Daddy King Read online

  Visiting the Holy Land was very nourishing spiritually, but it did not reduce my concern about the South entirely. Still, I was refreshed by the many new worlds I had an opportunity to visit.

  I began uncovering the mysteries of the South’s racial arrangement around 1935. Negroes and whites had been placed into a framework, a design that separated them by color, and for far too many people in both groups the terms of segregation had become acceptable as a social tradition. For many people there was simply no other way to live. And as a part of all this, I’d become a prosperous young pastor, a husband and father whose family had never lived in a rented home or driven a car on which a payment was ever made late. We dressed well, we ate well, we enjoyed great respect among the people of our community. Perhaps this should always have been enough, but it never was. The southern arrangement was as destructive as it was often superficially charming to outsiders, to those who had come to see the South as a gallant defender of some fine and noble way of life.

  Part of the protective covering put around this dehumanizing system—and it should be clear that segregation dehumanized both sides—was the creation of apparent privilege for certain sectors of the Negro population in the South. I had been, for instance, a registered voter for more than ten years before I fully realized that my access to this franchise had value only in relationship to the number of other black people who were utilizing their voting rights.

  My vote alone would mean nothing until social and political change could be more than a vision of a distant future. I organized a few meetings and sounded out a few close friends, among them several other Atlanta churchmen. There were arguments, healthy kinds of disagreement in the beginning. Eventually, though, I began to sense the formation of a strong opinion based, for the most part, on the theory that the comfortable passenger is the last one who should think about rocking the boat. Still, I felt that action was the only course for those of us whose relative financial security permitted a view of the overall situation that wasn’t entirely available—or practical—for folks whose very livelihoods could depend on the sort of smiles I’d once learned to display in the Southern Railway Yards. Any grinning I did now was on my own terms, and I’d come to feel that a certain responsibility went along with that very small freedom to be what I wanted to be.

  At one of these meetings I proposed that black churches become central headquarters for a voter drive that would be kicked off by a march to City Hall, where hundreds of black Atlantans would register en masse.

  The idea fell on deaf ears. When any of my fellow clergy spoke, it was to suggest that I keep such notions to myself, there was far too much at stake for Negroes in Atlanta to risk anything over some actions that could only bring trouble. Some others made the point that there was no need for everybody in the black community to vote as long as those who knew what government was really all about exercised that right wisely for themselves and for those folks who attended church.

  In fact, this was a widespread view among blacks and whites. It was an arrangement: Negro ministers would speak to the whites and get from them the message that was to be delivered among the citizens of the city’s Negro communities. As long as everyone did his job, there didn’t ever have to be any trouble. What was arranged, then, was a system of very real favors. But like all favors, they could be taken away more quickly than they had been offered, they were based in no genuine sense of mutual respect, and they had nothing to do with rights. For the Negro in the South, voting power represented the only way favors were going to be turned into the inalienable rights that the United States supposedly guaranteed all people.

  I even had trouble with the deacons of Ebenezer on my plan for a voting-rights march. But they were not about to go to the members against the wishes of the pastor who’d built this grand church even larger than it had been, and who was determined to see that it kept right on growing.

  Most church folks in Atlanta knew that not every young minister was so successful in keeping his pastorate in such stable economic shape as I was. So I was able to persuade the deacons, with the minimum of encouragement actually, to support my drive to enlist people for the rally and the march.

  Of course, there were a few members who were not overly enthusiastic, either. But some of them fortunately could be reminded of the padlock that had gone on Ebenezer’s door in 1931, and had come off so shortly thereafter, and the food and clothes that had been so helpful in the lives of so many in Atlanta. The majority of the membership encouraged the reluctant to have faith in a young minister’s judgment on this particular matter.

  We started out with a rally in Ebenezer, explaining to all who were participating just what kind of behavior we expected during the entire action on that day. When we left the church, for all Atlanta knew we were just a bunch of Negro church folks heading out of town to a picnic.

  More than a thousand people had gathered for the rally at Ebenezer, and several ministers, myself included, told the crowd that we were not stirring up trouble, but we were tired of waiting for the freedoms America said were every citizen’s right. I reminded those at the rally of how things had been for me and for many of them out in the country, where talk of rights and the law seemed to lead us into constant trouble. Now we were all looking for a new way. “I know one thing,” I shouted. “I ain’t gonna plow no more mules. I’ll never step off the road again to let white folks pass. I am going to move forward toward freedom, and I’m hoping everybody here today is going right along with me!”

  People began shouting so loud over what I was saying, I wasn’t sure whether they were with or against me. But we all went outside together, and I knew then that my enthusiasm was matched by that of hundreds of other people, some of whom had been unable to squeeze inside the church for the rally but had taken their places in the march line as we formed up and started out for City Hall.

  We soon found that with relatives and friends and tithing members and a few supporters from the other Negro churches in town, there were several hundred Negro Americans marching that afternoon in 1935, down to the Atlanta City Hall, in a demonstration such as no living soul in that city had ever seen. People along the streets looked on in amazement as we went along in straight, orderly rows, headed downtown. Some of them knew of the rallies Reverend Williams had organized in the early 1920s, when he stopped a municipal bond issue in its tracks because it contained no provisions for Negro high-school education. The result of that had been Booker T. Washington High School, opened in 1924, the first high school for black students in Atlanta.

  “Lawd, they marchin’ again,” I heard more than one person lining the way call out. And I yelled back a dozen or more times, every few blocks: “Yes, and you come on ’n’ march with us, brother; walk with us, sister . . .”

  Truly, we lived out the word: Walk together, children, don’t get weary—in that early time, when the police stood and watched, some of them dumbfounded, most of them with their eyes turned into steel and their jaws bulging hatred; back in that early time, when nobody saw reports of the marches in the newspapers because the newspapers did not want, in any way, to encourage Negroes in that sort of behavior. And Negroes went inside City Hall, and into that elevator that we would not be rid of for some years to come, and they became partners in the business of America.

  A lot marched, but, of course, not all of them registered. Maybe a couple of hundred out of the crowd did. But it was a great start, I remember thinking, a really fine beginning. It was a day of great pride, a day when the very ministers who had said no so forcefully in our meetings just happened to be in the neighborhood, after our march had gone a mile without incident. They joined in under the banners that proclaimed that we were starting to move forward into another day, another way. We were staring at freedom, and though the picture wasn’t entirely clear, all of us knew what we wanted to see one day, and where we wanted to be when we did.

  Days later, sitting in my study at Ebenezer, I tried to weigh the effect of the rally and the march.
Eventually the point had been made, and emphatically. But I realized also that, in the actions Reverend Williams had taken years earlier, there had been very specific results: Booker T. Washington High School and the first Negro branch of the YMCA, victories that might have seemed slight to an outsider. But to every southerner, black or white, these things called to mind points on a historical map. Sometimes they’d be swept under rugs, kept there, patted down, until these victories were taken for granted, as if they had always been there, as though no one had given a great deal to obtain them. Negroes built the Butler Street Y in Atlanta with money raised in the Negro community. Only after the building was finished would the national organization give us a charter. We were given little, if anything; we gained for ourselves, without question, a great deal.

  Our great sense of frustration, in virtually every area of the South where Negroes lived, came from feeling, at times, that the world we knew should exist might not appear in time for us to see even a part of it.

  NINE

  As early as the 1930s, though not at any time before that, the South might have addressed and solved the nation’s racial dilemma. But this would have required a leadership the South did not really ever develop—leadership among white clergymen. Every effort that Negro churchmen made toward not only a reconciliation but a progressive unity within the framework of southern religious life was rejected. There were simply no white ministers who would run the risk of meeting with us because such gatherings would have to be meetings between equals. The spiritual prison of segregated life was so strong that even the most powerful white minister would have lost his congregation for suggesting that the races were, in the sight of God, equals. If this implies that southern whites felt stronger in their faith in racial separation than in their belief in the possibility of racial harmony, the record speaks clearly. From the white Baptist churches of the South—and they were and remain the most influential institutions in this part of the country—no one emerged to look at the human condition as it was in the South and to say: Enough, this will come to an end because it contradicts every part of the Bible and all the doctrine and principles that book contains. We sought out a leader from the white community, feeling that if even one would speak, a new mood could be created here. We discovered that in this instance seeking brought nothing. And so we waited, feeling that across the huge but senseless divide, someone from the large, heavily populated other side would stand up and be counted, even if just one. It did not happen.

  The terms of the struggle during that period were harsh and coldly efficient. To change what needed to be changed required a solid effort across the country, not just in the South. But the only conclusion we could draw was that we were, in the most terrible way, alone. The newspaper did not use their massive power to influence—except, for many years, to discredit—what Negroes were trying to do in gaining rights already assured us by the U.S. Constitution. The great historians and social scientists of the day went along with the most primitive conclusions about Negro life and the contributions of darker people to world history. Everywhere in this country and many places around the world, we found ourselves boxed in by hosts of antagonistic forces. And so a great many people were discouraged. Some simply stopped trying, moving into the embrace of segregation as something representing the “very best we can do right now.”

  During the summer of 1936, I opened our house to several meetings held by an organization of Negro schoolteachers who wanted to find a way to protest pay scales established for them. There was, of course, another, higher scale offered white teachers with the same qualifications and experience. This was one of the more blatant examples of discrimination, and the teachers felt certain the time had come to turn all this around and achieve equalization of pay for all, regardless of color.

  I hadn’t planned to participate as anything more than an observer and host for the first planning meetings. But it was soon clear that leadership in this fight was going to have to come from outside the teaching profession. Too much pressure could be applied to the teachers themselves, all of whom held their jobs without any real security or anything even resembling tenure. There had been firings before in the school system, over lesser matters than protests or organizing. As a minister with a growing church family, I simply wasn’t in the same position the teachers occupied. They were vulnerable to pressures I didn’t have to consider. Nobody was going to fire me from the pulpit; my voice could be heard and would be. I didn’t fear any reprisals, either. So I chaired the fight by these teachers, and it was a fight, more than just a group effort to accomplish something reasonable. Perhaps if I’d known that eleven years would pass before equality and, basically, respect was achieved for Negro teachers, my enthusiasm might have cooled down a little. I like to think not.

  In the beginning, things got a little rough. Few outside the South understood in those days how much emotional heat really was stirred up by racial questions. Just a couple of days after the first teachers’ meeting was held in my home, a white minister called on me at Ebenezer to express his concern. It was his feeling that I just didn’t know how much opposition would be mounted against us, and how dangerous that opposition might prove. In a way he was right. Over several weeks I received dozens of hate letters, as word got around that Negro teachers, led by Ebenezer’s pastor, were fighting for some very fundamental rights as citizens. Drawings of me in a coffin were popular in these letters, as were ones of my neck being stretched by a rope. Several white ministers called on me after that, each expressing concern, each maintaining that his own congregation was too emotional on the issue for him to take a stand other than the popular one: that niggers should stay in their places if they wanted peace to prevail in the South.

  But in a larger sense, our difficulty in Atlanta had much to do with factionalism and division within the black community. Quite often this hampered efforts to seize the time. During the Depression, the teachers had been stunned in many instances to find out how other Negroes lived all the time. Vividly I recall the desperation of those who were laid off from any kind of jobs; but the teachers especially were hard hit, because it seemed as though all their training and professional preparation just flew out the window, sending them to soup lines where they rubbed shoulders with folks who’d never known what a steady job was.

  My efforts in bringing church men and women outside Ebenezer into this struggle ran aground time and again because when churches pull together for anything, the question of leadership, of just who will run the ship, becomes an immediate, primary concern. So between poor folks thinking the teachers were elite, middle-class brats, and ministers refusing to join me in a clearly moral question, enough conflict for twice eleven years stood squarely before us.

  There were teachers, for instance, who thought the whole matter could be resolved in a few days with some phone calls and a small delegation meeting with city officials. But this was a time when city governments in the South kept themselves so far away from Negro concerns that City Hall could have as easily been located on the moon. I thought the problem could be overcome fairly easily if teachers would confront certain facts. Registering to vote, which not all of them rushed to do, seemed to me a powerful lever to pull in any situation. But again, Reverend King wasn’t going to be laid off from his place in the pulpit because he was a voter. Teachers feared that possibility, however, and I was not going to diminish that fear with words.

  It was during the late Thirties that some people in Atlanta, including a few of my fellow members of the Negro clergy, began to look upon my activities and concerns as being more than strange. And so, more than once, I heard men I considered close, longtime friends tell me: Look, King, there’s no need rocking any boats and getting these white folks upset. A lot of us have some good things going for ourselves, and we can help some of our less fortunate brethren, but it’ll take time, years, maybe, because we’ve got to go slow.

  But we can create political power and bring about those changes we want quickly, I found myse
lf saying over and over, privately, to friends, and in meetings where I was often greeted with silence, eyes cast down, church fans fluttering away, not much open support.

  Some attitudes among people are difficult to overcome; others just never go away. So many times I heard Negroes say to each other: “Well, hell, there’s nothing you can do about the way things are until they decided the time has come. The white man owns everything, and he’s gonna run things his own way until he gets downright tired of it, and that’s bound to take at least another million years!”

  I argued, I shouted, some people thought I acted up, but these kinds of sentiments just angered me more than I should have allowed. No initiative to end segregation and the bigotry it helped maintain would emerge from the white community. Any actions that produced change would have to come from the Negro community. And then only if leadership was developed on a larger scale and respected and followed as well. White support, if it ever came, would be welcome, but depending on it made for a fool’s errand. What few Negroes knew and few seldom talked about was the incredible pressure whites could be subjected to when any of them chose even to discuss the notion that men and women of all colors were human beings, not more and not less, and that this was something God, not man, took responsibility for. Whites who leaned toward understanding and brotherhood could be made to suffer, their businesses shut down, burned, wrecked by hoodlums. Or their children could be ostracized in school, or made to feel like freaks with no place in a “normal society.” For a white person to support our struggle required more strength than most folks had. But for the Negro, the struggle had no escape hatches; only whites could quit.