Daddy King Read online

  But no one should be left with the impression that we’d found a way to control Atlanta politics; that just wasn’t so. One of the Negro community’s great assets across America has been the resistance to domination of the many by the few. We’ve been a most democratic people throughout this nation’s history, sometimes to our own detriment—as when the majority oppresses a minority through the law. But in Atlanta, during this period around mid-century, there was never a day that passed when a white person wouldn’t just go to a few black leaders to order our community around. As early as 1944, Benjamin Mays and the other heads of the separate black colleges that comprised the Atlanta University Complex formed the Southern Regional Council to urge whites in power to bring down all forms of racial discrimination. The group finally became integrated, but it was bogged down constantly by resistance among the presumably more enlightened members of the white leadership corps. Eventually they just turned most of the work of dealing with Negroes over to Mayor Hartsfield, who virtually had to dance between the racial fortresses on both sides as mediator, interpreter, good guy, and architect of compromise.

  One of the more pointed examples of this dance was Hartsfield’s move to integrate the city police force in 1948. Caught in a real tug-of-war over this issue, he eventually put blacks in uniform, with full pay, but with power only to arrest other blacks! As an indication of how many years have really passed since that time, most blacks in Atlanta considered this a major victory in the civil-rights struggle to that moment. I was one who wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement, but I had few allies this time. It was three years before Negro officers gained full arrest powers in a strange police department that continued to fight skin color more than it fought crime—and would do so for many more years. After a time, most Atlanta Urban League members backed me on this fight for full arrest powers for Negro cops, but some scars were left in the aftermath, wounds that would never completely heal.

  We particularly enjoyed a victory that came in 1947, after eleven years of court sessions that dragged on and on for no reason I could see, except our opposition’s unwillingness to accept defeat gracefully. This was the fight for the equalization of teachers’ pay scales without regard to race. The lawsuit, brought by Atlanta’s black teachers with financial backing from Ebenezer, involved Mr. William H. Reeves, an Atlanta schoolteacher, as the plaintiff. Mr. Samuel Davis, another teacher, was also a plaintiff. However, “Bill” Reeves was the principal and was dismissed from his job by the Atlanta Board of Education. But along with the teachers in the struggle, we had arranged with the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, a Negro institution, for them to hire Reeves as soon as the Atlanta Board of Education sent him a dismissal notice. We had to guarantee this job security before anyone would become involved with the court case.

  And now, after more than a decade of humiliating delays, the black teachers had forced a change that made them equal before the law and their peers in the profession. The Federal District Court in Atlanta, ruling in our favor, said simply that paying a person less money because of the color of his skin just couldn’t be.

  The triumph was rich and made all of us glad. But it also reminded me once more that we’d not had the support of everyone in our own community on this one until the courts decided in our favor. Then the bandwagon suddenly became overcrowded with people who had told us, when we were recruiting help, “Well, no, I don’t think I want to get involved in that stuff. . . . I’ve got them putting a lot of heat on me right now.”

  There had always been excuses. Someone’s mortage served as one kind of hammer to keep him away from controversy. Some others were tied into white interests in so many complicated ways that they felt extremely vulnerable. Those of us who could not be so easily threatened or pressured had to be the ones taking the stronger stand. I had to recall, however, one meeting at which every Negro minister in attendance told me that he wouldn’t go with me to picket City Hall over the segregated water fountains and elevators. I told them that our unity on this issue was vital, because they’d be safe from arrest, at least, if there were a substantial number of us, too many to toss into jail together. I ended up going alone, and finally going inside City Hall to try to use several elevators on both sides of the color line. As I thought I would be, I was threatened with arrest. This was repeated several times until the whole thing was more embarrassing to City Hall than it was to me, so they took the signs out of the elevators. We then set our sights on the fountains.

  In 1914, a new site for Ebenezer was found, and the present church building was completed shortly thereafter. The new red brick structure on Auburn Avenue was a fine and solid one, made to last, and located only a few blocks from Atlanta’s main black business district. Down the street, Negro commerce had blossomed. A man named Hemon Perry had set the tone long ago, forming the Standard Life Insurance Company back in 1913. With this as a base, he tried to build an empire in the service industries: dry cleaning, construction, drugstores, mortgage-loan companies, and land-development operations.

  Hemon overextended himself, and his capital eventually dried up; by 1924, it was all downhill for him. But he had established a kind of legend along the avenue, which came to be known as “Sweet Auburn.” Other adventurous businessmen came after him, and a few, learning from his errors, were able to sustain their enterprises. By 1948, Atlanta Life Insurance, started back in 1905 by a one time barber named Alonzo F. Herndon, had assets close to $20 million. Banks opened, run by Negroes, and run very well. C. A. Scott first put out the Atlanta Daily World from his headquarters on Auburn.

  All seemed well. . . .

  At home, our children were growing up around us like three impatient weeds, each one curving in a different direction. Christine, quiet and extremely polite, was often teased by her more rambunctious younger brothers. Alfred Daniel, A.D. to all of us and to his friends, could get a little rough at times and let his toughness build a reputation throughout our neighborhood. Martin Luther, Jr., was always a little sensitive in his responses to even the most casual matters, and he was always one to negotiate a dispute instead of losing his temper. Well, nearly always. One summer afternoon when three youngsters were playing around the house, A.D. was antagonizing his sister to the point where she was close to tears. It was all fun to him, but as Bunch and I sat out in the back yard we heard a yelp, and went inside to discover that the great little negotiator, M.L., had conked his battling brother over the head with a telephone, leaving him dazed and wobbly on his feet. Fortunately, we were all able to laugh—eventually—over this reversal of styles.

  I’d begun thinking about the future of my youngsters, and in the rush to help them grow up a little faster than they wanted to—especially the boys—I began easing them toward a special attention to the ministry.

  A.D. just backed away from this. He was a child who was determined from his earliest days not to be what his father was. At times he got so dramatic about it that we had a few run-ins over the matter, even while he was still very young.

  For his part, M.L. said very little about preaching as his life’s work, and—unreasonably, I guess—that made me believe through his earliest years that he would evolve more naturally than A.D. to a place in the pastorate of Ebenezer.

  “Don’t push the boys too hard, King,” Bunch would often warn me. “It’s easy to turn children away from things that you want so much. Let them be who they’ll be.”

  Well, this was a difficulty. M.L., for instance, was a great speaker as a young boy, and he sang, too, in a fine, clear voice. His schoolwork, in both the private and public institutions he attended, was always of a high caliber. And he loved church, in a way I could recall in myself: the feeling for ceremonies and ritual, the passionate love of Baptist music.

  I felt at times I was seeing much of myself in both the boys. A.D.’s angry response to being wronged, even slightly—I’d been there. I knew that they’d been spared some bruises of the spirit because they grew up in a relatively prosperous environment, bringing them
little contact with the sort of naked bigotry of what was now, for me, “the old country.” But they sensed things, both of them, that southern men must be aware of if they are black: the subtle moods and shifts of violent disposition, the low-burning flame of rage that never seems to go away in the Deep South.

  I’d look at my children and remember again how much my father wanted me to farm when I was growing up. His life had been in those fields, along the rows of cotton and corn, in the woods where he hunted for food, or on land where he remained a stranger because the very ground he stood on always belonged to somebody else. I had seen a different road. Not wanting to live my father’s life, I chose to walk in another direction. And yet, like him, I wanted so much to help my own boys shape their future. My daughter’s life as an educator seemed a goal that her mother and I were duty-bound to help Christine achieve. But it was Bunch who regularly expressed the concern both of us felt in trying to understand where the parent ends and the child begins. I could not stand in their way, a very old, very human feeling. I loved the children too much to deny them anything, especially themselves, that sense all three of them developed in regard to who they wanted to be.

  But I really saw the boys becoming ministers and Christine a teacher. It was in these areas that I knew I could help them. Our Baptist world of fellowship was built around family ties, school and fraternal relationships, the so-called hometown connections that kept phones ringing and letters moving in consideration of help requested and granted, favors offered and accepted. The world is too tough for anyone to think of challenging it alone. As a father, I wanted to be certain that my children went out into that world with skills to compete and self-respect to maintain themselves in all human encounters. I wanted them to have support from me to call on in achieving their goals. All of which sounded beautiful at the breakfast or dinner table. Only one thing worried me about it, though. The boys said right along they weren’t going to be preachers!

  TEN

  By the late 1940s I was at that point in my own life where a man must begin thinking about how much he will live to see and how much he will be able to do before there is no more time for him to work. In the South of those years, the vision many of us had carried so far, a vision of full equality among Americans, was still more years away from fulfillment than it was comfortable to think about. Unless a major effort was made, the twentieth century would just drift into the twenty-first with the crippling disease of racism still very much an epidemic across this country.

  In that frame of mind, I knew I had to reach out to my sons for their help in a matter of the greatest importance. For it was not just I who would need the vigor of a new generation’s commitment to justice, but all of this country. Not only my sons were going to be needed in an ongoing, ever-difficult battle, but the sons of everybody in this nation who wanted to see America grow beyond what it had become. There was no draft for this army. A Civil War that had never really ended would now be fought on several fronts: moral, legal, social, and political. Wherever people worked or lived or went to school, there would be this great combat. The Negro could only struggle, there was no place to surrender to, no place where people could be spiritually alive. If anything was to give, it was going to have to be on the white side, where there was room to budge, and space to change.

  I was beginning to feel that by repeating myself over and over on the issues that still affected the lives of Negro Americans, I was sounding like the proverbial broken record. But there could be no thought of stopping. A man grew older all the time, but he could never stop moving forward in his life. There was always so much to do, to learn, and to teach.

  One day the two young sons of a local grocery-store owner told M.L. they couldn’t play with him anymore. When he asked why, they said it was because they were white and he wasn’t. This was about the time of the shoe-store incident, when the clerk had asked us to move to the back room in order to be waited on. That was just a store, but this was about friends, little fellows he played ball with, climbed trees with, guys he thought were true friends. Bunch was hardly able to console him. His heart, he said, was broken. How could anybody refuse to be a friend with somebody else because they were not the same color? “Why?” he asked his mother. “Why don’t white people like us, Mother dear?”

  Bunch sat and talked with him for hours. He was a curious youngster who really did wonder constantly about this peculiar world he saw all around him.

  “Don’t you be impressed by any of this prejudice you see,” she told him. “And never think, son, that there is anything that makes a person better than you are, especially the color of his skin.”

  Bunch was very gifted with children. She raised all of ours with great love and respect for their feelings. I, on the other hand, had a temper. My impatience made it very hard for me to sit down with the boys and quietly explain to them the way I wanted things done. With M.L. and A.D., I found that a switch was usually quicker and more persuasive, although I never had to use this form of punishment with Christine. She was the exceptionally well-behaved, serious, and studious member of the trio.

  Bunch insisted, though, as the children grew older, that any form of discipline used on them by either of us had to be agreed upon by both parents. This often curbed my temper, but it also helped Bunch to understand the things that made me angry. We talked a lot about the future of the kids, and she was able to understand that even when I got very upset with them, it was only because I wanted them to be strong and able and happy.

  When the boys began earning a little money through neighborhood odd jobs, Bunch promoted a very simple plan for them. They were to consider the division into three parts of all the money their jobs or allowances brought them. Bunch called these divisions “the King home’s three S’s”: Spending, Saving, and Sharing. In these and other ways, compared to the modern home environment, we ran a very tight ship. The children got to school on time every morning; they did homework as soon as they reached home in the afternoon, then chores. After supper, they did some studying, then we had prayers.

  Bunch had grown up an only child, although her parents had raised other youngsters whose own parents were unable to care for them. She could be strict, in her way, and the kids learned early on that as gentle as their mother was, they couldn’t get up early enough in the morning to fool her, any day of the week. She knew each of her children almost as well as she knew herself. M.L. came along with sensitivities only she could investigate and soothe. Bunch could also point out to me, when I couldn’t see it, how much A.D. sounded like me when I was younger and she’d known me as a stubborn young country fellow trying to make up his own mind about where he was going.

  I believed very strongly during this period of my life that to change Atlanta would be to change the entire South. And along with many others, I felt that this change would come more slowly than we wanted, but that counting on the basic human decency of all peoples was the best way to get anything accomplished if it involved fundamental changes in the way folks had lived most of their lives. From those nights in class at the Bryant School, when I’d first heard of government and elections and politicians and constituencies, the thought had remained with me that whatever Negroes accomplished in the South in my lifetime would have something to do with the ballot box. Year by year, I was convinced, we would work on the two fronts that eventually had to get us over: fighting to bring about an end to the white primary, which prevented our exercising a voice in local affairs involving our taxes and the fundamental human rights that were at the foundation of everything we fought for; and working in black communities to see that a maximum number of Negro voters were actually registered and ready to use that franchise to free our lives from the bonds of second- and third-class citizenship.

  The ballot was the key. And the battle lines were drawn very clearly. Whites who were able to see the handwriting on the wall were already crying Never! even as our voices in the Negro community were preparing to sing out the new hymn of Now!!

 
; I was active in the Atlanta Voters’ League, a nonpartisan organization about evenly split in membership between Republicans and Democrats from the Negro community. Politically, I had seen value in both parties, and deficiencies as well. So I determined very early in my experience as a voter to support candidates instead of parties. I have in my life voted for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates and been supportive of those candidates without regard to party lines. This was my style in the Voters’ League. Others disagreed. Franklin Roosevelt had impressed a lot of people in moving the country through the crisis of economic collapse and world war. I shared the enthusiasm that millions of Americans displayed for him. But I was also impressed by the support to southern Negro education that had been provided by the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers were Republicans. I didn’t believe in labels, so I found myself relating more and more to the complicated but wondrous American identity with its many variations and backgrounds.

  The League was never taken over by any single political ideology. Freedom for all people was our goal, and we knew that in America that was going to mean working with everybody to whom this nation was important. We knew we had to begin a push toward a world where people did not have to live in constant fear because they were poor or the wrong color.

  The lie that formed around southern life during this period was pushing us all toward an explosive confrontation over the racial question. Segregation had become an arrangement between whites and Negroes, a plan designed to hide the truth from both groups. Leadership on both sides moved further and further away from the masses of people who were most affected by the philosophy of separatism. Whites had placed the Negro leadership halfway between white complacency and black anger. Instead of working with us, whites wanted us merely to carry messages back to our people, saying that everything was all right in the segregated world, and only the Negroes who had no regard for Atlanta’s or the nation’s future would ever think about making trouble in paradise. But the trouble was already there, and the Negro hadn’t been responsible for creating it in the first place. Now, in reacting against the system that dishonored everyone who lived comfortably within it, we became the troublemakers.