As Martin drove me home that night, he seemed disappointed that I hadn’t made a better impression on his father. I expressed my angst that his father had disregarded my feelings by talking about those other girls in Atlanta.
Two days later, however, I learned that I had made a better impression than I thought. During dinner, Daddy King slammed his hand down on the table and said, “You two are courting real hard. It is best that you get married.”
Only later did I find out what a sense of humor Daddy King had. Each time I would perform at a concert or excel in some way, he would remind me of what I had told him. He would say, “Coretta, I have something to offer, too.” These lines would produce much riotous laughter. By then, I, too, could join in the fun. Later I would learn how Martin’s sister, Christine, had beat the drum for me, and how Daddy King was impressed that his little granddaughter Alveda was so fond of me. She had nicknamed me Coco.
When Martin went home for Christmas, he discussed with his parents our plans to marry. They suggested we announce our engagement around Easter in the only black newspaper in Atlanta, the Atlanta Daily World. We would be married in June, after the school year ended.
As I hashed and rehashed my decision, I thought about what Edythe, who was very fond of Martin, had said. You won’t have your career as you dreamed it, but you will have your career.
With that in mind, I decided to switch my major at the conservatory from performing arts to music education, with a voice major and a minor in violin. This way, wherever Martin and I lived, I could supplement our income by teaching.
One year and four months after we met, on June 18, 1953, Daddy King married Martin and me on the lawn of my parents’ home in Marion, the one that they had built to replace the house that was burned to the ground. A.D. was best man, and Edythe was maid of honor. A.D.’s daughter Alveda was the flower girl. I decided to forgo a white formal gown, and instead wore a pastel blue, waltz-length dress.
Although the wedding was small by Atlanta standards, it was one of the biggest weddings ever held in my hometown. All of the King family came from Atlanta, along with some of the deacons and trustees of Ebenezer Church. None of the Kings, not even Martin, had ever met my parents, and I was concerned about whether they would form a favorable impression of our home in the country. My knowledge of Martin and his family should have allayed such feelings, but I suppose all brides have apprehensions. I didn’t want to look like I was trying to “impress” the Kings; at the same time, I wanted all of us to be hospitable and get along. I shouldn’t have worried. As soon as Martin walked in the door, smiling, said hello, and kissed my mother, the ice was broken.
I had made up my mind that I wanted the traditional language about “obeying” and submitting to my husband deleted from our marriage vows. The language made me feel too much like an indentured servant. I was worried that this break with tradition, which I later learned was quite revolutionary in the fifties, would anger either Daddy King, Martin, or both. To my surprise, neither one objected. Daddy King didn’t object because he understood that the times were changing and young people were thinking differently. Martin didn’t object because his view of women was more progressive than that of most men of his generation.
Because there were no hotels that accommodated blacks in the South, we spent our wedding night in the home of a friend, who happened to be an undertaker. Throughout our marriage, Martin would sometimes jokingly reminisce about this: “Honey, do you remember we spent our honeymoon at a funeral parlor?”
FOUR
A Brave Soldier
AS MUCH AS one can feel relaxed in the aftermath of hateful, threatening phone calls, on the evening of January 30, 1956, in the little house where we lived in Montgomery, Alabama, I was in a happy mood. It was about 9:30 at night, and I was comfortable in my bathrobe, chatting with my church friend Mary Lucy Williams in the front room. My infant daughter, Yolanda (we called her Yoki), was asleep in her crib in the back room.
Suddenly, coming from the front porch, I heard a sound: a heavy thump and a rolling noise. I yelled to Mary, “Something’s hit the house; run to the back!”
Before we could get halfway through the next room, a bomb exploded on the porch. The thunderous blast shattered the door and the window glass, leaving behind a cloud of putrid white smoke. It was the loudest explosion I had ever heard. The noise frightened my baby, who awoke, crying. I ran and gathered her in my arms. I gasped, calling out, “Oh, my Lord,” as I saw the damage the bomb had unleashed. Broken glass and pieces of wood were piled across the floors. We choked on the smoke that clogged the air.
As we crept toward the front of the house to see if anyone was outside, we saw a big hole in the front wall and the porch hanging half off. The chair and sofa where Mary and I had been sitting was torn to pieces; even the pictures on the walls had been shaken loose.
I heard the doorbell ring, and for a moment I panicked. Were the perpetrators returning to kill us? I worried about what to do with my baby: How could I protect her?
A concerned voice came through the front door: “Is anybody hurt?”
I went to the door and let in my neighbors. They were astonished and angered by the devastating sight of the broken windows, the hole in the concrete floor, and the split porch. I picked up the phone to call the police, but quickly put the receiver back down. From my childhood in Marion, I knew better. Instead, I thanked God that we were yet alive. If we had remained at the front of the house when we heard the noise, we might have died. A few feet had spared our lives.
Since the Montgomery Bus Boycott had begun one month before, we had experienced a barrage of harassing phone calls, including one particularly frightening caller who told Martin that if he didn’t leave town in three days they were going to bomb the house and kill our baby and me. Even so, I convinced myself that the call was an empty threat. When people call you up and tell you they’re going to do something, they’re probably not going to do it, I reasoned. They are just trying to scare you. But tonight I realized just how deadly real those threats could be.
Long minutes passed before I could calm my nerves enough to call First Baptist Church, where Ralph Abernathy pastored and where Martin, who had recently been appointed leader of the movement, was speaking at a mass meeting about the boycott. I let them know that our house had been bombed and asked them to find Martin.
I hung up, reminding myself of the need to stay calm, even as it was clear that anger and violence against those boycotting the city buses was escalating. Ever since hundreds of black maids, butlers, teachers, and preachers refused to board the buses that denigrated us as less than human, as the whites saw that we could not be intimidated, scared off, or bought off, the level of hostility had intensified. Young white ruffians would drive through black neighborhoods squirting urine on the faces, hair, suits, and dresses of any black person they could find. Adults and children would sometimes have to double back home to clean off the filth before they could proceed to school or work. The urine tossed from cars was humiliating, but that was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the violent intimidation. Crosses were being burned around town. Bricks were being thrown from windows, resulting in sprains and concussions. One well-known amateur boxer was stomped by a carload of white men, who accosted him as he walked along the street.
While I had dismissed the angry phone calls that came to our home night and day, Martin had calculated the possible outcome more clearly and insisted that a church member sit with Yoki and me whenever he was out. I was thankful that Mary was with me when the bomb hit our house.
Seeing the glass and feeling the explosion was my wake-up call. I was shocked into a new reality: the perpetrators would do anything, even commit murder, to stop us. It sank in again: if there had been more dynamite or if we had been closer to the explosion, Mary, my daughter, and I would have been killed. I had to be realistic, to stop and think about my own life and the life of my child.
Soon, Martin rushed home from his meeting. By that time,
an angry crowd had gathered outside; it was growing by the moment, and our house was so full of people that Martin had trouble getting in. The mayor and the police commissioner had also arrived; the police nervously held the crowd back.
Martin had been assured that Yoki and I were all right, but he was surprised to find me so calm. Gently, he told me, “Why don’t you get dressed, darling?” I was still wearing my house robe, and he wanted me to join him on the porch to hear him address the crowd outside.
I lagged behind a moment to answer the phone. I wished I hadn’t. It was a raging female voice: “I’m sorry we didn’t kill all you bastards.”
Martin had a textbook understanding of the Christian-Gandhian principles of nonviolence. We often debated the difference between passivism and creative nonviolence. But that night, as I joined him on the porch in the heat of the crisis, with pain and anguish all around, I saw that he was no longer the student. He was the practitioner, making the theories come alive as he spoke. This was his first test. His home had just been bombed, his wife and child could have been killed, yet he told the crowd very calmly that we were all right, and he asked them to go home. He had been told that a few of the men gathered there were armed with everything from broken bottles to pistols. “I want you to go home and put down your weapons,” he said. “We cannot solve this problem with retaliatory violence. Remember the words of Jesus: ‘He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’ We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us.”
Going further still, he said, “This movement will not stop, because God is with this movement. Go home with that glowing faith and radiant assurance.”
The atmosphere was so rife with tension that if a black man had tripped over a white man, it could have set off a riot. And if there had been a riot, Montgomery and the boycott would have turned into a dim memory, most likely recorded as the actions of out-of-control blacks with no mention of what had contributed to the violence.
As soon as our parents heard about the bombing, they sprang into action. Early the next day, my father and Daddy King made the drive from their respective homes to Montgomery. They were on a mission with one thing on their minds: to save our lives, to take us home. After the bombing, Martin, Yoki, and I went to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Joseph T. Brooks, both of whom were well-respected musicians in church circles. Martin’s sister, Christine, and his brother, A.D., drove up to their house along with our fathers.
My father made me very nervous, pacing the floor as he tried to convince us to abandon Montgomery. And Daddy King’s booming voice seemed to explode as he laid out the potential danger ahead. “Come on back to Atlanta. I need you at Ebenezer. It is better to be a live hero than a dead dog.”
Martin shook his head and stood his ground, looking like a little kid before his father.
“I think you need to step back and let someone else lead for a while, because they are after you,” my father told Martin. “I will take Coretta and the baby home for a while until things cool off.”
It took a lot for me to stand my ground as well. “I will not be returning home,” I said. “I would not be happy if I left. I am going to stay here with Martin.”
As I heard the flow of words streaming from my mouth, I felt as if I had an ear to my soul. The more I spoke, the stronger I felt. I had watched my father confront terrorism as a child. I was not new to the forces of hate and evil, but I had never been in a situation in which I had to make a personal commitment, to put my body on the line, to know my life could be taken from me. I had never faced my own test of endurance. At the age of twenty-eight, I had no idea what I would do, given a choice like this: to face and endure some of the worst acts of physical hatred or to run away. But in that moment I summoned a resolve. I knew what I needed to do, what my heart called me to do: stay.
Daddy King did not give up easily. He walked the floor and preached to us through the night and until daybreak. By morning, we were all exhausted, but Martin and I dug in our heels and refused to leave.
The next morning, after we had finished breakfast and our parents had left, Martin told me, “Corrie, you are a brave soldier. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
Hearing those words from him kept me motivated to be the best friend and wife I could ever conceive of being to Martin. He needed me. In fact, I truly believe that if I had packed up and left Montgomery that night, Martin would have left with me. And if that had happened, one can only wonder: Would Montgomery have birthed a movement that would electrify the world?
Later, Martin would write of me, “A wife can either make or break a husband. My wife was always stronger than I was through the struggle.… In the darkest moments, she always brought the light of hope. I am convinced if I had not had a wife with the fortitude, strength and calmness of Corrie, I could not have withstood the ordeals and tensions surrounding the movement.”
The night of the bombing, I began to understand how much it meant to Martin to have a wife who was strong. And that’s really when I made my commitment to go all the way. I remember it clearly. I remember how I felt. Inside my chest, I had this nervousness. Strangely enough, though, while I was nervous and torn between decisions, I was not afraid. There is a difference. I had known fear. I don’t think any black person growing up in the Deep South escaped the reality that a black person’s life could be taken by whites without any consequences. Yet, that night, fear mixed with the faith I had known from childhood. In Montgomery, when tragedy hit, when I was tested, I found that the fear had left. It had been overcome by faith.
I thought of Yoki. My baby. Love keeps you moving forward. I had no fear in Montgomery not only because of the spiritual strength I had found there, but because of the unity and solidarity of the people. The Bible says that perfect love casts out all fear. I began to see love in action: how brave, how courageous black people were; how, in the midst of such terror, they could stand up and demand a better future, for themselves, for their children.
While our parents were worrying themselves to death about us, Martin and I felt secure. After the bombing, I also came to the conclusion that I was stronger in a crisis. I didn’t panic or fall apart. I might get upset if the house is junky, but when there is a crisis, some mechanism inside me is set off; my mind kicks into high speed and starts racing toward solutions. Panic comes when you don’t see a way out. I was learning that even in the midst of terror, there is always a way out. I had been taught, and have come to believe in, the words of the gospel song: “God will make a way out of no way.”
* * *
AS NEWLYWEDS IN Boston, Martin and I had been like two schoolkids, playful and in love. We would go to Revere Beach amusement park, where Martin enjoyed the hair-raising roller coaster. He roller-skated with his friend Philip Lenud, the two laughing and roughhousing until they were ready to drop. Once, when my rather serious mother was visiting and went with us to the park, she joked, “Martin, you know you act like you are about four years old.”
Most portraits of Martin depict him as so intense, serene, and cerebral; you would not think, reading them, that he did everyday, normal things. But Martin was a prankster, a person who could bring fun into our lives and see the humor in the worst situations.
Also, in Boston, and until events in Montgomery swept us up in their wake, Martin was quite the househusband. He was so secure about his manhood that he didn’t equate helping me with housework as detracting from his masculinity. While he was researching his dissertation and I was finishing up at the conservatory, he was wonderful about helping with chores, and he didn’t mind wearing an apron, often telling himself that it made him look manly. Martin did all the heavy cleaning, even the laundry. He would cook one night a week, usually Thursdays, and was proud of his culinary skills. Depending on how he felt, he would cook smothered cabbage and fried chicken. He could also cook turnip greens with ham hocks and corn bread.
Six months into our marriage, however, in January 1954, Martin accepted an invitation to preach at the Dexter Av
enue Baptist Church in Montgomery, which was looking for someone to replace Dr. Vernon Johns, a fiery and fearless minister, who was retiring. Martin’s sermon topic was “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” He made such a tremendous impression that, a month later, he was invited to assume the pastorate.
Having completed most of his work for his PhD in systematic theology from Boston University, Martin had any number of churches interested in offering him pastorates, particularly in Massachusetts and New York, but he felt his calling was in the South, which brought him closer to his family in Atlanta.
I was not thrilled about leaving Boston and heading south. I would have preferred to move someplace at least more progressive, like Atlanta. After all, Montgomery was only eighty miles from Heiberger, the town where I grew up, and I thought I knew all too well what to expect from the city, once the capital of the Confederacy and one of the most racist places in America.
Selfishly, perhaps, I wanted to participate for a while longer in the richer cultural life open to blacks in the North, where there was a wealth of opportunities for me to further my musical career. I was also concerned about raising children under the bonds of segregation. And having lived for so long in Antioch’s Yellow Springs, Ohio, and in Boston, I knew what it was to ride anywhere you wanted on the subways and buses, to have quality friendships with whites, and not to have to move off the sidewalk when they walked by. If we returned, I feared that my will would be compressed and subjugated, that a body that knew what it meant to be free would be confined. The more we talked, the more I heard the shackles forming around my legs.
But in the end, our going south was never an issue. I had wanted to go later rather than sooner, but during our courtship Martin had prepared me in advance and let me know his intentions. So, regardless of my private concerns, on September 1, 1954, we officially moved into the parsonage at Dexter Baptist Church, where Martin began his first assignment as a full-time pastor, and I pressed on, ready to assume my role as a First Lady and pastor’s wife.
My Life, My Love, My Legacy Page 6