Daddy King Read online

  With a new militancy growing every day among black Americans all over the United States, and an increased amount of resistance on the part of whites to the aspirations of our people, the southern situation seemed to drift closer and closer to a chaotic upheaval. The coalition between whites in business and government and Negro leaders in the city, although functioning, was grinding slowly to a halt as far as any real movement toward social change was concerned. And this coalition had once been viewed as the true hope for the better life our city should have been able to enjoy.

  Among the whites in leadership, I believe William Hartsfield may have been alone in his desire to make Atlanta into one city instead of two. The others just didn’t seem to realize that unity was the only means of maintaining their power and achieving harmony. Dividing people by color was a practice living on borrowed time. White businessmen would often use those of us who’d been successful in the South as proof that separation of the races did really work to the benefit of both whites and blacks. White politicians tried over and over to convince Negro leaders that nothing was to be gained by mixing people together when they were doing just fine in their divided camps. And many Negroes who loved their city and this country tried for years to work out a reasonable solution to the grievances our people shared with us all the time. The more we pushed for a new day, however, the more complacent whites seemed to become, the more satisfied with the old ways. Just their indifference to the suffering of Negroes who weren’t well off or basking in any limelight created a swelling of impatience. Our warnings to Hartsfield and the others that it was increasingly difficult to convince younger people to wait any longer for the rights their Constitution guaranteed them just weren’t being heard. The storm kept brewing.

  Very severe differences of opinion split two generations of black Atlanta and most of the other black communities across the United States following the end of the Second World War. Black men serving in the armed forces returned to the South with a world view, having seen Europe and the Far East, and knowing clearly how the lie of racial segregation was being spread all over the earth. They were eager and unafraid. Those of us who were older responded to the South more patiently, perhaps, because we had seen it even worse in earlier times. Our timetables, that of the younger and that of the more experienced, were decidedly different. Blacks established in careers and homes may not have been so enthusiastic about direct action, certainly not at the beginning of the sit-ins and other demonstrations. But folks did change. Some of them lost what they could never recover, but they moved with the times and followed young dynamic leaders along the road toward a new day.

  At first things moved slowly. There had always been the impatient and the hot-tempered in the community, but they generally could be calmed down to the point where more reasonable voices prevailed. I had spoken out of turn at meetings of the Voters’ League on one or two occasions. Nothing serious—small differences in viewpoint and approach. But the black coalition had been large enough to contain my rough edges and the smoother, less abrasive style of the famed Atlanta activist John Wesley Dobbs. Now the entire coalition process was under challenge. The kids no longer believed in anything we stood for, or so the talk was going. They’d lost confidence, and it would soon be too late to mend all the bridges that had been breaking down right in front of us, for so many years.

  The battles of the Negro middle class had separated from those of the poor, and the groups seemed to be drifting in different directions within the same struggle for human dignity and constitutional rights.

  The matter entered my home in 1950. My daughter, Christine, had been graduated from Spelman and had continued her studies at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City. I was pleased with her determined pursuit of knowledge, although I should have realized it couldn’t just go on forever. She was a somewhat shy young woman who had, of course, confided in her mother that she was interested in the teaching profession, but she had said nothing to me. In this she was much the same as her brothers, who never wanted me to use any influence on their behalf. I spoke often with the mayor, the chief of police, the head of the Atlanta Board of Education; this is what the coalition had always been about—a spirit of communication between leaders on both sides of a racial fence.

  The hard part was getting into the general public arena the harmony we were usually able to bring to those meetings. I was able, for instance, to help my daughter to be hired as a teacher in Atlanta—when it had been determined earlier that she would never get such a job. I was still identified in town as the leader of those dangerous radicals from way back in 1936, who’d battled eleven years to equalize teacher salaries, forcing white teachers to live on the same rates of pay blacks worked for. And so Christine was being punished for the “sins” of her father.

  I had been busy with the business of the world and had not even noticed Christine’s intense desire to teach. And so I hadn’t seen that the forces locked against her in a most evil way were the same ones mounting the resistance to every part of our struggle. To confront what they had done to my child in getting back at me was to come face-to-face with the tasks of tomorrow. Bunch tried all of one afternoon to calm me down when I discovered what had happened. “Why didn’t she tell me she wanted to teach?” I was shouting around the house. “Because,” Bunch answered, “she believes in merit, King, just as you and I have taught her to believe in it, and she doesn’t want a job just because she happened to be born your daughter. She could spend the rest of her life being told she didn’t have a brain in her head, that she was working only because you pulled some strings. . . .”

  Christine had taken two master’s programs following her graduation from Spelman College. When she received her first master’s, she applied for a teaching position with the Atlanta Board of Education. Her request was denied, and she returned to Columbia for a second master’s. She again applied to the Atlanta Board of Education, and again her request was denied. Now, my daughter was so well qualified that the school system should have been begging her to come to work.

  I was busy being proud of her and wrestling with the demon South, and I had missed the center of all this. M.L. and his mother often mentioned that Christine had earned one master’s in 1949, and would have another one in a year or so, and wouldn’t it be fine if she stayed right here in town and taught school? Years later they’d remind me of how often I had nodded, “Yes, yes,” and “Sure, sure,” to their conversation, remembering the sound but not always the words.

  Finally Christine brought it to me directly. A woman named Miss Bazoline Usher, who was chief supervisor of Negro teachers for the school system, came to our home to share with us information that so disturbed her that she risked losing her job to tell us about it. Christine’s applications were being routinely filed away, never to be seriously considered. She would never teach in Atlanta.

  I called the mayor. We talked for a while about raising children, and then we moved over to how he felt about political opponents who took things out on each other’s families. He assured me that nothing like that would be tolerated in his administration. So I told him about my daughter’s job search and her difficulties in being placed in the school system, and I reminded him of the long teacher equalization fight that got so bitter in and out of court over those many years. And the mayor listened quietly. He then told me to expect a call from him within the half hour, and asked if I’d have my daughter on the phone when he called back. Several minutes later, he called to tell an elated Christine that Miss Ira Jarrell, superintendent of the Atlanta schools, would personally be welcoming her to a teaching position at the W. H. Crogman School, in the Pittsburgh section of the city, along with all of her new peers in education who’d be gathering in just a few days to begin a new school term.

  Now I realized, in a more personal way than ever before, just how limited this kind of coalition politics had become when so much could be done through a phone call to the mayor, but so little ever came out of meetings between Negro
leaders and whites in the power structure when it came to issues affecting everyone in the city. The power of the black sector of the coalition rested more on an ability to get a favor done now and then rather than on any real political clout. Negroes could advise, or even irritate, like a tight shirt collar that rubs the skin sore if it’s worn long enough. But this wouldn’t do. Power—not just favors and good deeds now and then—had to be shared among all people if social change were ever to become a reality in Atlanta. This required mutual respect and a healthy regard for the principles of democracy America told the world we practiced without prejudice toward anyone. Favors were now seen by young black people as more evidence that Atlanta’s more fortunate Negroes had a special deal going with whites that excluded the black masses in favor of a black elite. The poor had to ride segregated buses and trains. Others had fine cars to get around in. The poor had to use substandard public rest rooms, and they were forced to accept inferior school facilities. Others avoided these things, often through private education for their children. Such people could refuse to challenge laws that discriminated against those who could not afford, economically, to get around them. Meanwhile, members of the coalition seemed to be saying more and more that patience was the answer, a dialogue was continuing and would soon produce results.

  All that sounded fine and fancy, younger people were beginning to repeat, but what does it accomplish, this coalition? How can grown men sit in a room at City Hall and look across a table at one another, get up later and congratulate each other on doing such good work toward progress, when people couldn’t use the same drinking fountain in a city park if they were different colors?

  We were running out of time. The excuses had been used up. People wanted answers that made sense for a country surging through the most technologically advanced period in history, when disease was being conquered, when the machinery in our lives gave us travel and enormous comfort in all our working and social lives. We could speak to people thousands of miles away on the telephone but not a seat away on a city bus. A Negro could feed a white child, virtually live in a white home day by day, and still be considered unfit to be spoken to in a public place. And for the Negro who both aspired to more and achieved it, the emphasis placed on skin color throughout the South changed only slightly on the way up any social ladder black folks could pursue.

  The experience with Christine would provide much of the seed of thought for a sermon I regularly delivered in one form or another over the years, built around the premise of “Misplaced Emphasis.” You see, I would tell the Ebenezer congregation, important things can be lost although they are right before you, because of misplaced emphasis. You may think that all the meetings, and the picketing, and the marches are the center of your life . . . only to discover that you have misplaced your emphasis if the very core of the reason that you meet and march and picket and protest is so near you can reach out and touch it easily, not realizing that it was, in fact, so close. You say sometimes that you must look at the larger picture because this is where all the answers are bound to be . . . and you find out that maybe they aren’t there at all, that again you have misplaced your emphasis, and you’ve got to look even closer to yourself to see what is really there. And this same misplaced emphasis occurs (are you listening?) when you think that everything is going well because your car drives so smoothly, and your new suit fits you so well, and those highpriced shoes you bought make your feet feel so good; and you begin to believe that these things, these many luxuries all around, are the really important matters of your life. Then you have misplaced your emphasis again and failed to see truth pulling at your sleeve . . . say it’s tuggin’ at you, wants to get closer. Truth wants to come right up and say, Don’t misplace that emphasis anymore—put it in the right place! And see where the real matter lies. . . .

  At Voters’ League meetings I found myself doing more shouting than I’d ever done anywhere before in my life. My voice often came rolling out in the preacher’s cadence to see who else felt we weren’t asking for enough. However we asked for it, we had to push harder, for more, and sooner.

  Even as the young people of Atlanta clearly saw us as part of the problem, we began to see their shift in attitude as one that created division constantly. To them, this was the point. You can’t leave us behind, they were saying. We’re your children, we’re in front of you. But if the past is where you want to stay, or have to, then we will leave you there and move on.

  Perhaps it was a sign of the impatience that was coming that M.L. decided to skip his final year at Washington High School and enter Morehouse College as a fifteen-year-old freshman. In a way both distant and close to my decision at that age to go off and become rich working on the railroad, my son had decided to reach higher. The risk for millions of people, of course, is that in doing this, their grip fails, they fall back and never quite get going again; yet millions more follow in those footsteps. My pride swelled, though, because M.L.’s confidence simply left no room in our house for uncertainty. He was going to take the step that told him what nothing else could: where he was going. Bunch, though she was enthusiastic, also recognized that my great joy over M.L.’s decision had a lot to do with knowing that by enrolling at Morehouse, he chose to be in Atlanta, near the daily influence of a father who still had no co-pastor at his church. Of course, if a young man couldn’t be convinced in four years . . .

  ELEVEN

  The president of Morehouse College when M.L. entered there was the wise and stately Dr. Benjamin Mays, a scholar and leader who remains a respected mentor to thousands of his former students throughout America. It was in large measure the inspirational messages at Morehouse chapel services that would influence M.L., during his junior year, to accept a calling to the ministry. Dr. Mays had an enormous gift of speech that gave him great communicative powers. All of that was needed just to keep some Morehouse men awake at chapel, not then, or now, the most popular forum in the college schedule. In addressing these young fellows, Dr. Mays offered a deeply resonant voice that seemed, M.L. often said, to root him so intimately with human experience that all his observations seemed especially alive and intense.

  And of course this reminded me of my student days and the sound of those legendary Morehouse voices that seemed to thunder information through any wall of resistance: C. D. Hubert, Dean of the School of Religion, whose three hundred or so pounds had always given his lectures a special kind of solidity. Dr. Hubert was named Acting President of Morehouse College, succeeding Dr. Samuel Howard Archer, who was an outstanding scholar and a tough, athletic sort of man, who we all felt could have instilled pride in a pebble by the roadside. Their call was for hard work and high achievement. The faculty had always been dedicated to turning out yearly graduating classes of men who considered being Morehouse graduates something especially distinguished.

  During M.L.’s years there, George Kelsey, in the theology department, saw the pulpit as a place both for drama, in the old-fashioned, country Baptist sense, and for the articulation of philosophies that address the problems of society. And Dr. Mays, an elegant speaker, offered the tempering of that drama with calm assurance and unassailable reason. M.L. was clearly impressed by those first three years, and told his mother one evening that he would enter the ministry. After sharing the news with me, M.L. agreed to a trial sermon at Ebenezer, where he found a crowd waiting to bear witness, a crowd that grew so rapidly on a Sunday afternoon that we had to move him into the main sanctuary so he could finish. M.L. had found himself. I could only thank God, pretty regularly, for letting me stay around long enough to be there.

  Oddly enough, we had a fairly heated argument shortly thereafter. For weeks he’d been telling me about some meetings at Morehouse and some of the other schools, and the formation of a group called the Intercollegiate Council. I thought little of what sounded to me like an ordinary student organization, until he told me that it was integrated. White students had joined, and mixed meetings were now taking place on the white campuses and the
Negro campuses, under the guiding spirit of Mrs. Dorothy Lilley, a white Methodist woman.

  “I don’t like it, M.L.,” I said to him. “You don’t need to risk any betrayals from them, and that’s mainly what you’ll get. . . .”

  He answered that he had to take that risk, and he remained in the group, explaining when again I asked him to quit: “Dad, I know I could resent every person in the white race, and it would be easy. That’s the point. It would be too easy, and I know the answer to so much of this is more complicated.”

  He spoke of the fundamental decency of whites that could never be overlooked as we struggled for our own rights as full citizens and human beings in this country. To forget, he added, was simply to become the very people we’ve been fighting against. . . . He had learned, M.L. told me, that we had to act morally, no matter whom or what we were fighting.

  He was quick to remind me, too, that my own comments about men like William Hartsfield had given him a sense that we could—we had to—look for allies among those whites who understood and those who would learn, even as we were learning, how much this great country could do for itself. “There is time, Dad,” he explained further. “I know we have time if we build from among all the groups we can depend on and trust. And I know they’re out there!”