Daddy King Read online

  He was much more certain than I was. In my mind there were recollections of how many times the white ministry, for example, might have done exactly what M.L. was telling me about now. Each time one move was made, by an individual expecting to be supported by others, others moved to push the races even further apart. And those pushing seemed so much more successful than those who tried to pull people together. “We’ve got to work with them,” I told M.L., “God knows this. But be careful about these meetings, this willingness to trust those who can be friends or enemies from one day to the next.”

  But M.L. had made his point quite well, and had given his stubborn old father new food for thought. Even in my desire to make him a little more cautious, I’d run out of arguments. America was approaching the middle of a century where change was constant, and those who could not change soon were distanced by the rest of any society. How far had I thought the South would continue with segregation as a way of life? Years? Centuries? Nothing was going to bring us a new day unless it included the very simple, often overlooked communication between races as partners rather than adversaries. What M.L. had found in his Intercollegiate Council went on constantly in the meetings held between the Voters’ League members and Atlanta city officials: an attempt to find resolutions.

  The atmosphere at Morehouse created in its students a desire for excellence. M.L. saw this as meaning much more than gifted scholarship. And he saw his undergraduate studies as one step among several that would take him closer to an understanding not only of the particulars of the human condition, but of what could be done about them. It was not enough just to acquire an education because it was available. He was finding that not all of his classmates considered their pursuit of a degree in terms of values beyond finding a job.

  “Dad,” M.L. said to me one day, “Herman Talmadge has a Phi Beta Kappa key, can you believe that? What did he use all that precious knowledge for? To accomplish what?” Talmadge had been governor of Georgia for too long a time, and he came from a long line of segregationist politicians who appealed to voters by feeding their hatred of Negroes.

  “The most dangerous criminal,” M.L. wrote in a student paper during his senior year at Morehouse, “may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”

  A.D. was experiencing a period of crisis in his life. He entered then dropped out of Morehouse, convinced that he could never be a minister. We argued, mainly over his dropping out of school, which I thought he should continue whether he chose to preach or not. I knew the pressure had bothered him, the constant comparisons to his brother, the great success Christine had maintained with her scholarship and, not the least of it, my stubborn insistence that he could do anything I wanted him to.

  He went out and got himself a job selling insurance, and he did this without asking me for help through my contacts in the city’s business community. In a way I liked his doing it that way, though Bunch would remind me for years afterward how annoyed I’d been when I found out.

  My worries about A.D. increased in another area, however, when he began to talk a lot about getting married, settling down, and raising his own family. Nothing would make him any more independent in my eyes, we both knew that. I was praying he wouldn’t take such a step before giving his education another chance. But the more the subject came up between us, the more clear it became that he was talking about being in love. The time for infatuation was over very early with A.D. He was not dating several young women or going out a lot to social affairs. His moods were focused on the serious side of home life.

  Bunch didn’t have to tell me, although I acted like I didn’t really know, that at age twenty my younger son had made up his mind that what he wanted for his life would have to be paid considerably more attention by everyone in his family. He wanted to be a husband and a father. His brother and sister were doing exceptionally well in school. A.D. wasn’t as interested in school as the two of them, and he knew this sooner than the rest of us admitted it. On June 17, 1950, he married Naomi Barber, a gracious, warm young woman from Dothan, Alabama, who had grown up in Atlanta and was attending Spelman College. I had asked him to wait. He decided not to. And so we welcomed into our family its newest member. And we began that glorious wait for the child A.D. and Naomi were soon expecting, the grandchild, another generation to remind us all of time moving with or without notice, and life continuing as gently and quietly as it always had.

  The years would prove that A.D. was right in his choice of Naomi. They loved each other deeply, and in her quiet, unassuming manner she always gave him her full support as he completed his education, entered the ministry, and worked with his brother in the Movement. She balanced his robust, extroverted temperament because she was not easily ruffled. She has been a wonderful mother for their five children, displaying extraordinary calmness and courage since A.D.’s death, as an only parent.

  I didn’t oppose M.L.’s wish to continue his education with advanced graduate work after he’d received a degree from Morehouse in 1948, but my hope was that he’d soon join me as co-pastor at Ebenezer. He was a fine preacher. His voice, his delivery, the structure and design of his sermons all set him apart from anyone I’d ever heard in my life. And while I wasn’t thinking about retiring just yet, slowing down some in the work of the ministry did enter my mind now and then. But when M.L. shared, first with his mother and Christine, then with A.D., and finally with me, his desire to continue formal studies in theology, we all encouraged him to pursue his own dreams. And so he went north to study, first at Crozer Seminary, in Pennsylvania, and later at Boston University. In both places he was able to broaden his knowledge tremendously, and he matured, as well, in both his personal and vocational life.

  Bunch and I worried about the effect the northern social environment might have on him when he returned home. We remembered a summer when the boys had persuaded us to let them work in the tobacco fields up in Connecticut. They came back buzzing with stories about the integrated life of the North, and how different for the Negro such an existence was. They’d seen what they considered a freer society, and I don’t think either of them was ever able to look at segregation afterward without burning with a determination to destroy that system forever. They were just young boys at this time, high-school students. But that summer they spent in Connecticut changed both of them a great deal. The North wasn’t entirely without racial discord, of course, but there was some relief from the presence of laws intended to turn people into things that were less than human.

  So, many of the young went north to school and never came back. This was a loss that hurt the South, perhaps for longer than anyone knows. Sons and daughters who loved the South, despite its failures, were driven away by the fury of the segregationist mind and heart. The South was always the part of America where the deepest emotions seemed to have been gathered for some special purpose. The task of making two people into one people in the same country was a matter for those with a strong will and a great resolve. And we came to a time when Americans had to find out whether we had the stuff to win an especially hard fight.

  Coalition politics received a stiff challenge from a more radical sector of black Atlanta at precisely those points where it was most vulnerable. In a time when the speed of all other events was increasing, the snail’s pace of southern politics made this region of the country seem as backward as some people liked to say it was, people who saw the signs and the dividing lines and the separated facilities and probably wondered how a city like Atlanta could call itself civilized when its opera house maintained a COLORED ENTRANCE.

  Atlanta’s reputation as the South’s capital was built very carefully over a period of many years. The Civil War had left a city of ashes. In earlier times, Atlanta had become a central point of the railroads as they crossed this area going west and north. As a terminal for the movement of freight to other parts of the United States, Atlanta became a stronghold for business, and a strong class of merchants and later industrialists formed here. Money made the area
into a solid base for enterprising and hard-working southerners and people who were transplanted here, mainly to do business of one sort or another. Atlanta probably recovered from the War Between the States faster than any other city, North or South. People who came to the city wanted to build something special, something that would set them apart from any other part of the South. There were the merchant and the tradesman to dislodge the old land-owning, slaveholding folks, who couldn’t hang on to any of that and were finally pushed out by those who saw a model kind of city that could rival any other in the world.

  All of this helped create the political climate of Atlanta as one that consistently favored the interests of businessmen. What was good for business was deemed to be perfect for the rest of the city, and there really could not be any departure from this philosophy that received serious attention, let alone political support. Politicians were traditionally the “friends” of the corporate mind here, and Atlanta’s ties to the people often came after businesses had tied their knots with elected officials. So things could go slowly while business claimed that everything was fine because that’s what the profit ledgers were showing. The illusion became real, and people took to fooling themselves easily until they lived day to day in a complete fantasy world.

  As Hartsfield continued the work of bringing hundreds of industrial firms into Atlanta, the city seemed to boom. By the middle 1950s he would gain for this area the South’s principal airport, probably the greatest single attraction for people looking to place any kind of major investment in the future of the South.

  A lot of these efforts were extremely important economically, but they also managed to keep Atlanta isolated from some of the cities around it. It can be said that the Civil Rights Movement reached this city last because people here had been seeing the developing rifts between whites and blacks through proverbial rose-colored glasses. The ripple going through much of the South when the Supreme Court struck down segregation in schools in 1954 wasn’t received as passionately here—nothing was during that period—and so the entire pattern of social change moving through Atlanta seemed casual at times. As progressive as the city was considered, its pioneer spirit seldom extended past the walls of board rooms. Keeping things quiet became an act and an art.

  Being proud of a child is no risk, only a great pleasure. M.L. was moving forward into a modern, advanced sort of ministry requiring lengthy and dedicated study. I admired his mind’s receptivity and the genuine passion he had for learning. His arguments, theological or not, were precisely constructed and convincing. Politically, he often seemed to be drifting away from the basics of capitalism and Western democracy that I felt very strongly about. There were some sharp exchanges; I may even have raised my voice a few times. But mainly it was a rich period in my life, when a great wealth of knowledge from around the globe could be imparted by a son to his father. Listening to the fine sermons that combined so many of the Bible’s truths with wisdom of the modern world, I marveled at how all was interwoven into a most compelling, stirring oratory. M.L. was still a son of the Baptist South, there’d never be any doubt about that. But there was a deeper, considerably more resonant quality in his preaching, and on the Sundays he relieved me in the pulpit, I grew increasingly more moved by his growth, the probing quality of his mind, the urgency, the fire that makes for brilliance in every theological setting.

  My pride swelled even further when I spoke, by telephone, with an old friend, the Reverend William H. Hester, pastor of the Twelfth Street Baptist Church up in the Roxbury section of Boston, who told me how impressed he’d been when M.L. preached there for Sunday services on a couple of occasions. In the company each time, Hester managed to add, of an extremely attractive young lady.

  Bunch was the first to notice that M.L. had stopped calling home as much as he had when he’d first gone up to Boston to study. And I was the first to think that one of two things was possible when a young man in school lost interest in reversing the charges to telephone his parents, often for hours at a time, three or four times a week: the young man had been working too much, or he’d been partying too hard. Either way, he could be headed for trouble.

  Now, as it happened, I’d been elected to the Morehouse Board of Trustees, and their annual meeting was being held in New York at about the time I became convinced my son was either in love or being driven into depression over the vast amounts of scholarly work he was now doing. School had never thrown M.L. before. But Bunch reminded me that M.L. had been getting pretty serious about a young lady in Atlanta. An engagement had been discussed. However, she wasn’t hearing from him too regularly since he’d gone off to get his doctorate. Something was up. I decided to find out just what it was. Who, I wondered, was this attractive woman the Hesters talked about?

  And so, during that winter of 1951, Bunch and I traveled to Boston following the Morehouse Trustees’ meeting in New York and dropped in on M.L. at the apartment he shared in the Roxbury section with a young fellow, Philip Leund, who’d also graduated from Morehouse. They were both glad to see us, and Bunch congratulated them on the neat way in which they kept the apartment. I noticed that, too, but I wasn’t so sure that these two fellows were responsible for the touches of housework so evident throughout the place.

  Philip graciously volunteered to drive Bunch over to visit the Hesters, and M.L. and I settled down for a little talk. I could see immediately that I’d guessed correctly. The young man was so much in love, stars were just glittering in his eyes. But he sidestepped the issue when I brought it up. Later, I found out why. He didn’t want to talk about Coretta Scott, he wanted to see her, and he wanted me to meet the young lady. She stopped by the apartment just a few minutes after Bunch and Phil Leund had left.

  Coretta was a beautiful young woman from Marion, Alabama, who’d been a student at Antioch College in Ohio before coming to Boston to study voice at The New England Conservatory of Music. She came from among strong, solid, courageous black folks who’d worked the land and built up businesses for themselves. Proud people who had produced, in Coretta, a fine, strong young daughter to carry on their traditions of hard work and high regard for education. From the moment she arrived, I knew M.L. was very much in love with her. Well, this worried me a bit. I knew of situations where young people hadn’t been able to control their desire for one another and fell victims to their mutual affection instead of becoming beneficiaries of it. Coretta seemed extremely level-headed and serious. But as I watched them make eyes at each other across the room, they seemed even younger and less mature than I knew they were.

  Bunch and I stayed in Boston for a few days, visiting with our friends the Hesters and seeing the city. M.L. and Coretta seemed to spend so much time together that I wondered when either of them got any studying done. And so on the afternoon Bunch and I planned to return to Atlanta, I decided to have a talk with the young lovers. Bunch had met Coretta only briefly and though their exchanges were very cordial, I didn’t have the impression that they’d really hit it off too well. Still, we thought it would be a good idea to see each other for a half hour or so before Bunch and I caught our train. But as we sat in the living room of M.L. and Phil’s apartment, it was very clear that my son and Miss Scott only had eyes for each other. Bunch sort of nodded at me during one point in the conversation about the weather, then asked Philip and M.L. to join her for a moment in the kitchen.

  Coretta and I sat and talked together for several minutes before anything was really said. She was planning a career on the concert stage, which I hardly thought was appropriate for a young woman seeing a young man from a strict Baptist up-bringing and background. Perhaps, I suggested, she’d find much more in common with someone from her own field of interest, music.

  Coretta didn’t let my words slip by her unnoticed, but she remained unruffled by them. I then hinted that both she and M.L. were just experiencing a little infatuation that probably wouldn’t last out the school term. She smiled but didn’t fall for that bait, either.

  Well
, I got a bit tired of the fencing, and I spoke very bluntly to Coretta.

  “Let me ask you very directly,” I said. “Do you take my son seriously, Coretta?” She thought I was joking with her, because M.L. had been displaying his dry sense of humor most of the afternoon. In answer to my question, Coretta answered, rather cheerfully I thought, “Why, no, Reverend King, not really.”

  I felt myself turn warm under the collar. I was too angry to say anything right away, but as M.L. rejoined us, I found myself speaking very rapidly to Coretta. I told her I was glad she had no serious intentions as far as M.L. was concerned. Well, naturally, upon hearing this, M.L.’s jaw dropped almost to his belt buckle. I went right on telling Coretta I thought that, under the circumstances, M.L.’s mother and I would be just as happy if things were put right out in front, openly and honestly. . . .

  Then, as people who speak a lot often will, I went a little too far, mentioning names, women to whom M.L. had proposed marriage.

  She was very cool through all of this, and I told myself that Coretta Scott was nobody to try to intimidate with rhetoric. But stubbornly, with that old country mule rising up in me, I just went right on. “M.L.,” I said, none too subtly, “has gone out with the daughters of some fine, solid Atlanta families, folks we’ve known for many years, people we respect, and whose feelings we’d never trample on. I’m talking, Coretta, about people who have much to share and much to offer.”

  She stood up. Anger flashed briefly through her eyes, but I could see also that Coretta Scott was determined not to lose control of herself. Her voice was very full and confident when she spoke.

  “I have something to offer, Reverend King.” And she made it crystal clear that she wasn’t a giggly little girl with no substance or sense or spirit. She knew just what was at stake in her relationship with M.L. She would be able to see, just as I could, the looks of concern in the faces of Ebenezer’s congregation on any Sunday morning when word got out that M.L. was becoming very serious about a woman who planned to be a musical artist. Would she continue with that, possibly traveling around the country to appear before cheering audiences and building up a following of adoring fans who left her almost no time for any personal life? Or would she just abandon that in favor of being the wife of a very promising young southern minister, mother to his children, a vital part of a tight-knit church community set very much in its own ways, which didn’t include concert singing for the pastor’s wife? These were difficult matters. Bunch understood very clearly the sacrifice many women had to make for their husbands in the ministry. She herself had been forced to give up a life in the educational system because she chose marriage over the work she’d been trained for. And now Coretta was facing the same kind of decision, with a quiet dignity that I couldn’t help admiring. I still wasn’t certain I wanted her to marry M.L., but I knew she was a person of substance.