Daddy King Read online

  The boys came along as the Depression was hitting America. In addition, both births were extremely difficult for Bunch; but she was convinced there would be great joy for us in a large family. I worried, though, about her physical well-being. Pregnancy had proven very painful to her, birth had left her in an ill and weakened condition. But later several doctors assured Bunch there was absolutely no reason for her not to have more children, as many as she felt she wanted. And Bunch and I were two of the happiest people in all the world.

  Just a few weeks before A.D. was born, I completed my studies at Morehouse and received a bachelor’s degree in theology. And though I’d never become an outstanding student in college, my stubborn determination got me through. I’d gone to summer school to improve grades and to take make-up courses. Several times I studied myself into complete exhaustion and wanted, so many times, just to stop and never open a book or go to another class again in my life. And when I did graduate, I was ten years older than most of my classmates, but that no longer mattered, though it did bother me at times during my stay at Morehouse.

  Graduation proved to be a thrilling experience. Receiving my degree was the final mark in a test of my personal will. The late nights of cramming for examinations, the extra work and the tutoring I’d received pushed me to limits I wasn’t always certain I could endure. But so many people had believed in me. When I was weary and down in spirit, Bunch would simply remind me of how far I’d already come—too far to stop along a road where there simply was no turning back. I could not “un-educate” myself, Bunch would point out, so I needed to think only about going on until the job was done. She spoke often about the feeling of accomplishment that came when a lot of very hard work had been completed. There had been times during those four years at Morehouse when I was willing to forgo the feeling. But on that summer day in 1930 when I was graduated, so many of my thoughts centered on just how far beyond our self-imposed limits we can actually go.

  Times were tough for everybody as the Depression swept into Atlanta in the early Thirties. Church memberships fell off sharply in some parts of the city. A mood of great fear and disillusionment took hold of many people. I was then pastoring at the small church in the East Point section. The members had very little money, and to make ends meet for Bunch, the children, and myself, I assumed the pulpit of Traveler’s Rest Baptist Church as well. When things grew worse for my congregations, they’d do like good country people do and bring food to services to share with the preacher. My family always ate well.

  Reverend Williams considered our fairly good fortune part of a call to very special duty. This was the Lord’s call. He said to endure and have faith. Whosoever carries the word must make the word flesh. Reverend Williams told the Ebenezer family one Sunday morning that to say is one thing, to live is another. People must be helped in this bitter season.

  Ebenezer became a church where the service lasted around the clock. Membership had held at a steady two hundred people. They were a generous congregation, and what money Reverend Williams could take in he poured back into the community to make food available to the hungry and clothes to those without them. We kept children while mothers worked. The church bought and supplied medicines. Ebenezer tried to be an anchor as the storm rose. And we did well—nothing fancy, no frills. But the church helped as many in need as the church could reach. And the church grew stronger.

  At this critical time in the spring of 1931, the family suffered a severe blow when Reverend Williams passed away. As he played one morning with granddaughter Christine in the living room of our home, he was stricken with a heart attack. Christine was then three years old and didn’t really understand what had happened to her grandfather. She got up and went into the kitchen where her mother and grandmother were preparing breakfast and said that her grandfather was lying on the floor asleep.

  The Reverend’s funeral was a huge and emotional ceremony. Bunch and her mother took his death in great sorrow. I’d lost a mentor, the good man and fine preacher who’d been friend and father-in-law for enough time for me to miss him a great deal when he’d gone on home. And while driving back from the cemetery after we’d buried the Reverend, I recalled a priceless Sunday morning at Ebenezer when he’d been the subject of some whispers along the front pews as several schoolteachers attending services began snickering and exchanging cutting remarks about the pastor’s grammar. He’d responded by saying to one of them that during the time the church was raising its building fund several years back, “I have give a hundred dollars while the man with the good speech have give nothin’!” I remembered that story as Bunch and I drove home. And I laughed very softly to myself until my eyes were filled with tears.

  EIGHT

  After the death of Reverend Williams, I was called to the pastorate of Ebenezer. I did not accept the call immediately because I was still committed to Traveler’s Rest. Moreover, though I was no stranger to Ebenezer, some of the deacons felt that an older and more experienced pastor should succeed Reverend Williams. As I had done, and would continue to do with all my major decisions, I began praying that God would guide me in the direction that He wanted me to go. I aspired to pastor a large church, but I did not want to accept one before God told me I was ready to assume more responsibilities and a larger role of leadership.

  I knew that Reverend Williams had worked arduously to bring Ebenezer to the prominent place that it occupied in the lives of the members and in the Atlanta community. Surely, for his memory, for the sakes of my wife, my mother-in-law, and the members, I wanted the church to continue to grow and thrive. But most of all, I wanted what was best for Ebenezer. Ebenezer did not belong to us. It belonged to God and His work on earth. Naturally, I now felt a very strong bond to the church—the members were our extended family—but I would be guided by God.

  Now, I knew my wife was also praying for my guidance, but I began to think that her prayer may have been, “Lord, don’t direct King to Ebenezer.”

  Bunch was “born” in Ebenezer. Except for the Sundays she spent with me at Traveler’s Rest after our marriage, she had never known another church. At Traveler’s Rest she was Mrs. King. Although she was now married, at Ebenezer she was still “Lil” Alberta or Alberta.

  “King,” she said, “I don’t want you to go to Ebenezer. I’ll never be the First Lady there, but at Traveler’s Rest I am the First Lady.” Well, I thought I understood how Bunch felt, and I was sympathetic to her, but when I received my answer from God, I knew that I should accept Ebenezer’s call. I said to her, “We are going to Ebenezer and you will continue to work there as you did when your father was the pastor. We’ll build our legacy at Ebenezer; new members will join. And, as those who have known you since you were born become older and leave us, you will have a new generation that will not have known ‘Lil’ Alberta or your mother. They will know only Mrs. King, the First Lady of Ebenezer.”

  I became the pastor of Ebenezer in the fall of 1931, and I was correct about Bunch’s role in my pastorate. She was a peerless co-worker in the continuing growth of Ebenezer. She endeared herself to the hundreds of members who joined the church during my administration. And, as I had told her she would, with the passage of time and her incomparable contributions to the church, she earned her place in the hearts of the members as the First Lady of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

  The board of deacons of the church was not pleased at first. They felt an older, more experienced man was needed to pastor the church in those difficult times. But Mrs. Williams, who had maintained a quiet but very solid position of influence at Ebenezer during all the years her husband was minister, put all the objections to rest when she told the congregation one Sunday morning that in her view, I was going to be the church’s new leader.

  I felt that even in the middle of the Depression a wonderful moment had come to my life in the form of great promise and hope for the future. Just weeks later, though, I had cause to wonder.

  A realty company held a mortgage on the Ebenezer church building.
When the company went bankrupt, late in 1931, the Atlanta Federal Savings Bank took over our note, which had an outstanding balance of $1,100. Because the realty company hadn’t been making its payments, the bank moved in to seize all its assets. I arrived one morning to open the church and found that our doors had been padlocked. The marshals were just leaving. We hadn’t been notified, there had been no warning. They just locked us out.

  I went downtown and talked to the bank manager. Atlanta Federal had no real interest in our building. As a piece of real estate, its main value was the one Ebenezer Church gave it as a house of worship. The bank manager was an impatient fellow, and he obviously had been listening to hard-luck tales all that day. People all over the city were really up against it financially.

  “We can pay off the mortgage,” I assured him, though at the time I didn’t know for sure. If things got any worse for the Ebenezer folks, money would be tighter than ever before. They were giving until it hurt them. Asking them to sacrifice even more to save our building wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  But the bank manager was willing to work out a payment schedule with me. And as poor as we were then, the note, which ran for five more years, was paid off in three and a half. We did more than survive. A deep sense of pride filled the church now. Our Sunday mornings had a joy about them, a passion in the songs, and a pleasure in the pastor’s sermons that came from knowing what strength people could bring to hardship, what faith and fellowship. I knew that throughout the congregation there were people who went without meals to keep money in our collection plates.

  And I preached that we wouldn’t just make it through but we would prosper, because this belief of ours was something special. “Ebenezer will give this world much that is special,” I said, “because we walk any path proudly. We can be weary but continue on without a word of reproach. And we will, church,” I preached. “We surely will.”

  And eventually we did prosper. The deacons, twelve in all, got together and gave the church $25 each to form a building fund. I had asked them each to contribute twenty dollars. They not only gave themselves but raised money on their jobs and among friends and relatives. They even managed to raise my salary just a year after I became Ebenezer’s pastor. The deacons took great pride in knowing that young Reverend King was the best-paid Negro minister in the city. The black church in America has always honored its ministry, but I was treated extraordinarily well by Ebenezer. In return, I worked to give my congregation a continuing sense of our strength as God had provided it. We had been asked by Him to bear a great burden in our time. But we could rise above any misery and grief. Others might slip under the weight, Ebenezer determined not to. So many of us had come from places where Negroes were not regarded as part of the human race. We knew better. And we knew that in time everyone else in this country would understand our struggle, our patience, our anger, and our spiritual power to change not only our own condition but that of the rest of this nation. Nothing would ever overwhelm us. We could be set back, knocked down, and kicked around. But we’d live. And in our living, America would discover its future.

  Family became my anchor. Being a parent often seemed rather strange. I remained accustomed to thinking of myself as a son long after I’d left my father’s house. And as my children grew, I became more familiar with what Mama and Papa had been talking about when they’d seemed a little harsh with us. To prepare a child for a world where death and violence are always near drains a lot of energy from the soul. Inside you, there is always a fist balled up to protect them. And a constant sense of the hard line between maintaining self-respect and getting along with the enemy all around you. In the Southern Railroad Yards, I had watched men betray one another to get on the good side of the bosses, never realizing that the good side had nothing to do with victory. And now, as I grew within the increasingly influential world of the southern black church, I wondered how much would be expected of me as a person who presumably had arrived somewhere better, somewhere higher and nicer, within the framework of the segregated society. What would my own children expect of me when they understood the part of the world we occupied? The central question was whether the forces opposed to the aspirations of the Negro community would defeat us, would leave us willing to accept the status of lesser beings. Could we simply go along with the system that rewarded silence and apparent agreement by making a few creature comforts available to those willing to forget what the real issues actually were?

  Ebenezer was prospering, but I often wondered if the cost of our survival was higher than it seemed to be. Separate societies, as a practical matter, cost the taxpayers much more than any human vanity was ever worth. How much does the citizen pay for two drinking fountains—for white and for colored—and two school systems, double public facilities in every conceivable area of public life? One system is cheaper, one is right, one is human.

  In this South I lived in during the early 1930s, all actions, all viewpoints, all morality, justice, and true faith were manifest among the South’s people in one word: nigger. What this term represented to each man, woman, and child, whatever their color, told, finally, the story of America. There was anguish in white homes. I had seen and sensed it as a boy, going to back doors, waiting for my mother to scrub other people’s floors, listening to whites hate us without them or us knowing why. Whites ached. And sadly, some of them thought keeping their heels on our heads could make them feel a little better, or a little safer, or a little closer to God. But nobody can keep a slave without being a slave, too. Visitors to the South would often comment on how harmoniously these segregated tribes of people seemed to live right next to each other. But the smoldering resentments were there, as anyone who’s ever been called “nigger” can explain. Resentment that also came from hearing people say that the Negro didn’t want his condition changed in the South. The happy darky was a myth held on to by folks who never learned to face the truth.

  There is a difference between the person who is still waiting for freedom and the person who has finished waiting and wants something done. The South needed more time, whites kept on saying. Things will definitely change in just a little while. Some blacks waited a lifetime on that false promise because the more powerful white voices in the South belonged to men who were demagogues: the Talmadges, the Longs, and the Bilbos, men who formed alliances against change, against the possibility of racial harmony. The Negro in the South had been asking: When? And the supposedly reasonable white southerners kept saying: Soon. But the political forces that controlled the entire region of the old Confederacy really meant: Never!

  And so the Negro continued to be an easy target of hatred, a “thing” to be kept in its place, to be despised, brutalized, or killed. We, in turn, were not fighting out of hatred for anybody. Our struggle was not so much against other people as it was against the systems people had created to keep us from living decent lives. Whites could only hate us. We had no political machinery or systems to oppress them. We had no signs to represent who we thought we were. Negroes did not divide buses by race or build separate drinking fountains. The police did not support our prejudices with the force of guns. We were vulnerable. Our victories and losses in the civil-rights struggle had to begin with that understanding.

  I became a chronic complainer. I grumbled about all the conditions I saw segregation imposing on Negroes, and I talked too loud about it at times and got on a lot of people’s nerves. A few folks said my Morehouse degree had added a few inches to my hat size. But every time I saw Negroes using separate water fountains or shuffling toward the backs of buses, I wondered why some reasonable whites and blacks couldn’t just sit down and bring a swift halt to all of the dumb kinds of things segregation represented. But I was told by more than a few Negroes to stop grandstanding about the racial situation in Atlanta because it was pretty damn good compared to a lot of places, and we should just be satisfied with it until whites could see their way clear to work with us on some changes.

  Well, I’d get so riled up at state
ments like this that Bunch would have to use all her considerable skills of reasoning with me to get my temperature back down. Even when that happened, I felt I was right. We would have to change things. Whites were not interested in change. The only change most of them wanted to see was Reverend Martin Luther King keeping his mouth shut about conditions for Negroes in the South. But Reverend King just wasn’t going to do that, because Reverend King just wasn’t satisfied with the way things were in the South.

  And I intended to keep on complaining.

  Oddly enough, this was a period of enormous growth for Ebenezer. The church’s membership continued to increase. My salary now had increased considerably. Bunch and the kids and I had material comforts in our home, and we had the spiritual warmth of Ebenezer in our lives.

  In 1934, I traveled to Europe and the Middle East. I traveled with a party of ten other ministers from around the United States. We arrived in France by ship, went down through Italy by train, traveled over onto the continent of Africa, across Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, then finally on to Palestine and the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, when I saw with my own eyes the places where Jesus had lived and taught, a life spent in the ministry seemed to me even more compelling.

  Returning to Europe, we all attended a World Baptist Conference in Berlin, Germany. For a week I heard the broadcasts of a man on the radio who seemed—although I understood no German—to shriek and roar, as if he wanted everyone who heard him to rise up and follow. I heard rage in that voice; it was a sound I’d heard in my own language too many times, a sound that poured oil on roaring flames. Adolf Hitler was on the rise, and the week we spent in Germany was filled with the sight of his image on posters and of streets filled with the soldiers, with the sound of his voice seemingly everywhere day and night. It was difficult to imagine, somehow, that in this same city was a huge convention of Baptists from all over the world, praying, hoping, feeling that we could take back home, some of us, a new sense of how peace was to be accomplished among men. Simultaneously the militaristic march of jackboots continued beneath unfurling flags with swastikas emblazoned on them. Perhaps both sides were convinced that they had the right answers for tomorrow.