King: A Life

In 1910, a young Black boy in Stockbridge, Georgia, named Michael King was delivering a bucket of milk to a neighbor when a group of white men demanded use of the bucket for themselves. When he refused, they beat him, prompting his mother to confront them. When a mob set upon the house later that night, his father, reasonably fearing the punishment for his wife’s actions, fled into the woods, and Michael’s family would never again find stability.

Michael’s parents had grown up during Reconstruction, when the promise of emancipation soured into the reality of economic exploitation and segregation. Michael’s parents, Jim and Delia, lived their lives in crushing poverty, and Delia only learned to read in middle age. Amid these trying conditions, the Black church was a source of both community and hope for a better life, for “their souls would never belong to a plantation owner, a landlord, a hooded Klansman, a prison warden, a sheriff, or anybody else; their souls would always be free” (14). Yet there was little peace within Michael’s family. When his father, in a drunken rage, threatened to kill him after he defended his mother from attack, the 14-year-old Michael left home and traveled to Atlanta.

Working for a railroad company in Atlanta, Michael King dreamed of being a Baptist preacher. He moved at a time when millions of Black Americans were fleeing the oppressions and poverty of the rural south for comparatively better opportunities in the North, or large southern cities like Atlanta. Georgia’s capital was the heart of a burgeoning civil rights movement, including a major branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Black churches were crucial to civil rights messaging and organizing, including Adam Daniel “A. D.” Williams of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Michael King was instantly attracted to Williams’s daughter, Alberta. His courtship took several years, and friends worried that he was less interested in Alberta than in “lining himself up to join one of Atlanta’s more prominent Black families and to lead Ebenezer Baptist Church” (22). Even so, they both attended college and were married in 1926, with Michael becoming associate pastor of the church the following year. After having a daughter, they had a son, Michael, who was born on January 15, 1929. A census taker later listed the boy as Marvin L. King Jr. and later still as Martin Luther King Jr., after his father changed his own name to Martin Luther King Sr., purportedly following a 1934 trip to Germany when he connected with the anti-authoritarian ethos of the early Protestant leader. (Eig expresses some skepticism regarding the veracity of this story, but does not interrogate it closely.)

Martin Luther King Jr. grew up on Auburn Avenue, known as “Sweet Auburn,” a relatively safe and prosperous Black enclave formed after white community leaders drove Black businesses out of downtown in the early 20th century. In 1931, A. D. Williams died suddenly, and Martin Sr. became senior pastor. Young Martin, or M. L. as he was called, would later tell a story about befriending a white boy at a young age, who then refused to associate with him upon their entering school due to the color of their skin. Telling the story many times over the years, he identified it as his first contact with racism and the painful questions of, “[W]hy am I defined and categorized? Why am I judged?” (27), although he may have been speaking more to a general moral condition than an actual personal experience.

M. L. exhibited a tremendous vocabulary from a young age, absorbing his father’s sermons and sneaking into his sister’s school before he was of age. The family was not wealthy, and his father used the corporal punishment that was common at the time, but the Kings were relatively stable and even prosperous, especially compared to most Black Americans during the Great Depression. M. L. was baptized at the age of seven, and as he grew older he became more aware of Black celebrities like singer Marian Anderson and boxing champion Joe Louis, as well as the ubiquitous racism that constrained even these giants of the Black community. His father told him “that white people used their power in the South to subjugate Black people, but that didn’t mean they had to accept it” (37), a message he conveyed to his parishioners as well. However, his father did occasionally compromise his principles, such as accepting an invitation for his choir to take part in the premiere of Gone With the Wind, accommodating himself to the white establishment by helping to promote a film that glorified slavery. M. L. himself took part in the performance, dressed as an enslaved person.

Where Martin Sr. was a stern and authoritative preacher, Alberta was a warm and attentive choir director. M. L. was particularly close with both her and her mother, and when she died suddenly when he was 12, he jumped out the window of his house and was inconsolable for days, later emerging a more somber child. Managing a growing church, Martin Sr. attempted to balance his calls for social change with a practical approach to the white establishment. Some, like A. Philip Randolph, were working to desegregate the defense industries and push for voting rights, but they also met with surveillance and even violence. The Second World War was fought to advance liberty, but Black soldiers came home to Jim Crow, lynching, and lack of access to education and housing.

M. L. skipped several grades at school, which reflected his intelligence but also may have exacerbated his immaturity. For example, at 15 he participated in a public speaking contest. He delivered a stirring address on the history of racism in America, which he mostly copied from a book of famous speeches. On the bus ride back from the contest, he was forced to give up his seat and instead stood for the entire ride, later declaring it the “angriest” moment in his life.

After his junior year of high school, M. L. joined a group of Morehouse College students to work on a tobacco farm in Connecticut, a welcome respite from the strictures of Jim Crow. The work was light, he walked around public places without fear, and he attended an integrated church. Toward the end of his time in Connecticut, he was able to meet the president of Morehouse College, Benjamin Mays, and on the train back recorded that “it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation” (56). King began his studies at Morehouse at 15, considerably younger than most of his peers. He met Walter McCall, who would prove a longtime friend, and found an adviser in Walter Chivers, a sociology professor who studied the economic roots of racism. Mays gave frequent lectures urging students to recognize that “[their] destiny is tied up, and inevitably so, with the great mass of people who do the ordinary work of the world and need their souls lifted by contact and fellowship with the more privileged among us” (60). King took to this message, working as a student journalist. His early writings incorporated the tone of the church with the structural focus of his professors. On another trip to Connecticut, he had a run-in with the police, and while the exact details are unclear, he resolved afterward to become a preacher like his father.

Martin Jr. gave his first sermon at Ebenezer at 18 years old, reflecting his familial and scholarly influences with a mix of biblical language, theological optimism, and concern for social justice. Much of the content was likely lifted from sermons he had read, but King would later say his goal was to move audiences, and that great words “are shared assets, not personal belongings” (68). As a senior at Morehouse, King was a fair student but proved attractive to many young women with his charisma, winning smile, and talent for romantic poetry. He also began working with white organizations to heal the divide of segregation, angering his father in the process. He further split with his father over his decision to pursue graduate school at the mostly white Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.

King graduated from Morehouse with a prize for oratory. During a summer research project, he told his partner, June Dobbs, that his father was a womanizer, and that he was angry that someone he respected so much—and who hypocritically denounced dancing as sinful—could succumb to temptation. King vowed to June that he would do better as an adult, but June doubted he would follow through, sincere as he was.

Entering the seminary at 19, King had more freedom than he had ever had from both his family and racist institutions, but Crozer was also a very small community, so “he studied harder than ever, dressed extra sharply, and tried not to laugh too loudly, not to dispense too many gratuitous compliments, and not to call attention to himself by arriving late to class” (75). He learned a more historicist and critical approach to the Bible than the literal approach of his youth, and he performed well in a course on Preaching Ministry of the Church. He learned to, in modern parlance, “code-switch,” adapting his personality around white or Black associates, but his preaching would prove compelling to both audiences, especially as his education came to include more diverse sources. He read philosophy and had a crisis of faith upon reading the fiercely anti-Christian Friedrich Nietzsche, but found comfort in the teachings of Walter Rauschenbusch, “who argued that the ‘Kingdom of God’ required not only personal salvation but social justice, too” (79). King’s optimistic attitude found challenges in encounters with racists in the non-segregated North, but he fought back, launching an early court challenge against a New Jersey bartender who had refused to serve him.

King dated one white woman, Betty Moitz, while at Crozer, and was “rather proud of the fact that he was able to socialize openly with a white girl” while continuing to see Black women on trips home to Atlanta (81). As his studies continued, he learned about nonviolent resistance as a means of effecting social change, based on a spirit of universal love that “made no distinction between friends and enemies, that encouraged love of everyone because God loved everyone” (84). His relationship with Betty became more serious, even though he continued to hide her from his family. He had great affection for her, but worried about the prospects for his career as a preacher, even in the comparatively liberal North. They broke up and he continued to pine for her, upset over the structural conditions that prohibited from doing as he would have wished.