed the pastorate of Ebenezer on Sunday, September 14, 1975.

  In the fall of 1975, I was invited to address a joint session of the Alabama state legislature, the first Negro in history so designated. I traveled over to Montgomery with a few misgivings. It was such a different place from what it had been just twenty years earlier, when the bus boycott started. Still, it was difficult to forget that M.L.’s church, Dexter Avenue Baptist, where I would also be speaking later that day, was located within sight of the capitol, where all the machinery of resistance to our freedom struggles had been based.

  I arrived for a press conference in the middle of the afternoon, and was met by several members of the legislature’s Black Caucus. During the conference, held on the steps of the capitol, a reporter asked if I intended to meet with the governor, and I realized that in back of me in the huge white building in downtown Montgomery sat George Wallace. Well, a meeting was arranged, although none had been scheduled originally. I walked into his office with all the armed security guards present, and the enormous portraits and banners hung from the walls, the state seals, wood paneling, the huge desk that almost hid him from view at first.

  Wallace’s eyes, I suppose, were the key to his condition. There was a deep sadness there, and I felt I was standing near a man who had had driven home to him the cost of appeals to violence in a nation with so many guns. We chatted. He was an old country boy, and we both knew of the cold and the hunger and the fear in places where so many were ground under the heels of landowners. He seemed pleased to see me and quickly explained that he’d never been against the Negro, but only stood for the law in a time when the law, possibly, was unjust. He said he regretted many things, most especially that few had ever understood his opposition to the federal government’s plans for integration, which he conceded he knew was inevitable. I listened, and then said to him that he would receive my prayers because he surely needed them, and many more. At this time he still entertained the hope of running for the presidency, to speak for the little man, the folks who didn’t dislike Negroes but just didn’t want to be pushed around by the bureaucrats in Washington.

  It surprised me that he looked so robust, so vigorous, until the wheelchair in which he sat was visible. The man would never walk again, and perhaps his dream was to be another Franklin Roosevelt. But too many people remembered those times, a very few years ago, when George Wallace would not move from a doorway to let integration take place at the University of Alabama. Most would remember that, not that this university was now fully integrated.

  Wallace had been wrong in a time when news traveled instantly to every part of the world. He was an early television politician, who used that medium to appeal to people’s fears and to ignorance in some parts of society. When he tried to keep some young Negro students from entering the University of Alabama, television newscasts made George Wallace a familiar figure to people who might never have known who he was by reading about him in the papers. Television, of course, does that. It creates personalities, and shapes them, and sends them around the world. This is what it did for George Wallace, who stood for what everyone would soon repudiate, publicly at least, in a way that could never be fully erased from memory. And so he was a sad figure. If he had, indeed, seen some light in his lifetime, it had shone too late for his greater political ambition. He’d remember that, in all those days in that wheelchair—being on the side of pain instead of healing, then coming to know so intimately what a mistake he had to carry through the future.

  Quietly, he asked that he remain in my prayers, this was most important to him, and of course I assured him I wouldn’t forget.

  My speech to the joint session was brief because I know how legislators hate to waste any time when there’s work to do for their constituencies. Twenty years after the tears and the blood, I stood up to a standing ovation and told them God planned to smile on them as they accomplished, as they kept the faith, as they saw to it that nobody wasted any tax dollars.

  And that night at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in my son’s former pulpit, I offered the text of remarks I’d made often during those months. “Once,” I said, “as a young preacher I worked hard at preaching to move people. Now I want to preach and have people think.” And I went on to say, as I would so many times afterward, that it concerned me that people were about to become too black, when they knew very well that some people had hurt us because they were too white for too long. I continued, “You and I know these are bewildering times we live in. But don’t you lose your way and don’t you ever let it get so dark you cannot promote a song.”

  There are two men I am supposed to hate. One is a white man, the other is black, and both are serving time for having committed murder. James Earl Ray is a prisoner in Tennessee, charged with killing my son. Marcus Chenault was institutionalized as deranged after shooting my wife to death. I don’t hate either one. There is no time for that, and no reason, either. Nothing that a man does takes him lower than when he allows himself to fall so far as to hate anyone. Hatred is not needed to stamp out evil, despite what some people have been taught. People can accomplish all things God wills in this world; hate cannot. If we achieved a victory in the South it was over inhumanity. When the evil heart of segregation could beat no more, it was because it had been stopped by people who did not counsel violence, who did not brutalize and bomb, who never sought to take away any part of anyone else’s identity as a human being. These things triumphed over the exaggerated power of hatred. And so which path would any man who knew this choose to travel? Hatred did not win. I prefer to share triumph.

  I am asked if I think of Ray and Chenault, and in what way. And I say that I have never believed that Ray was alone in his plan. In my heart I can only wonder why there seems to be so much that points to others working with him. Why? That question is always there, of course. But M.L. had done what he set out to do, and I love what my son taught me and thousands of other people in this country about the enormous personal power of nonviolence. I love
the lesson too much to make room inside myself for the very emotion that killed M.L. And it is again heartening to realize that he, better than anyone else, could have understood this.

  I retired from the active ministry in 1975, and a Sunday in my honor was held at Ebenezer on July 27 of that year. It was a beautiful and very moving day, bringing back memories that filled me with deep and abiding emotions. I knew it was time for me to move on and make room in that pulpit. I didn’t want to leave. But I was thankful that I wasn’t a stubborn old mule of a country boy anymore, and knew just when it was time to step aside.

  My joy over this wonderful Sunday was not to last long, however. Just a year afterward, in July of 1976, my granddaughter Esther Darlene, A.D. and Naomi’s fourth child, suffered a heart attack while jogging with friends in Atlanta. She died before help arrived.

  I was away on a speaking tour in Indiana at the time, and the news reached me and Darlene’s brother Al, who was traveling with me. We grieved together while waiting nearly all night for a flight home. It was rough for Al; he lost his little sister, whom he’d always been very close to. I knew it was a terrible blow for him—it seemed so unfair. But it had been God’s decision. We had all been through such times before. And we’d learned, Al especially, I think, that life gets harder and harder as we move along. You can only continue and be what you can best be, and never give up trying to be better, no matter how many times you are pushed down.

  Through that night, waiting with my grandson for a plane back to Atlanta, the pain continued, but so did my determination not to fall apart.

  Throughout the last weeks of 1975, I spent as much time as I could bringing Ebenezer’s new pastor into his role at the church. The transition was a smooth one. Reverend Roberts, although trained in the Presbyterian faith, developed an immediate rapport with members of the Ebenezer family, so I was able, after just a few weeks with him on board, to spend most of my time with the correspondence we still received from around the world, and some of the smaller details of the church’s operation.

  We chose Reverend Roberts because he impressed us with his knowledge, his commitment, and an extensive theological background. Ebenezer’s tradition was one that stressed a trained ministry. Reverend Roberts helped us continue this tradition.

  One afternoon my secretary, Miss Lillian Watkins, buzzed my study to say that former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter was on the telephone. I’d always had a pleasant relationship with him while he was in office, sort of one country boy to another, and I was pleased on this occasion to hear from him. We exchanged a few stories about our children and my grandchildren, the way men will, and then he asked if he might drop by later in the afternoon.

  Carter arrived while I was in the middle of a short nap. Miss Watkins rang me, then brought him up to the study. We chatted very warmly for several minutes, and I sensed after a time that this was more than a social call. I’d visited him at the governor’s mansion, found him a fine host and a stimulating conversationalist. I’d also learned that he didn’t do a lot of visiting himself without a purpose.

  “Reverend King,” he finally said to me, “I need your help with something. I need some advice.” He went on to say that his time in the governor’s office had given him a good deal of confidence about his leadership ability. And he wanted to know if I’d support him if he decided to run.

  “Run for what?” I asked him.

  “Why, for the presidency,” he answered.

  “The presidency?” I said. “Of what?”

  “The United States,” he told me.

  I had to admit to some surprise. A southerner in the White House was something not many folks thought much about. It hardly seemed like a solid possibility in the modern American political atmosphere. But as we were talking I recalled how impressed I’d often been with Lyndon Johnson, a southerner if there ever was one, but a man who’d looked further than the convenience segregation had often provided him, and sought, vigorously and, I always felt, sincerely, to bring a new atmosphere and new solutions to some of this country’s more serious social problems. His war on poverty had not been a glowing success, but in my view much of the failure he experienced with it had to do with general resistance and very poor management of many of the programs. Until that time, few people in this country had been involved with delivering real services to the poor and the disadvantaged of America. But Johnson could recall a childhood spent in the dust of Texas, growing up without enough to eat or wear during his early years. He knew. He understood firsthand what many others only dealt with at secondhand.

  Now, seated with me in my office, was a smiling, friendly Jimmy Carter, asking for my help. How far it seemed from Stockbridge at that moment when he said that he felt if I supported his candidacy, he could begin a campaign of very real substance throughout the South and beyond it. He felt he could win. I remembered that he had been in the legislature years earlier, and had never been characterized as a “cracker” law-maker, the way so many rural statesmen had been. And later, as governor, he achieved an unusual reputation among blacks. They talked about his availability while in office; they talked about his willingness to meet with people and work long hours on issues and needs as they were expressed by Negroes from around the state. But President of the United States? I hesitated, wondering if my old friend Nelson Rockefeller was really planning to make a run for the Republican nomination. I was in the Democratic party, but I’d certainly have no hesitation about crossing party lines for someone I thought could handle the kinds of political climate that black people were going to continue creating through the coming years.

  There were two points, of course: Could he get the job in the first place? And could he perform well if he did?

  “Governor,” I said to Carter, “I’ll tell you what. I’m pleased that you’ve come to me, but I have to be honest with you and say that only if a certain Republican does not run could I consider lending my support to your candidacy. Otherwise I’d have no problem with it at all.”

  I traveled to New York City for the Democratic Convention during the summer of 1976. My full commitment to Carter’s candidacy was official by then. I had campaigned somewhat for him and was asked to deliver the benediction for the closing of the convention in New York’s huge Madison Square Garden. I wasn’t doing Jimmy Carter a favor by going there. He was the best man running for the office, and I wanted to see him elected. To me he was not only a symbol of how much the South had changed in my lifetime, but also a man who understood and accepted great challenges in an effort to shape the country’s future. Who in this world believed he had a chance when he started out? And how many people thought, when I was a boy, that segregation would be gone before my life was over?

  Carter and I could be split apart on certain political issues, and I knew we probably would be. But in my heart I felt certain he was the right man for the job he was after. In the weeks leading up to the convention, I spoke in several cities around America, urging folks in Negro churches especially to get behind Carter’s presidential drive. There was very little resistance to my support of the man. Negroes knew the difference between white southerners like George Wallace—whom I never, never would have endorsed for the presidency—and Jimmy Carter, who in a few minutes’ conversation showed that he was made right and had a lot of truth and decency in him.

  I don’t really know how much my endorsement influenced the outcome of that election. Carter won. And black voters turned out in considerable numbers for the Carter-Mondale ticket. The cynics, of course, said almost anything was possible after the disillusionment the country went through as a result of the Nixon Administration, and the Ford presidency it left behind. Carter, though, is a really good man, I’ve always thought. There can be disagreement with a good man, and certainly this is true with him. But only a good man can keep your respect while you are disagreeing with him. I feel that way about Carter. He wants a country living in harmony, spiritually intact, healthy and energetic. A lot of people in public life say they wan
t these things. Disagreement arises over how we should achieve them.

  Now the very core of American democracy is participation by all citizens in the processes of government. No one person has complete control at any time, and the President of the United States is no exception. To get anything done, of course, requires influencing rather than overpowering folks. And that is a very slow-moving activity. I am reminded often of that elderly eye doctor who gave me those glasses when I was studying at Bryant so many years ago. He wanted to be right; he wanted to be fair. But it was hard to do this when others were watching, because so many of them were afraid to believe in justice. And when everything political has been said about Jimmy Carter, I don’t believe anyone will say of him that he was afraid.

  I was pleased that Jimmy Carter won the election. And early on the morning of his inauguration I delivered some brief words, speaking in front of the Washington Monument. I felt honored and proud to play a part, however small, in such a great event.

  My great respect and admiration for the Kennedy family not-withstanding, I support Carter’s reelection campaign in 1980 one hundred percent. Coretta traveled with me to Washington during the fall of 1979, and we visited Ted Kennedy’s office in the Senate. I considered it a necessary courtesy under the circumstances. Every person who aspires to the Oval Office has to seek support among Negroes. And I think most candidates realize that Negroes in America are still going to be found in great numbers within church memberships across the nation. Those churches are in touch with one another, even beyond denominational lines, on matters of national and international interest to American Negroes. It’s very simple arithmetic, really, the kind I used to struggle mightily with back at the Bryant School in the 1920s. But when you put flesh on numbers, they really do come to life and mean a lot.