A.D. KING MARTIN LUTHER KING BROTHER civil rights ATLANTA PHOTO RARE

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176299960732 A.D. KING MARTIN LUTHER KING BROTHER civil rights ATLANTA PHOTO RARE. A VERY RARE 5 3/8 X 7 INCH PHOTO OF A.D. KING WHO WAS KILLED IN 1969 AND WAS HE BROTHER OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. Alfred Daniel Williams King was an American Baptist minister and civil rights activist. He was the younger brother of Martin Luther King Jr.

INTRODUCTION

[In] the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1965.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta about noon on Tuesday, 15 January 1929. The difficult delivery occurred in the second-floor master bedroom of the Auburn Avenue home his parents shared with his maternal grandparents. From the moment of his birth, King's extended family connected him to

African-American religious traditions. His grandparents A. D. Williams and Jennie Celeste Williams had transformed nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church from a struggling congregation in the 1890s into one of black Atlanta's most prominent institutions. Martin Luther King, Sr., would succeed his father-in-law as Ebenezer's pastor, and Alberta Williams King would follow her mother as a powerful presence in Ebenezer's affairs.

Immersed in religion at home and in church, King, Jr., acquired skills and contacts that would serve him well once he accepted his calling as a minister. He saw his father and grandfather as appealing role models who combined pastoring with social activism. Although King's theological curiosity and public ministry would take him far from his Auburn Avenue origins, his basic identity remained rooted in Baptist church religious traditions that were intertwined with his family's history.

* * * * *

King, Jr.'s family ties to the Baptist church extended back to the slave era. His great-grandfather, Willis Williams, described as "an old slavery time preacher" and an "exhorter," entered the Baptist church during the period of religious and moral fervor that swept the nation in the decades before the Civil War.1 In 1846, when

Willis joined Shiloh Baptist Church in the Penfield district of Greene County, Georgia (seventy miles east of Atlanta), its congregation numbered fifty white and twenty-eight black members;2 his owner, William N.

Williams, joined later. 3

Although subordinate to whites in church governance, blacks actively participated in church affairs and served on church committees. In August 1848, members of such a committee investigated charges of theft against Willis. After listening to the committee's report the church expelled him, but two months later the church minutes reported that "Willis, servant to Bro. W. N. Williams, came forward and made himself confession of his guilt and said that the Lord had forgiven him for his error. He was therefore unanimously received into fellowship with us."4

Extant records provide no documentation of Willis's ministry, but he probably helped recruit some of the slaves who joined the church during a major revival in 1855. Between April and December of that year, nearly a hundred blacks, more than one-tenth of the slaves in the Penfield district, joined the congregation. Among them was a fifteen-year-old named Lucrecia (or Creecy) Daniel. Shiloh's minutes report that she "related an experience and was received" into church membership in April 1855.5 She and Willis were married in the late

1850s or early 1860s, and she bore him five children--including Adam Daniel (A. D.), who celebrated 2 January 1863, the day after the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation, as his birthday.6

The family left Shiloh Baptist Church when it, like other southern congregations, divided along racial lines at the end of the Civil War. At war's end, Shiloh's 77 white members were outnumbered by 144 black members, but in the following years all the black members left. Willis Williams and his family may have joined other black members of Shiloh in organizing a large black-controlled Baptist church in Penfield. 7

A. D.'s desire to follow his father's calling was evident even as a child, when "it was his greatest pleasure to preach the funeral of snakes, cats, dogs, horses or any thing that died. The children of the community would call him to preach the funeral and they would have a big shout."8 Although he was unable to attend school for

only three weeks because of the demands of sharecropping, the seven-year-old A. D. reportedly "attracted the people for miles around with his ability to count."9

A. D. Williams spent his childhood on the Williams plantation. After the death of his father in 1874, A. D. and his family moved from the Williams plantation to nearby Scull Shoals, a rural community on the Oconee River. 10Several years later, in the early 1880s, A. D. and his family joined Bethabara Baptist Church in northern Greene County. With the help of his pastor, the Reverend Parker Poullain, A.D. worked through a blueback speller and the first, second, and third readers. Williams underwent a conversion experience that confirmed his religious commitment. Poullain baptized A. D. in August 1884, and later tutored him in preparation for a preaching career. Finally, in April 1888, Williams earned his license to preach.11

The number of black Baptist churches, many of which were affiliated with Georgia's Missionary Baptist Convention, increased rapidly during the 1870s and 1880s, but general economic conditions in Greene County's Oconee River Valley declined during the latter decade. Surrounding farmlands were much less profitable than in the past, and many blacks migrated from the area.12 During the late 1880s and early 1890s, A. D. Williams

tried to make a living as an itinerant preacher, while supplementing his income with other work.13An injury in a sawmill accident left him with only the nub of a thumb. Seeking better opportunities elsewhere, A. D. Williams joined the black exodus from Greene County. In January 1893 he left for Atlanta.14

Arriving in Atlanta "with one dime and a five dollar gold piece" during the unusually cold winter of 1893, Williams used the gold piece to secure treatment for a sore throat.15 At the end of the summer, after working in a machine shop, he accepted invitations to preach at Springfield Baptist Church in Atlanta and a Baptist church in nearby Kennesaw, Georgia.16 Finally, on 14 March 1894, Williams was called to the pastorate of

Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church. One of many small Baptist congregations in the city, Ebenezer had recently lost its founding pastor, the Reverend John Andrew Parker, who had organized the church eight years earlier.17Williams took over a church with only thirteen members and "no church house at all"--a challenging situation in which he quickly demonstrated his leadership abilities, adding some sixty-five members to the church his first year. His attempt in 1896 to leave for another pastorate was "frustrated by the providence of God"; yet at Ebenezer he was "an overwhelming success." Ebenezer, his biographer recounted, "continued to grow in strength and popularity and so did he."18

Williams supplemented his income by serving as minister of other congregations in the Atlanta area before deciding to focus his energies on building Ebenezer.19 Recognizing that his long-term success as an urban minister required that he overcome academic shortcomings, Williams also enrolled at Atlanta Baptist College, taking both the elementary English and the ministers' courses of study. In May 1898 Williams received his certificate from the ministerial program.20

During the 1890s Williams also met his future wife, Jennie Celeste Parks. Born in Atlanta in April 1873, Jennie Parks was one of thirteen children. Her father, William Parks, supported his family through work as a carpenter. At age fifteen, Jennie Parks began taking classes at Spelman Seminary, becoming, according to one account, "one of Spelman's lovely girls"; her graces included "culture, unfeigned modesty, and [a] devotion to home life.21Parks left Spelman in 1892, however, without graduating. Married to A. D. Williams on 29 October 1899,

she was a deeply pious woman who always kept a Bible nearby and was "a model wife for a minister." On 13 September 1903, she gave birth at home to their only surviving child, Alberta Christine Williams, the mother of

Martin Luther King, Jr.22 During the early years of the century, the family lived in several houses in the Auburn Avenue area, which was then home to both whites and blacks.23

Like many other contemporary black ministers from similar backgrounds, Williams built his congregation by

means of forceful preaching that addressed the everyday concerns of poor and working-class residents. Despite his deficiencies "from a technical educational point of view," a biographer later insisted that Williams's "experience and profound thought and his intensive practical ways in expounding the gospel, places him easily with the leading preachers of his day and generation."24 In 1900 the Ebenezer congregation purchased a building at Bell and Gilmore streets that formerly housed the white Fifth Baptist Church, and there they remained for thirteen years. Thanks to Williams's efforts, the congregation experienced steady growth, attracting ninety-one new members in 1903 for a total membership of four hundred at year's end.

Nevertheless, Ebenezer was still overshadowed by the much larger Big Bethel AME and Wheat Street Baptist churches on Auburn Avenue.25

In addition to building his own congregation, Williams participated in the establishment of new regional and national Baptist institutions. In September 1895, Williams joined two thousand other delegates and visitors at Friendship Baptist Church to organize the National Baptist Convention, the largest black organization in the United States. By 1904 Williams was president of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers' Union, chairman of both the executive board and the finance committee of the General State Baptist Convention, and a member of the Convention's educational board and its Baptist Young Peoples' Union and Sunday School board.26

Black-white relations in Atlanta were undergoing major changes during the early years of the twentieth century. Booker T. Washington's historic address delivered at Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895 had signaled the beginning of a period of rapid economic growth and intensified racial restrictions. Black migrants sought to participate in the city's economic growth, and by 1900 black Atlantans constituted nearly 40 percent of the city's population. In 1900, some black residents departed from Washington's accommodationist strategy by launching an unsuccessful streetcar boycott to protest new regulations requiring segregation on all public transportation. In the same year, the Georgia Democratic Party adopted rules that barred the participation of blacks in the party's primary.27

Williams, along with other black religious leaders, were pioneering advocates of a distinctive African-American version of the social gospel, endorsing a strategy that combined elements of Washington's emphasis on black business development and W. E. B. Du Bois's call for civil rights activism. In mid-February 1906, A. D. Williams joined five hundred black Georgians in organizing the Georgia Equal Rights League to protest the white primary system. They elected William Jefferson White as president and AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and CME Bishop R. S. Williams as vice presidents. White urged the delegates to recognize the importance of both black economic development and civil protest. Turner, one of the most prominent black religious leaders of the period, was outspoken advocate of racial pride and a caustic critic of prevailing racial policies. "To the Negro . . . the American flag is a dirty and contemptible rag," he cried. "Hell is an improvement upon the United States when the Negro is involved."28 The convention's address to the public protested lynching, peonage, the

convict lease system, inequitable treatment in the courts, inferior segregated public transportation, unequal distribution of funds for public education, and exclusion of black men from the electorate, juries, and the state militia. A. D. Williams and Turner signed the address along with sixteen other leaders, including Atlanta University professor W. E. B. DuBois; Atlanta Baptist College president-elect John Hope; J. Max Barber, editor of The Voice of the Negro; and Peter James Bryant, pastor of Wheat Street Baptist Church.29

Soon after this gathering, in September 1906, African-American advancement efforts received a serious setback when Atlanta experienced a major race riot. Newspaper reports and rumors of black assaults on white women had already inflamed the fears of whites. When white gangs assaulted isolated African Americans, they met little opposition from police. Larger mobs of whites, numbering in the thousands, then attacked and looted black businesses on Auburn Avenue. Rioters derailed trolley cars and beat to death blacks who

happened to be on the streets. Commerce in the city almost ceased for three days as many Atlantans remained in their homes. After five days of violence, the city resumed a sullen peace. Official accounts listed one white and twenty-six black deaths and more than 150 blacks seriously wounded. The riot destroyed the illusion that Atlanta was a New South paradigm of racial harmony and reinforced the trend toward increased residential segregation in the Auburn Avenue neighborhood, which now became the center of

African-American economic and social life in Atlanta.30

Williams and other black Atlanta residents faced new racial barriers in the years after the riot, but Auburn Avenue businesses thrived during the following two decades as the black community turned inward, supporting its own institutions. Although Williams continued to oppose racial discrimination, he benefitted from the new realities of white flight from and black movement into the Auburn Avenue area. Several years after the riot, Williams purchased the two-story Queen Anne-style building on Auburn Avenue in which King, Jr. would be born.31 An Odd Fellow, Williams also served on the order's Industrial Commission, which planned to develop

Odd Fellow City, an African-American community near Elberton, Georgia. He joined Bishop Turner in a controversial business venture, the Silver Queen Mining Company, which sold stock in a silver mine in Mexico. Benjamin Davis, editor of the black newspaper the Atlanta Independent, criticized the venture as "a fake, pure and simple" and offered space in the newspaper to Turner and Williams "to explain their connection with this fraudulent scheme" to the "many thousands of poor Negroes that are being defrauded throughout the state." 32 Turner responded that stock was sold "to colored people only" because the corporation was a "colored organization" and "a stepping stone to teach our people how to do business, and put some money in their pockets." He said he had visited the mine with two reputable mining engineers. "The reports from these two gentlemen were good," he concluded, "and there is no fake about the Company, but a straight, fair, square proposition." 33Although Turner's response did not satisfy Davis, the reputations of the two

preacher-entrepreneurs suffered no permanent damage because of the controversy.

Williams continued to involve himself in business ventures that capitalized on and enhanced his success as Ebenezer's pastor. By the beginning of 1913 the growing congregation had 750 members and was planning further expansion. In January the church purchased a lot on the corner of Auburn Avenue and Jackson Street. Six months later it announced plans to raise $25,000 for a new church building, which would include an auditorium and gallery seating 1,250 people. "Few Churches in the city have made strides more rapidly," conceded theIndependent, "nor have contributed more to the moral and intellectual growth of the city. Dr.

Williams is an earnest, conscientious and well-informed minister whose influence in the city is acknowledged and appreciated."34 In March 1914, Ebenezer celebrated the beginning of Williams's third decade as its pastor

by breaking ground for the new building. While the basement was under construction, the congregation worshipped in a hall above a storefront on Edgewood Avenue. That spring, many of the older children of the church, including ten-year-old Alberta Williams, were converted in a ten-day revival, baptized in a borrowed pool at Wheat Street Baptist Church, and formally admitted to church membership. When the basement was capped with a roof in the late spring of 1914, "there was a great march" as worshippers entered the basement to hold services for the first time. Ebenezer's building was finally completed in 1922.35

As he consolidated his institutional base at Ebenezer, A. D. Williams continued to expand his regional influence. In the fall of 1913 he was elected moderator of the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association.36 He played a role in power struggles among Baptist leaders, including a dispute within the National Baptist Convention over ownership of the National Baptist Publishing House.37 He also served as treasurer of Atlanta's YMCA campaign

and of the Georgia State Baptist Convention, where he had fiduciary responsibility for a new youth reformatory established by the convention in Macon, Georgia. A year after Atlanta Baptist College was renamed Morehouse College (in honor of a white executive of the American Baptist Home Mission Society),

Williams became chairman of the finance committee of the Morehouse College Alumni Association; that same year, the college honored him with a Doctor of Divinity degree.38

Early in 1917, A. D. Williams became involved in an effort, initiated by Atlanta University graduate Walter White, to organize a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).39 After the branch was chartered, he and other NAACP members, along with members of the

Neighborhood Union, a black women's group, launched a prolonged campaign to improve conditions in black schools. The catalyst was the plan by the Board of Education to close seventh-grade classes in its black schools in order to pay for a new junior high school for white students. A committee, which included branch president Harry H. Pace, Lugenia Burns Hope of the Neighborhood Union, and her husband, Morehouse president John Hope, presented a petition protesting the plan to the all-white school board. A. D. Williams represented the black Baptist ministerial alliance at the meeting with the board. "You, with fifty schools, most of them ample, efficient and comfortable, for the education of your children," said the petitioners, "can square neither your conscience with your God nor your conduct with your oaths, and behold Negro children in fourteen unsanitary, dilapidated, unventilated school rooms, with double sessions in half of the grades, no industrial facilities, no preparation for high schools and no high schools for the blacks." In the end, the school board acceded to the petitioners' plea to reinstate the seventh grade for blacks.40

The issue of black schools spurred membership in the new NAACP branch, which climbed to four hundred by the end of March. Yet subsequent petitions to the school board--for better school buildings, a commercial and industrial junior high, a high school for black students, and the elimination of double sessions in all public schools--met with no success. Thereafter, wartime mobilization and rebuilding after a devastating fire in May 1917 caused popular commitment to the NAACP to wane.41 By June 1918, membership had declined to

forty-nine due to Walter White's departure for the NAACP's New York office and the resignation of the branch president. The enervated branch appealed to Atlanta's Baptist and Methodist ministerial associations for support. In response, A. D. Williams agreed to serve as branch president and was formally elected on 9 July.42

Williams--described in one account as "a forceful and impressive speaker, a good organizer and leader, a man of vision and brilliant imagination, which he sometimes finds it necessary to curb"--experienced initial success as an NAACP leader.43 A month after his election, he announced an ambitious drive to attract five thousand

new members. The Atlanta Independent illustrated its confidence in Williams's ability to revive the organization with a front page cartoon depicting a black gladiator, whose shield was the NAACP, slaying the hydra-headed monster of the grandfather clause, lynching, peonage, and segregation. The branch did grow: to 1,400 members within five months. During his tenure, the newly invigorated NAACP spearheaded a major effort to register black voters in anticipation of a local referendum on school taxes and bond issues for public works that would allocate a disproportionate share of the funds raised went to white institutions. The 2,500 black Atlantans who paid the poll tax and overcame other obstacles to become registered voters were able to defeat the education measures in the nonpartisan referendum.44 When local authorities put the issues to a

vote again in April 1919, Atlanta's NAACP submitted a petition to the mayor and the board of education outlining the inadequate conditions in black schools and stating the group's terms for supporting the bond issues and tax increase. Again black Atlantans, not convinced by official promises, helped to defeat the measures.45

In June 1919, A. D. Williams led an Atlanta delegation to the NAACP national convention in Cleveland. In a speech there, Williams told how black voters had rejected the referenda in Atlanta and attributed the rapid increase in black voter registration to the work of women. "We got our women organized and put the women in different districts and we had meetings weekly," Williams explained. "There is one gentleman [who] said we couldn't get members by having meetings; we got a number that way Night after night people came

forward and paid their dollar. That was done largely because the women were allowed to make speeches.

They made such speeches you would be surprised." Williams ended by extending an invitation from the governor of Georgia, the mayor of Atlanta, and the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce to hold the organization's 1920 convention in that city, still notorious as the site of the 1906 riot. "Somebody says it is not time to go down to Atlanta now, but it is, you are due there," Williams asserted.46 After some hesitation, the NAACP

voted to make Atlanta the site of its first national convention in the South.47

By May 1920, however, when the NAACP convened at Auburn Avenue's Big Bethel AME Church, Williams had been forced to step down as branch president. The preceding year some NAACP members had moved to boycott the white press in favor of black newspapers such as the Atlanta Independent. Williams opposed the move. In retaliation, the editor of the Independent, Benjamin Davis, lashed out, attacking Williams in scurrilous cartoons and editorials and charging him with "suppression of speech, arbitrary ruling, despotism in the chair," and other misuses of authority.48 Nevertheless, Williams served on the local host committee for the NAACP

conference, an event that enhanced the city's reputation for racial tolerance. "Atlanta treated us royally," NAACP leader Mary White Ovington recalled, "and there were white men . . . who attended our sessions every evening. The press gave us unusually fine publicity, featuring on its front page our demands for unsegregated traveling accommodations and for the vote."49

Williams remained active in racial advancement efforts, achieving another victory in the school bond election of March 1921. With the addition of women to the electorate, black voter registration more than doubled in two years. This rise in representation, combined with the results of the 1919 balloting, convinced white leaders to make firm commitments to the black community. The bond issues now passed overwhelmingly in a record turnout. Several million dollars were earmarked to build eighteen new schools, including four black elementary schools and Atlanta's first public secondary school for black students. Martin Luther King, Jr., would receive most of his public education in two of the new schools, David T. Howard Elementary School and Booker T. Washington High School.50

In the fall of 1922, the Atlanta Independent endorsed Williams for the newly vacant post of president of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia. "Dr. Williams may not be the most learned philosopher among our preachers, the best scholar or the deepest theologian, but he is easily the best businessman, and that is what the state Baptist convention needs at its head," editor Benjamin Davis argued.51 That November,

however, Williams lost the election.52 Even so, by then his institutional ties reached broadly and deeply

throughout Atlanta's black community. Williams was on the executive board of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia, chaired its Mission Board, and served as a trustee of its Central City College in Macon. He had also served the Baptist community as president of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers Union and moderator of the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association for seven years, as Georgia's representative on the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention for a dozen years, and as floor leader of Georgia's delegation for six years.53 In the last of these roles, he had attended the tumultuous National Baptist

Convention held in St. Louis in December 1922, where he participated in the unsuccessful effort to elect Peter James Bryant of Atlanta's Wheat Street Baptist Church to succeed the convention's first president, Elias Camp Morris. In the end, the Reverend Lacey Kirk Williams of Chicago's Olivet Baptist Church won the election, after a two-month campaign marked by "bitter feelings" and "the ugliest things ever said by one preacher about another"54

A. D. Williams regained some of his earlier prominence as a civil rights leader in February 1924, when he was reelected as president of the moribund Atlanta NAACP branch. Despite earlier criticisms, the Atlanta Independent reported Williams's return in hopeful terms: "It was the ballot that gave Atlanta Negroes modern

. . . schoolhouses and facilities; and it was the inspiration that the race received from the local branch under the leadership of Dr. A. D. Williams that put the fight in their bones."55 Williams's program for the

revitalization of the branch called for drives to increase membership to two thousand and to register ten thousand black voters; he also advocated passage of bond issues for more and better schools, boycotts of office buildings where black people were barred from elevators, and improved park and recreational facilities for the black community. Williams and other NAACP leaders aggressively promoted branch membership and voter registration and eventually won additional funding for Atlanta's beleagured black public schools.56

In the meantime, Williams was unable to prevent a decline in Ebenezer's membership, from nine hundred in 1918 to three hundred by 1924. 57 As he entered the seventh decade of his life and his fourth decade as

pastor of Ebenezer, he faced strong competition from younger ministers. Some members, too, may have left to join the northern migration. Although Williams himself had thought of moving during the years after World War I, by the mid-1920s he realized that his future, for better or worse, was at Ebenezer. By then he had met Michael King, the man who would become his son-in-law and reinvigorate his pastorate.

* * * * *

Like A. D. Williams a quarter of a century earlier, King had come to Atlanta from rural Georgia, with little money or education but with a fierce desire to succeed. In 1920, when he first met the Alberta Williams, Reverand Williams's daughter, King was twenty-three and studying elementary English at a preparatory school. She was sixteen and attending Spelman Seminary's four-year high school program. Even before meeting her, he had heard about her "gracious manners, captivating smile and scholarly manner" and knew that she had "organized a fine choir in her father's church." He told incredulous friends of his plan to marry the daughter of one of Atlanta's most prominent ministers although he had not yet met her. Driven by his desire to be taken seriously as a suitor and a minister, King struggled to rectify his educational deficiencies by attending night classes until he was able to afford day school. "I had no natural talent for study," he admitted, "and my

learning came after long, long hours of going over and over and over the work until I was falling asleep saying my lessons to myself." The school principal drilled King in English syntax. He also encouraged his pupil to register to vote. When King sought to do so, however, he discovered the maze of obstacles placed in the way of black people, including the poll tax, literacy test, and even elevators to the "colored registration office" that did not work. He made several attempts before becoming a registered voter.58

King's determination was rooted in his childhood experiences with poverty and racism. His grandfather Jim Long had been used by his owner to breed slaves, conceiving children with several women. Census records show that after the Civil War, Long maintained at least two families in Henry County, where he also registered to

vote during Reconstruction.59 Long's relationship with Jane Linsey produced a daughter, Delia, who married James Albert King, King, Jr.'s grandfather.60 Little is known about King's early life and heritage, except that he

was probably of Irish-African ancestry and born outside the South.61 Following their marriage in Stockbridge

on 20 August 1895, twenty-year-old Delia Linsey and thirty-one-year-old James King became sharecroppers, moving from place to place in Henry and Clayton counties. After 1900 they settled in Stockbridge, an area of unexceptional farmland later romanticized in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Unlike Willis Williams's Greene County, Henry County never had many large plantations. It was a section of hard-scrabble farms, where black and white people alike scratched a living from hard red clay. Like many families, the Kings were poor; the county tax lists record little personal property for James King.62

The large King family included nine children (plus one who died in infancy). Michael (or M. L.), the second child and first son, was born on 19 December 1897.63 During his childhood, M. L. King later recalled, "my mother

had babies, worked the fields, and often went during the winter to wash and iron in the homes of whites around town." His father's life followed the unchanging seasonal labors of a sharecropper: spring sowing of cotton in fields fertized with foul-smelling guano; summer weeding; fall picking and chopping; and winter

turning of the resistant soil. The rewards were paltry, made even more so by the inability of powerless blacks to prevent cheating by whites. On one occasion, Michael King remembered accompanying his father to "settle up" with the white landlord. When he pointed out that his father was due more money, the landlord threatened him. A fight was narrowly averted, but the King family was forced off the property and had to seek aid from a white landowner who employed Delia King and Woodie, Michael's older sister, as laundresses. The family then moved into a little frame building on his property.64

For Delia King and her children, the rituals of the black church offered relief from this life of hardship.

Although the family occasionally attended a local Methodist as well as the Baptist church, they established enduring ties with Floyd Chapel Baptist Church in Stockbridge. Its Sunday services, Wednesday prayer meetings, baptisms, weddings, funerals, and special Christmas and Easter services offered welcome diversions. "Church was a way to ease the harsh tone of farm life, a way to keep from descending into bitterness," Michael King wrote. "Papa was not religious, and although I don't think he was very enthusiastic about my attending so

many church affairs, he never interfered with Mama's taking me." Unable to find solace in religion, James King became increasingly cynical in the face of the economic and racial hardships of his life. His family became targets of his angry outbursts, fueled by alcoholism.65

The King children attended school from three to five months a year at the Stockbridge Colored School. Michael King's teacher, the wife of his pastor, taught 234 children in all the grades. "We had no books, no materials to write with, and no blackboard for her to use in instructing us," King wrote. "But I loved going, particularly when we began learning numbers, which always had a fascination for me."66

According to his memoirs, King experienced a number of brutal incidents as he grew up in a troubled family in the rural South.67 On one occasion, when he was passing a local sawmill fetching milk for his mother, he was

stopped by a sawmill owner who demanded that King get a bucket of water for the sawmill workmen. The youngster politely declined, whereupon the white man beat him and kicked over his milk. Mike ran home and explained what had happened. His enraged mother then returned with her son to the mill to confront the owner; when he acknowledged that he had hit the boy, she knocked him down and pummeled him. Jim King, upon hearing of the incident, took his rifle to the mill and threatened to kill the man. That evening, white men mounted on horses visited the King house in search of the father. Having heard that they were after him, however, King had already fled. He lived for months in the woods, and by the time tempers had cooled enough for him to return to his family, he was drinking heavily, and Delia was in poor health. One evening Jim King came home drunk and angry and began to assault his wife. Mike came to his mother's defense and subdued his father. The next day, Mike promised not to challenge his father's authority; Jim, in turn, pledged to never hit his wife again.68

Within the walls of Floyd Chapel Baptist Church, meanwhile, Michael grew to respect the few black preachers who were willing to speak out against racial injustices, despite the risk of violent white retaliation. He also admired ministers, such as his own pastor, the Reverend W. H. Lowe, who could recite Scripture largely from memory, preach in rich cadences, and lead traditional Baptist congregational a capella singing. "The human voice was the rural church's organ and piano," King recalled.69 By age ten Mike King had developed his own talent for singing, and during his teenager years he was a member of an a capella singing group that toured local churches. He gradually developed an interest in preaching, initially practicing eulogies on the family's chickens, which he then dispatched. By the end of 1917 he had decided to become a minister, choosing the Baptist church because its nonhierarchical structure seemed to offer more opportunities for a person, such as himself, with little formal education. (Like many other rural preachers, King was barely literate; his religious training was limited to instruction from his pastor and his experience as a church member. School records indicate that by age fifteen, he had learned to read but could not write.)70 After the minister and deacons of

his church licensed him to preach, a small rural church between Jonesboro and Atlanta invited King to become its pastor. Overcoming the resistance of church officers who felt he was too young, King was able to convince

his examiners that he should be ordained. By that time, he had already developed a conception of his role as a

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pastor concerned about the everyday lives of his congregation.

In the spring of 1918 King left Stockbridge to make his home in Atlanta, an attractive place for an ambitious young country preacher. He joined his older sister, Woodie, who had left Stockbridge for the city a year or so earlier. King roomed with a family near Auburn Avenue. He worked first in a vulcanizing shop that made tires. When he failed to get a raise, he quit to load cotton bales and then drove a truck for a firm that sold barbers

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chairs.

By the summer of 1919 Woodie King had moved from her first residence with a cousin and was boarding at the Williams home. Michael King seized the opportunity to introduce himself to Alberta Williams. He began to see her regularly before asking her to "consider entering a courtship" with him. The courtship persisted even when Alberta Williams, at her father's insistence, departed to attend Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute in

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Virginia. Her parents welcomed King into the family circle, however, eventually treating him as a son and

encouraging the young minister to overcome his educational deficiencies as the elder Williams had done three decades earlier.

* * * * *

In March 1924, shortly after A. D. Williams celebrated his thirtieth anniversary as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Alberta returned to Atlanta after completing a two-year teaching program at Hampton. Her engagement to Michael King was announced at Ebenezer's Sunday services. Because the school board did not allow married women in classrooms, Alberta Williams taught only briefly in Rockdale County and at Atlanta's

W. H. Crogman Elementary School before her marriage.74 Meanwhile King served as pastor of several

churches in nearby College Park, while studying at Bryant Preparatory School. Shortly after the engagement, his mother died, prompting his father to request his return to help on the farm. Instead of complying, he followed the urging of Alberta Williams and her father to finish at Bryant and to seek admission to Morehouse College.75 Despite being twice refused admission owing to poor test scores, King, backed by influential

alumnus A. D. Williams, appealed his case to President John Hope and Dean Samuel Howard Archer. He was finally admitted as a beginning student at the Morehouse School of Religion in the fall of 1926.76

Like Williams, King studied in Morehouse's three-year minister's degree program, headed by Dr. Charles Hubert. Although he found the work difficult, he received encouragement from Hubert, who offered helpful criticisms of sermons King prepared. He recalled failing an introductory course in English twice and only receiving a passing grade on his third attempt in summer school. To study for a biology course, he relied on the help of classmate Melvin H. Watson, the son of a longtime clerk at Ebenezer Baptist Church. His closest friend was Sandy Ray of Texas, a fellow seminarian. "We shared an awe of city life, of cars, of the mysteries of college scholarship, and, most of all, of our callings to the ministry," King recalled.77

On Thanksgiving Day 1926, the Reverend Michael Luther King and Alberta Christine Williams were married at Ebenezer. Atlanta's most prominent black Baptist ministers--Bryant of Wheat Street, E. R. Carter of Friendship, and James M. Nabrit of Mt. Olive--performed the ceremony. When the newlyweds moved into an upstairs bedroom of the Williams's house on Auburn Avenue, many people assumed that King would succeed his father-in-law at Ebenezer. Williams encouraged him to consider the possibility, but King initially resisted. He was already serving two congregations at College Park and East Point, and he was still learning the ministry. If he was to be Williams's successor, he wanted to merit the position, not inherit it.78

According to King's recollections, A. D. Williams inspired him in many ways. Both men preached a social-gospel Christianity that combined a belief in personal salvation with the need to apply the teachings of Jesus to the daily problems of their black congregations. Both also avoided an overreliance on emotional oratory, which sometimes was meant to disguise lack of content. King later noted his high regard for Williams's sermons. "[He] could preach with force and power. Some of the things I started off to do as a preacher he corrected . . . He turned me around and put me on the right road."79

The family of M. L. and Alberta Williams grew rapidly. On 11 September 1927, the first child was born to the Kings and named Willie Christine for her grandfather and for her mother. M. L. King, Jr., the first son and grandson in the extended family, was born next on 15 January 1929. A second son--named Alfred Daniel Williams, after his grandfather-arrived on 30 July 1930, a month after King, Sr., received his bachelor's degree in theology.80

The black community into which King, Jr., was born had changed substantially during his grandfather's forty years in Atlanta. The city's population had grown from 65,500 people in 1890 to 270,500 in 1930, while the percentage of blacks in the city had declined from 43 to 33 percent. Because of legal and social restrictions, Atlanta's blacks were now heavily concentrated in the "Sweet Auburn" district and in southwest Atlanta near Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University. 81 In 1928, just as Benjamin Davis's Independent was foundering,

W. A. Scott launched the Atlanta World. The new paper flourished, becoming the Atlanta Daily Worldin 1932, the first black-owned daily newspaper in the country. At the same time, older black leaders like A. D. Williams were gradually being replaced by a new generation of ministers that included King, Sr., who was, by then, president of the Atlanta Sunday School and Baptist Young Peoples Union convention and moderator of the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association.

A. D. Williams died on 21 March 1931. The massed choirs of Ebenezer, Liberty, Traveler's Rest, and Wheat Street Baptist churches sang at his funeral, "a huge and emotional ceremony," as King, Sr., recalled.82 The

sixteen eulogies included offerings by Benjamin Davis; W. A. Fountain and J. S. Flipper, bishops of the AME church; John Hope, president of Atlanta University and Morehouse; Florence M. Read, president of Spelman; Dr. Will Alexander of the Commission on Inter-racial Cooperation; and Dr. James M. Nabrit of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia. Letters, resolutions, and telegrams of condolence and tribute came from across the country. The Georgia Baptist's obituary was effusive: "`A. D.' was a sign post among his neighbors, and a mighty oak in the Baptist forest of the nation," it said. "Born in the country and with limited literary preparation, his wealth of native ability, tact and application made him a man among men and a force to be reckoned with in local, state, and national economic and ecclesiastical councils. He was a preacher of unusual power, an appealing experimentalist, a persuasive evangelist, and a convincing doctrinarian."83

* * * * *

As a child, King, Jr., was constantly reminded of the depth of his family's roots in Ebenezer Church and Atlanta's black community. Although his father's increasingly impressive accomplishments would in time overshadow those of his grandfather, Williams's influence at Ebenezer remained strong even after his death. King, Sr., did not leave Traveler's Rest to succeed his father-in-law until the fall of 1931, by which time he had sufficiently overcome his feeling of unpreparedness in assuming the post. It took several years, however, before he gained the full trust and support of Ebenezer's deacons--years in which he provided remarkably effective leadership and restored the church to financial security.84

Beyond his grandfather's legacy, the forces shaping King, Jr.'s emerging personality were the stable influences of family, church, and community. King remembered his childhood as one of harmony. In an autobiographical statement written in early adulthood, King, Jr., depicted a happy childhood spent "in a very congenial home situation," with parents who "always lived together very intimately." He could "hardly remember a time that they ever argued (My father happens to be the kind who just [won't] argue), or had any great fall out."85

Hidden from view were his parents' negotiations regarding their differing notions on discipline. His father believed strict discipline was sometimes necessary to prepare his offspring for the often cruel society they would enter. "To prepare a child for a world where death and violence are always near drains a lot of energy from the soul," King, Sr., later explained. "Inside you, there is always a fist balled up to protect them. And a constant sense of the hard line between maintaining self-respect and getting along with the enemy all around you."86

As a father, King, Sr., found it difficult to control his temper and to soften the sharper edges of personality that had enabled him to survive the hardships of his early life. "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."87 L. D. Reddick, an

acquaintance of the King family, described the household as "father-centered," a place where King, Sr.'s word, "considerate and benevolent as he tried to make it, was final."88 The elder King's own recollections, however,

suggest that his paternal desires were neither unbending nor always obeyed. Although he believed that the "switch was usually quicker and more persuasive" in disciplining his boys (Christine was "exceptionally

well-behaved"), he increasingly deferred to his wife's less stern but effective approaches to child rearing, recognizing that her gentleness and empathy did not result in permissiveness--"they couldn't get up early enough in the morning to fool her." King, Sr., later acknowledged that his wife "insisted . . . 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." His own difficult relationship with his embittered, violence-prone father prepared him to accept the possibility that only his wife could "investigate and soothe" his oldest son's "sensitivities." "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."89 King, Jr., would later describe "Mother Dear" as

being "behind the scene setting forth those motherly cares, the lack of which leaves a missing link in life."90

Protected and loved by concerned, confident, and accommodating parents, the King children also benefited from the presence in their household of Jennie Celeste Williams. As First Lady of Ebenezer, Williams was involved in most aspects of church governance, heading the Missionary Society for many years. She represented the church in local Baptist organizations and in the Woman's Convention, an auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention. Known as "Mama" to her grandchildren, she was especially protective of her first grandson and "could never bear to see him cry." Referring to her as "saintly," King, Jr., acknowledged her considerable impact on his childhood. "She was very dear to each of us, but especially to me," he later wrote. "I sometimes think that I was [her] favorite grandchild. I can remember very vividly how she spent many evenings telling us interesting stories."91

Beyond the family home, the King children spent most of their time at Ebenezer church. As King, Jr., later explained, "the church has always been a second home for me." Nearly all his initial friendships developed there. "My best friends were in Sunday School, and it was the Sunday School that helped me to build the capacity for getting along with people." 92 Even King, Jr.'s earliest letters to his parents, written between the

ages of eleven and fifteen, convey an intimate knowledge of Baptist church life, including such details as congregational governance, ward meetings, church finances, and social events.

In addition to observing his father's leadership role, King, Jr.'s church activities also brought him into close association with his mother, who was Ebenezer's organist and choir director. As in other African American Baptist churches, the music and singing at Ebenezer played a major role in attracting and holding members. King, Sr. believed that "religious ideas and ideals have been shaped as much by gospel songs as by gospel sermons." 93 Alberta King's musical talent caused her to be in demand at various Baptist gatherings in Georgia and even in meetings of the National Baptist Convention. In 1937, before graduating from Morris Brown College, Alberta Brown initiated a series of annual musicales featuring the church's choirs. Ebenezer's choirs also performed at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of Gone With The Wind. By the early 1940s the annual concerts were attracting overflowing crowds. From the age of four, King Jr., often performed with his mother at

Ebenezer and at other churches and religious gatherings, singing such songs as "I Want to be More and More Like Jesus" with his mother providing accompaniment.94 His father recalled his son's appreciation for chrch "ceremonies and ritual,the passionate love of Baptist music.95

The King children observed their father's increasingly evident achievements as a minister. Faced with mortgage foreclosure on Ebenezer in the years after A. D. Williams's death, King, Sr., reinvigorated the church through successful membership and fundraising drives and was able to pay off the note within four years. The family's living standard also improved. Indeed, King, Sr., later stated, "the deacons took great pride in knowing that young Reverend King was the best-paid Negro minister in the city."96 In 1934, his finances were such that he

could attend the World Baptist Alliance in Berlin. Traveling by ocean liner to France, King and ten other ministers journeyed by train from Paris to Rome, then by boat to Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. The tour was highlighted by visits to historic sites in Palestine and the Holy Land. "In Jerusalem, when I saw with my own eyes the places where Jesus had lived and taught, a life spent in the ministry seemed to me even more compelling," King recalled. Upon arrival in Berlin--where they noted many ominous signs of the rise of Adolf Hitler--the group joined thousands of Baptist clergymen from around the world. King's return to Atlanta in August 1934 was front-page news in the Atlanta Daily World.97 The increasing prominence and relative affluence of

Ebenezer's pastor was also reflected by the now-final transformation of his name: from Michael King to Michael Luther King to Martin Luther King (although close friends and relatives continued to refer to him and his son as Mike or M. L.).98

Despite the senior King's relative wealth, the family did not join the migration to the more prestigious neighborhoods that were being settled by middle-class blacks. King's anti-elitist attitudes were cultivated by his parents who discouraged him from developing feelings of class superiority. The King children often heard the story of A. D. Williams's stern rebuke of a parishioner who had corrected his grammar: "I done give a hundred dollars but the gentleman who corrected me has given nothing." 99 King Jr., worked a variety of jobs -

delivering the Atlanta Journal from age eight and holding manual labor positions as a teenager. He connected the "anti capitalistic feelings" he had developed by late adolescence with his childhood observations of "the numerous people standing in bread lines" during the Depression.100

At about age six, King, Jr., had an experience that profoundly affected his attitudes toward white people. When a white playmate he had known for three years entered Atlanta's segregated school system, the friend's father told his son that he could no longer play with King. "I never will forget what a great shock this was to me," King, Jr., later recalled. He remembered discussing the matter with his parents over dinner and realizing for the first time "the existence of a race problem." King's parents told him of the "tragedies" of racism and recounted "some of the insults they themselves had confronted on account of it. I was greatly shocked, and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person." Although his parents told him that he "should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty as a Christian to love him," he was not satisfied. "The question arose in my mind, how could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends?"101

King, Jr.'s schooling officially began at the end of January 1935. A year earlier he had tried to join his sister in the first grade of Yonge Street Elementary School; the attempt to enter school early was apparently foiled, however, when a teacher overheard him talking about his last birthday party. After a half-year as a first grader, though, he was promoted to the second grade anyway. In the fall of 1936, he entered the third grade at David T. Howard Elementary School, where he remained through the sixth grade.102 He then entered the

Laboratory High School of Atlanta University, an experimental, progressive private school that appealed to black residents seeking alternatives to Atlanta's crowded public schools. He completed two years there -- earning generally good grades except for a failing grade in social studies -- before the school was closed.103

During King's childhood and teenage years, he became increasingly aware of his father's vocal opposition to segregation. The elder King not only engaged in individual acts of dissent, such as riding the "whites only" City

Hall elevator to reach the voter registrar's office, and participating in protest movements for civil rights, but also was a leader of organizations such as the Atlanta Civic and Political League and the NAACP. In 1939, he proposed, to the opposition of more cautious clergy and lay leaders, a massive voter registration drive to be initiated by a march to City Hall. At an Ebenezer rally of more than a thousand activists, King referred to his own past and urged black people toward greater militancy. "I ain't gonna plow no more mules," he shouted. "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!" 104 A year later King, Sr., braved racist threats

when he became chair of the Committee on the Equalization of Teachers' Salaries, organized to protest discriminatory policies that paid higher salaries to white teachers than to blacks with equivalent qualifications and experience. With NAACP legal help, the movement resulted in significant gains.

Although too young to understand fully his father's activism, King, Jr., later wrote that he and his siblings wondered how their father avoided being physically attacked during the "tension-packed atmosphere" of their childhood years. Dinner discussions in the King household often touched on political matters as King, Sr., expressed his views about "the ridiculous nature of segregation in the South." Fearing that they might endure humiliating treatment, King forbade his children to attend segregated theaters. King, Jr., later remembered witnessing his father standing up to a policeman who stopped the elder King for a traffic violation and referred to him as a "boy." According to King, Jr., his indignant father responded by pointing to his son and asserting, "This is a boy. I'm a man, and until you call me one, I will not listen to you." The shocked policeman "wrote the ticket up nervously, and left the scene as quickly as possible."105

On another occasion during the time of the voting rights campaign, King, Jr., again witnessed his father's determination not to accept racial discrimination. His father asked for a pair of shoes at a downtown store. When the white clerk told the two that they must go to the back of the store for service, King, Sr., refused and left the store. Years later, King, Jr., recalled the incident: "I still remember walking down the street beside him as he muttered, `I don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.'"106

King, Sr.'s activism shaped his son's understanding of the ministry and presaged King, Jr.'s own career. Along with other "progressive" black Baptist preachers, the elder King stressed the need for an educated, politically active ministry. In 1942 he spearheaded an effort in the National Baptist Convention to pressure President Franklin Roosevelt to eliminate racial discrimination on trains. In an earlier speech expressing his views on "the true mission of the Church" King, Sr., told his fellow clergymen that the church must

touch every phase of the community life. Quite often we say the church has no place in politics, forgetting the words of the Lord, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the

broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." . . .

In this we find we are to do something about the broken-hearted, poor, unemployed, the captive, the blind, and the bruised. How can people be happy without jobs, food,

shelter and clothes? . . .

God hasten the time when every minister will become a registered voter and a part of every movement for the betterment of our people. Again and again has it been said we cannot lead where we do not go, and we cannot teach what we do not know.

As ministers a great responsibility rests upon us as leaders. We cannot expect our

107

people to register and become citizens until we as leaders set the standard.

King, Jr.'s, recollections suggest that he entered his teenage years with enormous admiration for his father's social commitment and with a sense of religion as a constant source of support. On the traumatic occasion of his grandmother's death on 18 May 1941, he accepted his parents' spiritual guidance. King learned about the fatal heart attack of Jennie Celeste Williams while attending a parade without his parents' permission. Grieved by the death of his beloved "Mama" and remorseful about his transgression, King initially reacted by jumping

from a second-floor window of his home. While neither King nor his father later mentioned a suicide attempt in their autobiographical statements, the elder King's account confirms the distress and guilt his son felt: "He cried off and on for several days afterward, and was unable to sleep at night." King, Sr., explained that death "was a part of life that was difficult to get used to" and that God had "His own plan and His own way, and we cannot change or interfere with the time He chooses to call any of us back to Him."108 King, Jr., later

described his grandmother's death as a major formative experience of his youth: "It was after this incident for the first time that I talked at any length on the doctrine of immortality. My parents attempted to explain it to me and I was assured that somehow my grandmother still lived."109

Despite his acceptance of many of his parents' religious beliefs, King was uncomfortable with the fervent emotionalism he sometimes observed in church. In an autobiographical sketch King wrote while a graduate student at Crozer Theological Seminary, he remembered the lack of "dynamic conviction" that had accompanied his decision to join the church, made when a guest evangelist led a revival at Ebenezer. He admitted that he "had never given this matter a thought" and joined only when his sister took the step: "after seeing her join I decided that I would not let her get ahead of me, so I was the next." That King so vividly remembered this childhood event, which culminated in his baptism, may explain his later discomfort withemotional "conversion" experiences. "Conversion for me was never an abrupt something," he explained after recounting his baptism. "I have never experienced the so called 'crisis moment.' Religion has just been something that I grew up in. Conversion for me has been the gradual intaking of the noble ideals set forth in my family and my environment, and I must admit that this intaking has been largely unconscious."110

King's religious doubts occurred just as many aspects of his life were changing. Following the death of his grandmother, the family moved from the house on Auburn to a larger yellow brick house three blocks away at 193 Boulevard, thus fulfilling a childhood ambition of King, Sr., to own such a home. Enjoying the benefits of his family's affluence, King, Jr., became active in the social life of middle-class Atlanta. He could not remain isolated, however, from southern racism. After delivering the Atlanta Journal for five years, he was denied the job of manager of a deposit station. As one account put it, "such a top post, even in Negro neighborhoods was reserved for white men. It involved handling money and coming into the downtown office where the cashiers and clerks were mostly young white women."111

Another change in King's life resulted from the closure of the Atlanta Laboratory School in 1942. Skipping the ninth grade, the thirteen-year-old started tenth grade at the public Booker T. Washington High. During his second year at the school he won a preliminary public speaking contest, which allowed him to participate in a state oratorical contest sponsored by the black Elks in Dublin, Georgia. On the way home from the competition, King and other black students were cursed by the bus driver when they refused to give up their seats to white passengers. They reluctantly complied with his directive only when their speech teacher warned them against becoming involved in a potentially dangerous incident. More than two decades later, King recalled his feelings as he stood during that ride to Atlanta: "It was the angriest I have ever been in my life."112

King's speech from the contest, "The Negro and the Constitution," was published in the 1944 high school annual. The text reflected King's early political views. "We cannot have an enlightened democracy with one great group living in ignorance," he insisted. Neither could the nation be healthy with "one tenth of the people ill-nourished, sick, harboring germs of disease," or "orderly and sound with one group so ground down and thwarted that it is almost forced into unsocial attitudes and crime." King warned: "We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flaunt the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule. We cannot come to full prosperity with one great group so ill-delayed that it cannot buy goods. So as we gird ourselves to defend democracy from foreign attack, let us see to it that increasingly at home we give fair play and free opportunity for all people."113

Following completion of the eleventh grade at Washington High, King had an opportunity to begin college education a year early. Because enrollment at Morehouse College, the alma mater of both King, Sr., and A. D.

Williams, had declined because of the wartime draft, president Benjamin E. Mays allowed promising high school juniors to fill out the entering class of 1944. Although King's grades at Washington were not strong, he demonstrated his capacity for college work in a special admissions test. Before beginning at Morehouse, however, King left for his first extended stay away from home, joining about one hundred other students working on a tobacco farm near Simsbury, Connecticut. Established during the World War I period by John Hope and supervised since the 1930s by Morehouse mathematics professor Claude B. Dansby, the summer work program allowed students to earn and save money to pay college expenses.

The letters King wrote home from Connecticut reveal a fifteen-year-old who was both a child responding to his parent's wishes and a teenager relishing this departure from the world of his childhood. Most startling for King was his first exposure to racial attitudes outside the segregated South. Writing to his father, he commented on things he "never [anticipated] to see." Upon traveling north from Washington, D. C., he observed "no discrimination at all." Whites were "very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to." A letter to his mother referred to his attendance at a church service in Simsbury: "Negroes and whites go [to] the same church." After a weekend trip into Hartford, he told his mother about the lack of discrimination in public places. Having eaten at one of Hartford's "finest" restaurants, he commented, "I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere."114 These experiences in the North increased King's

already strong resentment of racial segregation.115

While in Connecticut King participated in various religious activities, including singing in a boy's choir that appeared on a local radio program and leading student religious meetings on Sunday evenings. Despite the doubts of his high school years, King's religious commitment became stronger as he demonstrated his preaching abilities. He informed his mother: "As head of the religious Dept. I have to take charge of the Sunday service I have to speak from any text I want to."116 Four years later he referred to the summer of 1944 as a

crucial period in his religious evolution, a time when he "felt an inescapable urge to serve society . . . a sense of responsibility which I could not escape."117

In September 1944, King returned to Atlanta to begin his studies at Morehouse College. While the buildings that constituted the small campus had not changed much since the days when his father had been a student, the goals and standing of the college had. Since Mays had become president in 1940, Morehouse had begun to reverse the decline that began during John Hope's final years. Under this new leadership, the college regained its earlier vitality. Not only did Mays -- the first Morehouse president with an earned doctoral degree -- instill a belief in its students that "Morehouse men" were distinctive in their talent and commitment to racial uplift, but he also worked hard to improve the quality of the faculty, increasing salaries and encouraging professors to pursue doctorates.118

Mays was also an innovative, politically-engaged scholar. His first book, The Negro's God, published in 1938, was a pioneering study of African-American Christianity, and reflected Mays's enthusiasm for prophetic,

social-gospel religious teachings. A trip to India increased his appreciation of the philosophy of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had given the Indian masses "a new conception of courage." Mays asserted that "when an oppressed race ceases to be afraid, it is free."119 He often criticized American Christian institutions for not

challenging segregation.120 Believing that black colleges should be "experiment stations in democratic living," Mays also challenged Morehouse students to struggle against segregation rather than accommodate themselves to it.121Noting the difficulty many students encountered in developing "a critical but secure

religious position" to replace the orthodox religious views of their precollege years, he argued that black colleges should seek to inform students about the importance of the church in African-American life. Students needed "contact with people who demonstrate in their person the fact that religion counts," Mays argued, adding that "a religion which ignores social problems will in time be doomed." Religion must "give direction to

life--a direction that is neither communistic nor fascistic--not even the direction of a capitalistic individualism."122

Mays inspired a generation of Morehouse students who gathered for his Tuesday morning lectures, in which he stressed intellectual excellence, religious piety, and commitment to racial advancement. He later recalled King as an eager listener, often responding to his lectures by debating certain points. These contacts led to a "real friendship which was strengthened by visits to his home and by fairly frequent chats."123 King later

described Mays as "one of the great influences in my life." 124

King's enthusiasm for Mays's teaching developed only gradually. There is little evidence that King exhibited a serious interest in his studies during most of his stay at Morehouse. Younger than most of the other 204 students in his class and uncertain about his career plans, King initially paid more attention to his social life than to his classwork. Although he lived with his parents and did not join a fraternity, King was socially active. Not only was he president of the sociology club and a member of the debating team, student council, glee club, and minister's union, but he also joined the Morehouse chapters of the NAACP and the YMCA, and played on the Butler Street Y basketball team.125

Among King's first acquaintances at the college was another Morehouse freshman, Walter R. McCall, a preministerial student five years older than King who would soon become King's best friend. McCall recalled that King was an "ordinary student" during this period: "I don't think [King] took his studies very seriously, but seriously enough to get by." King "loved the lighter side of life," even when it meant disobeying his father's injunctions against sinful behavior. "Many times [his father] opposed our dancing and things like that," McCall remembered, "but he would slip off anyway and go. Many times he and I as well as his sister and some more girls would congregate at his house while his Daddy was at church and we'd put on a party."126

Documentary evidence regarding King's studies at Morehouse is scanty, making his intellectual development there difficult to trace. Later accounts suggest, however, that he benefited from Morehouse's liberal arts curriculum and from the personal attention of the school's faculty. During his first year, for example, he received the valuable help of Professor Gladstone Lewis Chandler in preparing for the John L. Webb oratorical competition, in which he won second prize in 1946 and 1948.127

During King's second year, he took his first course with sociologist Walter Richard Chivers, an outspoken critic of segregation, who became King's advisor when he chose sociology as his major. Chivers wrote several articles during the 1940s about racial discrimination and the role of black leaders in the struggle against oppression.

He praised social reformers, such as Harlem's militant minister, Adam Clayton Powell, but offered caustic criticism of cautious "talented tenth Negro leaders." Although his discussions of working-class issues were clearly influenced by Marx, Chivers did not openly advocate socialism, and he rejected communism as akin to totalitarian fascism.128 His emphasis on the economic roots of racism certainly contributed to King's

increasingly anticapitalist sentiments. As classmate Lerone Bennett, Jr., later recalled, King saw Chivers's notion that "that money was the root not only of evil but also of race" confirmed when he took a summer job and observed that blacks were paid less than whites performing the same tasks.129

King's growing awareness of social and political issues is evident in the few writings that survive from his undergraduate years. In a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution written the summer before his junior year, for example, he reacted to a series of racially motivated murders in Georgia. King summarized black goals: "We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens: The right to earn a living at work for which we are fitted by training and ability; equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar public services; the right to vote; equality before the law; some of the same courtesy and good manners that we ourselves bring to all human relations."130 Invited during his junior year to write an

article for the February 1947 Founders' Day issue of the school paper, the Maroon Tiger, King used the opportunity to warn students about their "misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the `brethren'

think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end." To save men from "the morass of propaganda" was "one of the chief aims of education," according to King. "The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically."131 Another essay, written at the end of his junior year, addressed the topic "Economic Basis for

Cultural Conflict" and appeared in a departmental journal Chivers helped produce.132

During his junior year, King's evolving sociopolitical views merged with the new understanding of Christian theology he gained from religion professor George D. Kelsey, a theologian widely known and respected for his annual Institute for the Training and Improvement of Baptist Ministers. While King, Sr., described Kelsey as a teacher who "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," the younger King was attracted to his professor's tough-minded approach to theological issues. Kelsey (who gave King his only A at Morehouse) stressed the implications of the Christian gospel for social and racial reform while also insisting that the Kingdom of God could "never be realized fully within history" because the sinful nature of man "distorts and imposes confusion even on his highest ideas."133 Kelsey's writings of the 1940s evinced a personal struggle to

reconcile the Protestant notion of individual salvation with the realization that religious individualism often encourages pessimism about progressive social reform.134 He also provided some of the intellectual

resources King needed to resolve the conflict between the religious traditions of his youth and the secular ideas he had learned in college. As King later commented, that conflict continued until he took Kelsey's course and realized "that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape."135

The influence of Chivers and Kelsey was evident in an essay entitled "Ritual" that King probably wrote during his senior year. Reflecting his self-conscious straddling of the line between his social science training and his religious vocation, King acknowledged that, although as a pretheological student he would be expected "to defend certain aspects of sacred ritual, therefore becoming unscientific," his aim was "to be as unbiased and scientific as possible."136

While King's enthusiasm for Kelsey's critical approach to biblical studies set him apart from his father's scriptural literalism, it also enabled him to think more seriously about an idea he had previously rejected: entering the ministry. King, Sr., had always wanted both sons to become ministers and eventually, perhaps, to serve as pastors for Ebenezer, but he also recognized the wisdom of his wife's entreaties that their children be allowed to make their own career choices. He later expressed the hope that his sons could make use of his connections among Baptists--"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." 137 Yet A. D.

and M. L. were unwilling to conform to paternal expectations: A. D. dropped out of Morehouse before deciding on a ministerial career, and King, Jr., spent his first three years at Morehouse planning to become a lawyer, or perhaps a physician, but certainly not a minister like his father.

King, Jr.'s reluctance to become a minister stemmed largely from his rejection of religious practices that appealed to emotions rather than to the intellect. His persistent questioning of literal interpretations of biblical texts evolved during his Morehouse years into criticism of traditional Baptist teachings. He later wrote that his college days were "very exciting ones," especially the first two years when "the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body."138 Although his break with orthodoxy may have strengthened

his determination not to become a minister, it also opened him to liberalism as a potentially acceptable religious orientation. King wrote later that the circumstances of his call to the ministry were unusual, for even though he had experienced a sense of calling, he continued to waver about his career choice during his first

three years at Morehouse. He recalled wondering "whether [the church] could serve as a vehicle to modern thinking. I wondered whether religion, with its emotionalism in Negro churches, could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying."139

King was probably leaning toward the ministry by the end of his junior year, but making a final decision was nevertheless difficult. On the one hand, he could not ignore his father's hopes and his friends' expectations. His fellow students who heard him speak at campus events admired his oratorical skills; as one classmate recalled, "he knew almost intuitively how to move an audience."140 On the other hand, he continued to deprecate the

emotionalism the associated with Baptist preaching. While remaining skeptical of his father's doctrinal conservatism, King saw his father as a model. He would later explain that King, Sr.'s influence "had a great deal to do with my going in the ministry."141 Perhaps even more influential than his father, Mays and Kelsey were

also crucial role models. "Both were ministers, both deeply religious, and yet both were learned men, aware of all the trends of modern thinking," King Jr. later explained. "I could see in their lives the ideal of what I wanted a minister to be." 142 His decision was, in short, a summation of King's earlier experiences and influences.

It came neither by some miraculous vision nor by some blinding light experience on the road of life. Moreover, it was a response to an inner urge that gradually came upon me. This urge expressed itself in a desire to serve God and humanity, and the feeling that my talent and my commitment could best be expressed through the ministry During my senior year in college I finally decided to accept the challenge to enter the ministry. I

came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become.143

King told close friends at Morehouse of his intention to become a minister, but he probably continued to debate the idea during the summer. Returning with other students to the Connecticut tobacco farm where he had worked in 1944, King once again led weekly religious gatherings. While there, he telephoned his mother to tell her of his decision. Upon his return to Atlanta at summer's end, he discussed his plans with other family members before finally telling his father. "I finally decided to accept the challenge to enter the ministry," King recalled. "I came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become."144 That autumn, King Jr., delivered a trial sermon at Ebenezer,

attracting a large and appreciative audience. "M.L. has found himself," King, Sr., later recalled. "I could only thank God, pretty regularly, for letting me stay around long enough to be there." 145 Immediately after the

sermon, the Ebenezer congregation liscensed him to preach, and he joined the church as associate pastor to his father. During his final year at Morehouse, he preached occasionally at Ebenezer before being ordained as a minister in February 1948.

After King decided to become a minister and to pursue graduate studies at a seminary, he became more serious and focused during his final year at Morehouse. In addition to Kelsey and Mays, Samuel W. Williams provided King with another example of an academically trained, socially committed minister. A leader of the People's Progressive Party in Georgia, Williams supported the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace.146King took an introductory philosophy course from Williams, who also preached at local churches.

During his senior year, King's commitment to social change was strengthened when he joined the Intercollegiate Council, an interracial student group that met monthly at Emory University to discuss various issues. Despite opposition from his father, King participated in these meetings. The encounters with white students helped King overcome the antiwhite feelings he had felt since childhood.147

As he approached the end of his undergraduate years, King applied to several northern, theologically liberal seminaries, including Crozer Theological Seminary. His father, who already admired his son's qualities as a 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"), was disappointed that King, Jr., would not become co-pastor at Ebenezer, but reluctantly agreed to support his son's education. King, Sr., feared his son might not return to the segregated South, but

he also recognized that King, Jr., would be able to "broaden his knowledge tremendously" at a northern seminary.148 He secured letters from his father and several family friends, but the comments of those who

knew King well were restrained in their assessments of his intellectual ability, often focusing instead on King's family background and social skills. Morehouse religion professor Lucius M. Tobin, who had not taught King, could report only that he came from "a fine family" and was "a little above average in scholarship." Mays similarly recommended King, along with another student, but conceded that King was "not brilliant," only a person capable of "B work" or, "with good competition," perhaps "even better." George D. Kelsey described King's Morehouse record as "short of what may be called `good'" but contended that King was an underachiever who had come "to realize the value of scholarship late in his college career." Brailsford R. Brazeal similarly saw evidence of academic growth and sought to explain King's average grades by referring to his "comparatively weak high school background." Even King, Sr.'s positive letter was vague, referring to the fact that King was only fifteen when he entered college and was "above his age in thought."149

When he began his seminary studies in the fall of 1948, nineteen-year-old King was younger than most of his Crozer classmates. He probably realized that he would have to become more diligent in his studies if he were to succeed at the small Baptist institution in Chester, Pennsylvania, a small town southwest of Philadelphia. As one of eleven black students (six of them in King's class) in a student body numbering more than ninety, King was self-consciously aware that he represented his race and determined to do well in his studies. King's only extant letter from his Crozer years, written to his mother during his first term, mentions the social distractions of a Temple student he had once dated when she was at Spelman and "a fine chick" in Philadelphia, but King also insists that he never went "anywhere much but in these books" and did not think about girls because he was "[too] busy studying."150 King, evidently wishing to break with the relaxed attitude he had had toward his

Morehouse studies, quickly immersed himself in Crozer's intellectual environment. He later recalled struggling to avoid confirming racial stereotypes: "If I were a minute late to class, I was almost morbidly conscious of it and sure that everyone noticed it. Rather than be thought of as always laughing, I'm afraid I was grimly serious for a time. I had a tendency to overdress, to keep my room spotless, my shoes perfectly shined and my clothes immaculately pressed."151

The Crozer environment encouraged King's increasing intellectual seriousness. Nearly all students lived in private dormitory rooms on campus, situated on a bucolic hillside. Students found that most of their daily needs were satisfied by the seminary's facilities, which included a library, dining rooms, tennis courts, and other amenities. The letter King received from Crozer's dean before the start of the term emphasized the school's academic quality -- it was a fully accredited theological seminary with an "excellent faculty of consecrated Christian teachers" -- and its informality, made possible by extensive personal contacts between students and full-time faculty, all of whom lived on campus.152 His transition was eased when former Morehouse classmate

Walter McCall joined him at Crozer after the first term. In addition, King often had dinner at the nearby home of the Reverend J. Pius Barbour, a King family acquaintance who had left Morehouse to become Crozer's first black graduate and who was then pastor of Chester's Calvary Baptist Church. "He is full of fun, and he has one of the best minds of anybody I have ever met," King informed his mother.153

King immersed himself in his studies and in the European-American theological readings assigned by his Crozer professors. King enrolled in six courses during his first term at Crozer, the most important of which was James Bennett Pritchard's Introduction to the Old Testament--a demanding required course that constituted eight

of King's thirteen credit hours for the term. Pritchard was a noted biblical scholar who had been earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and had taught at Crozer since 1942. King quickly demonstrated his willingness to accept Pritchard's biblical interpretations based on historical and archeological research. In one of his first papers for Pritchard, King eagerly expressed his independence from religious fundamentalism. "No logical thinker can doubt the fact that . . . archaeological findings are now [indispensable] to all concrete

study of Hebrew-Christian religion," King commented in discussing the application of the "scientific method" to

Old Testament study. Yet, King concluded, while such findings might reveal that biblical stories have mythological roots, they did not necessarily undermine the essential truths of the Old Testament, which remained "one of the most logical vehicles of mankind's deepest devotional thoughts and aspirations, couched in language which still retains its original vigor and its moral intensity."154

King's preference for politically engaged religion was also evident in another paper discussing scholarship on Jeremiah. King argued that despite his failure to affect the social order of his time, Jeremiah's insistence on a personal relationship with God was ultimately a valuable contribution to Christianity. The prophet, King insisted, demonstrated that Christians should never "become sponsors and supporters of the status quo. How often has religion gone down, chained to a status quo it allied itself with." In refuting the cynical notion that religion was "simply the reflection of the State's opinion of itself foisted upon the divine," Jeremiah taught that religion could be a vehicle of social progress: "Religion, in a sense, through men like Jeremiah, provides for its own advancement, and carries within it the promise of progress and renewed power."155

King gained further exposure to historical biblical scholarship during his second term, in Morton Scott Enslin's History and Literature of the New Testament. A sometimes intimidating, Harvard-trained expert in the history of early Christianity, Enslin had taught at Crozer since 1924 and edited the Crozer Quarterly since 1941. Like Pritchard, Enslin was known to give few high grades, and he returned King's papers with numerous critical comments and corrections written in almost illegible, miniature script. King's papers for Enslin, in which he acknowledged Christianity's indebtedness to earlier religious traditions, were, like those for Pritchard, competent, but unimaginative and derivative. In them he continued to affirm the value of biblical scholarship while also insisting that such scholarship did not undermine essential Christian values.

King began to forge his own theological perspective during the fall term of his second year, when he enrolled in George Washington Davis's two term course, Christian Theology for Today. Davis, who attended

Colgate-Rochester Divinity School and received a doctorate from Yale before joining Crozer's faculty in 1938, was a northern Baptist influenced by the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch. He emphasized the social implications of Christianity, reinforcing the social reform motivations that had led to King's decision to

become a minister. Although King had already been exposed to the social-gospel teachings of Mays and Kelsey, Davis expanded King's understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of modern Christian liberalism, particularly the notion that God's reality was revealed through the historical unfolding of his moral law. Davis's impact on his twenty-year-old student was immediate. King's essays for Davis displayed a greater degree of intellectual engagement than had the historical essays written for Pritchard and Enslin. So theologically compatible were King and Davis that King took a total of seven courses from him. Under Davis's tutelage, King began to see theology as a storehouse of ideas that could reinforce the religious beliefs derived from his formative experiences.

Although King's essays for Davis were more reflective than those he had written during his first year, they were still flawed by unacknowledged textual appropriations from theologians King consulted. His bibliography or notes nearly always identified his sources, but the lack of adequate citations and quotation marks obscured

the extent to which King relied upon the work of others. The available documentary evidence does not provide a definite answer to the question whether King deliberately violated the standards that applied to him as a student, yet his academic papers do contain passages that meet a strict definition of plagiarism--that is, anyunacknowledged appropriation of words or ideas. At the same time, his essays contained views consistent with those King expressed in other papers and exams written at the time; thus, even though King's writings were derivative, they remain reliable expressions of his theological opinions.156

King, in his papers for Davis, reaffirmed his acceptance of critical biblical scholarship while leaving room in his perspective for some traditional Christian beliefs that could not be reconciled with scholarly findings. He agreed with the liberal view of the Bible as "a portrayal of the experiences of men written in particular historical situations" and as a progressive revelation of the divine, rather than as the literal word of God.157

Although he saw Jesus as human, he affirmed "an element in his life which transcends the human," a divine quality that was "not something thrust upon Jesus from above, but . . . a definite achievement through the

process of moral struggle and self-abnegation."158 He rejected literal interpretations of Christian beliefs that

contradicted "the laws of modern science," insisting instead that such beliefs -- the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, the second coming, and the bodily resurrection -- should be understood metaphorically. The true meaning of the kingdom of God, in short, involved the creation of "a society in which all men and women will be controlled by the eternal love of God."159 Christians who probed "into the deeper meaning of these

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doctrines" would find, he stated, "that they are based on a profound foundation." Contrasting liberalism

with fundamentalism, King portrayed fundamentalists as "willing to preserve certain ancient ideas even though they are contrary to science." 161

In another paper, King declared that biblical scholars did not destroy religious belief; instead they served "to prepare the ground for constructive building." The Bible is subject to historical analysis, King explained: "This advance has revealed to us that God reveals himself progressively through human history, and that the final significance of the Scripture lies in the outcome of the process."162

Several of King's papers for Davis reflect his effort to refine his theological perspective by either identifying himself with or setting himself apart from particular theologians or theological schools. In an essay entitled "The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God," for example, King rejected both agnosticism, which eliminates "mystery from the universe," and fundamentalism, which claims certainty about the nature of divinity; rather, he reiterated, "genuine Christian faith" accepts "that the search for God is a process not an achievement." This stance led King to discard, as "one of the perils of our time," the views of Karl Barth and other "crisis" or neo-orthodox theologians who argued that man, corrupted by original sin, could never come to know God through reason. Instead King identified himself with the views of Boston University personalist theologian, Edgar S. Brightman, who saw human awareness of God's presence as the very essence of religious experience.

Brightman's personalism appealed to King because it recognized the importance of nonintellectual sources of theological knowledge, including one's own experiences. Echoing Brightman and other personalists, he confidently insisted that religious experience was important in finding God. "No theology is needed to tell us that love is the law of life and to disobey it means to suffer the consequences," King wrote. "It is religious experience which shows us that much of the misery and weakness of men's lives is due to [the] personal fault of the individual." Moreover, King argued, all people, not just the intellectual elite, were capable of searching

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for God through experience. While granting the utility of reason in the search for knowledge of the divine,

King concluded by appropriating a Brightman formulation: "We must grant freely, however, that final intellectual certainty about God is impossible We can never gain complete knowledge or proof of the real.

. . . But we cannot give up the search because of this limitation. Certainly if God is the real that we are seeking, we can always learn more about him. Thus, reason, when sincerely and honestly used, is one of [the] supreme roads that leads man into the presence of God."164

While King remained hostile to fundamentalist Christianity, he increasingly acknowledged the limitations of liberal theology and even of the theological enterprise itself. Still accepting a broad framework of theological understanding based on biblical criticism and the social gospel, he increasingly referred to his personal experiences to explain his gradual move toward greater orthodoxy. In an essay for Davis entitled "How Modern Christians Should Think of Man," he argued that liberals too "easily cast aside the term sin, failing to realize that many of our present ills result from the sins of men." King admitted that his conception of man was

going through a state of transition. At one time I find myself leaning toward a mild neo-orthodox view of man, and at other times I find myself leaning toward a liberal view of man. The former leaning may root back to certain experiences that I had in the south with a vicious race problem. Some of the experiences that I encountered there

made it very difficult for me to believe in the essential goodness of man. On the other hand part of my liberal leaning has its source in another branch of the same root. [In] noticing the gradual improvements of this same race problem I came to see some noble possibilities in human nature. Also my liberal leaning may root back to the great imprint that many liberal theologians have left upon me and to my ever present desire

to be optimistic about human nature.

He had, he acknowledged, become "a victim of eclecticism," seeking to "synthesize the best in liberal theology with the best in neo-orthodox theology." Discarding "one-sided generalizations about man," he concluded that "we shall be closest to the authentic Christian interpretation of man if we avoid both of these extremes."165

As King became more critical of liberal theology, he also focused on the theological issue that he considered most crucial: the nature of divinity. Never having experienced God's presence directly through an abrupt experience of conversion, he sought ideas that would provide a conception of God consistent with his own experiences. Although King indicated in the middle of his second year "that the most valid conception of God is that of theism," which he defined as the notion that God was "a personal spirit immanent in nature and in the value structure of the universe," he would continue to struggle with this difficult issue long afterward.166

King's acceptance of personalist theology resulted from his desire to view religious experience, rather than simply philosophical rigor, as a necessary foundation for religious rectitude. In another paper for Davis, King concluded that the "ultimate solution" to the vexing problem of the sources of evil in a God-created universe was "not intellectual but spiritual. After we have climbed to the top of the speculative ladder we must leap out into the darkness of faith."167

King's increasing tendency to acknowledge the validity of some neo-orthodox criticisms of Christian liberalism may have been related to events in his personal life that contradicted Crozer's ethos of interracial harmony. Most accounts of King's experiences at Crozer suggest that he actively sought out social contacts with white students and faculty members. His immersion in the social and intellectual life of a predominantly white, northern seminary may have had psychological costs, however, for King learned that he could not insulate himself from the realities of antiblack prejudice. On one occasion a white southern student pulled a gun on King, in the mistaken belief that King had victimized him as a prank.168 During the summer after his second

year at Crozer, King was involved in another incident of harassment that reminded him of his vulnerability to racial discrimination when he ventured off campus. Not only were he and three friends refused service at a tavern, but the owner became abusive and picked up a gun, which he took outside and fired into the air. (He later claimed that, fearing a robbery, he wanted to alert his watchdog.) Almanina Barbour, daughter of J. Pius Barbour, urged the outraged King to sue the establishment. Although the Camden branch of the NAACP agreed to handle the case as a violation of New Jersey's 1945 legislation prohibiting racial discrimination in public facilities, the matter was dropped when several white witnesses refused to testify.169

In addition to these reminders that he had not left racism behind in the South, King confronted the realization that he would have to tailor his academic training to fit his needs as a pastor of a black congregation. The unenthusiastic evaluation he received as a participant in Crozer's fieldwork program suggests King's difficulty in reconciling what he was learning at seminary with the ingrained religious beliefs he had brought from black Atlanta. Designed to aid students in their development as clergymen, fieldwork in King's case involved training at black churches in the area. Although King had refined his preaching while at Crozer, listeners' accounts suggest that his practice sermons were designed to engage the mind, not the emotions.170 King was an

experienced preacher, of course, having assisted his father at Ebenezer during the previous three summers; the final evaluation, written by the Reverend William E. Gardner suggests, however, that King may have become somewhat estranged from his Ebenezer roots. While Gardner saw King as superior in judgment,

decisiveness, neatness, poise, and self-confidence, he also noted an "attitude of aloofness, disdain & possible snobbishness which prevent his coming to close grips with the rank and file of ordinary people," as well as "a smugness that refuses to adapt itself to the demands of ministering effectively to the average Negro congregation."171

Despite this evaluation, King's buoyancy and self-assurance were evident in the most extended biographical statement he would write during his college career. While enrolled in Davis's course The Religious Development of Personality in late 1950, King insisted in a paper, "An Autobiography of Religious Development," that his basic religious and social views were decisively shaped, not by his academic training, but by his formative experiences. His father's "noble" example, he said, and the influences of his childhood had led him to enter the ministry. Despite periods of doubt and a continuing antipathy toward religious emotionalism, King considered his early years and his intense, daily involvement in church life as the bedrock of his religious faith: "At present I still feel the affects of the noble moral and ethical ideas that I grew up under. They have been real and precious to me, and even in moments of theological doubt I could never turn away from them.

Even though I have never had an abrupt conversion experience, religion has been real to me and closely knitted to life. In fact the two cannot be separated; religion for me is life."172

As King became absorbed in the concerns of philosophical or systematic theology, he did not abandon his interest in Christian ethics and the social role of the Christian church. During King's last months at Crozer, he took two courses with Kenneth L. Smith, a strong advocate of social gospel thought. The courses, Christianity and Society and Christian Social Philosophy, served as a forum for discussion of modern social issues, including the problems associated with capitalism and the appropriateness of Marxian solutions to those problems.173 Unsigned student papers from this class suggest that students examined a wide range of issues -- church-state relations, the American economy, and Cold War foreign policy, for example -- and challenged their own and one another's political beliefs. One unsigned paper entitled "War and Pacifism," often attributed to King, probably accurately expressed King's changing position on the issue during this period. "Though I cannot accept an absolute pacifist position," the author began, "I am as anxious as any to see wars end and have no desire to take part in one." Challenging the views of American pacifist leader A. J. Muste, who had spoken at Crozer during November of King's second year, the paper argued that absolute pacifism would lead to

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anarchy. Not only did such a position allow "no grounds for maintaining even a police force, since there is

no real difference in kind between war and police action," but it also isolated "war from other ethical problems and [ignored] the fact that war is actually a symptom of deeper trouble." The conclusion was probably consistent with King's beliefs at the time:

Since man is so often sinful there must be some coercion to keep one man from injuring his fellows. This is just as true between nations as it is between individuals. If one nation oppresses another a Christian nation must, in order to express love of neighbor,

help protect the oppressed. This does not relieve us of our obligation to the enemy nation. We are obligated to treat them in such a way as to reclaim them to a useful place in the world community after they have been prevented from oppressing

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another. We must not seek revenge.

Although this paper reflects the neo-orthodox ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr, Smith recalled that King remained a fervent advocate of the social-gospel Christianity he had derived from both his childhood experiences and his study of Walter Rauschenbusch.176 Smith later recounted his arguments with King "about the relative merits

of the social ethics of Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr," with King arguing against Niebuhr. 177 King's

later account of his Crozer years, in Stride Toward Freedom, probably overstates the extent of his intellectual engagement with the ideas of Niebuhr, for this is not confirmed by the documentary record. While King, like many other liberal theological students of the early 1950s, was undoubtedly influenced by Niebuhr's ideas, few

of his papers mention Niebuhr's writings. Rather, King's increasing awareness of the neo-orthodox critique of liberalism derived from a variety of sources in addition to Niebuhr.

Aware of the intellectual deficiencies of social-gospel Christianity, King sought a theological framework that combined scholarly rigor with an emphasis on personal experience of God's immanence. Such a theology would allow him to reconcile his emotional roots in the nurturing, sustaining environment of Ebenezer with the sense of intellectual rectitude he had sought in graduate study. King's search led him to the personalism of Boston University's Edgar S. Brightman. As early as his second year at Crozer, he had made favorable comments about Brightman's writings, and during the second term of his last year he again encountered Brightman in Davis's course on the philosophy of religion. Assessing Brightman's book A Philosophy of Religion, he conceded that Brightman's personalism left him "quite confused as to which definition [of God] was the most adequate." In general, however, he was persuaded by Brightman's inclusive notion of "essential" beliefs that underlay particular religious practices and concepts of God. Rejecting atheism as "philosophically unsound

and practically disadvantageous," King affirmed religion "that gives meaning to life" and provides "the greatest incentive for the good life." He expressed his enthusiasm for a philosophical perspective that offers a rationale for the emotionally rich religious life he had known as a child: "How I long now for that religious experience which Dr. Brightman so cogently speaks of throughout his book," King concluded. "It seems to be an experience, the lack of which life becomes dull and meaningless." The third-year seminarian reflected on his struggle to achieve a sense of religious contentment: "I do remember moments that I have been awe awakened; there have been times that I have been carried out of myself by something greater than myself and to that something I gave myself. Has this great something been God? Maybe after all I have been religious for

a number of years, and am now only becoming aware of it."178

By the time of his graduation, King's intellectual confidence was reinforced by the experience of having successfully competed with white students during his Crozer years. He was elected student body president, became the class valedictorian, and was the recipient of the Pearl Plafker award for scholarship. He was also accepted for doctoral study at Boston University's School of Theology, where he would be able to work directly with the personalist theologians he had come to admire. He had convinced his teachers that he was destined for further success as a minister and leader, perhaps even as a scholar. Davis's confidential assessment of King's abilities was that he would "make an excellent minister or teacher. He has the mind for the latter." Enslin considered him a "very able man. All is grist that comes to his mill. Hard working, fertile minded, rarely misses anything which he can subsequently use." He added a prediction: "He will probably become a big strong man among his people." Crozer dean Charles Batten saw King as "undoubtedly one of the best men in our entire student body," one of Crozer's "most brilliant students," a person with "a keen mind which is both analytical and constructively creative."179

Although King's understanding of the modern literature of systematic theology was still in flux at the end of his stay at Crozer, he had refined his basic ideas about the nature of God. His essays reflected a gradual movement from an acceptance of liberal theological scholarship toward an increasing skepticism about rational inquiry as a means of achieving religious understanding. He had found new value in his early religious experiences. King's seminary years had also been characterized by an ambiguous relationship to the values of the academy. Rather than developing proficiency as an original scholar, King had become skilled at appropriating ideas and texts that defined his evolving religious identity. As a student, he had been dutiful, inquisitive, well read, and able to win the approval of his professors, but his theological beliefs were subtly derivative, based on a priori assumptions about the nature of divinity and increasingly suited to his anticipated needs as a preacher rather than a scholar. King's discovery of personalist theology had both strengthened his ties with African-American Baptist traditions and encouraged him to pursue further theological study at Boston University.

The religious ideas King brought to the seminary were modified but not drastically altered as his intellectual sophistication grew. Indeed, although he sought scholarly understanding of religion, his writings at Crozer consisted of an eclectic body of ideas that was rendered coherent not by his academic training but by his inherited values. He saw God as immanent in the world, accessible through reason and personal experience, yet

also transcendent, a being not limited by human conceptions of reality. Although King would further refine his beliefs about the nature of God, at Crozer he had reached theological conclusions that would remain central to his worldview.

Footnotes

1. G. S. Ellington, "A Short Sketch of the Life and Work of Rev. A. D. Williams, D.D.," in Programme of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Pastorate of Rev. A. D. Williams of Ebenezer Baptist Church, 16 March 1924, CKFC.

2. Records of Shiloh Baptist Church indicate that after several others joined the church on 1 November 1846, "Willis, servant boy of William N. Williams, came forward and was also received" by the pastor. One of the oldest Baptist congregations in the state, Shiloh was founded in 1795. Both enslaved and free

African-Americans were admitted as full members, but only free black members were mentioned with last names in the church minutes. See Arthur F. Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), p. 356; James Porter, "Shiloh Baptist Church minutes," 1 November 1846, SBCM-G-Ar: Drawer 34, box 36; Bruce A. Calhoun, "The Family Background of Martin Luther King, Jr.: 1810-1893," King Project seminar paper, 1987, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

3. William Williams, one of the county's wealthiest slave owners, became a pillar of the church, serving as its clerk and as its delegate to meetings of the Georgia Baptist Association. His and his wife's combined holdings placed them in the top 15 percent of Greene County's landowners and in the top 20 percent of the county's slave owners. See Thaddeus Brockett Rice and Carolyn White Williams, History of Greene County, Georgia,

1786-1886 (Macon, Ga.: J. W. Burke Company, 1961), p. 628; Census entries for William Williams, 1850 and 1870, Greene Co., Ga.; Greene Co., Ga., "Tax Digest Record for William Williams," 1854 and 1859, G-Ar; Greene Co., Ga., "Slave Digest Record for William Williams," 1850, G-Ar; Arthur F. Raper, Tenants of the Almighty (New York: Macmillan, 1943), pp. 366, 372; "Shiloh Baptist Church minutes," 3 January 1852 and passim, SBCM-G-Ar:

Drawer 34, box 36.

4. R. B. Edmonds, "Shiloh Baptist Church minutes," 15 October 1848, SBCM-G-Ar: Drawer 34, box 36. See also minutes for 16 July 1848 and 20 August 1848.

5. William Sanders, "Shiloh Baptist Church minutes," 15 April 1855, SBCM-G-Ar: Drawer 34, box 36. The identification of "Creecy, servant to Mrs. N. E. Daniel" as the wife of Willis can be inferred from the documentary evidence. The census of 1870 locates sixty-year-old Willis Williams living with thirty-year-old Creecy, thirteen-year-old Benjamin, and twelve-year-old Randal Williams on the plantation of his

seventy-two-year-old former owner, William Williams (Census entry for Willis Williams, 22 June 1870, Greene Co., Ga.). Family tradition holds that Willis Williams's wife was "Lucrecia" or "Creecy" (Ellington, "Short Sketch"; and unsigned sketch, "Adam Daniel Williams," in History of the American Negro and His Institutions: Georgia Edition, ed. A. B. Caldwell [Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell Publishing Company, 1917] p.210.)

6. Adam Daniel's and his twin sister Eve's actual birthdate was probably earlier in the 1860s. The census of 1870 lists Adam Daniel Williams as nine years old, suggesting that he was born in 1861; his twin sister, Eve, is listed as seven. The census of 1880 lists both him and Eve as eighteen, implying a birthdate of 1862 (Census entry for Willis Williams, 22 June 1870, Greene Co., Ga.; census entry for A. D. Williams, 1880, Greene Co., Ga.). For A. D. Williams's claim of 2 January 1863 as his birthdate, see "Rev. A. D. Williams," Atlanta Independent, 4 April 1904; Ellington, "Short Sketch"; and "Adam Daniel Williams," in Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, p. 212.

7. The fragmentary church records show no sign of the Williams family at Shiloh Baptist after Emancipation. See Bartow Davis Ragsdale, Story of Georgia Baptists (Atlanta: Foote and Davies, 1938), 3:65, 3:312; Raper, Preface to Peasantry, p. 356; and Clarence M. Wagner, Profiles of Black Georgia Baptists (Atlanta: Bennett Bros., 1980), p. 65.

8. Ellington, "Short Sketch." See also "Adam Daniel Williams" in Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, p. 212.

9. Ellington, "Short Sketch." Ellington noted that A.D. Williams had only three weeks of schooling in his youth.

10. See Ellington, "Short Sketch"; Census entry for A. D. Williams, 15 June 1880, Greene County, Ga.; and Calhoun, "Family Background."

11. Ellington, "Short Sketch," and "Adam Daniel Williams" in Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, p. 212. Williams also later studied with the Reverend Henry M. Smith of Crawford, clerk of the Jeruel Baptist Association, which was composed of rural black congregations.

12. Powell Mills, a major employer, closed in 1884 and was destroyed in a devastating flood three years later. For more information on Greene County economic conditions, see E. Merton Coulter, "Scull Shoals: An Extinct Georgia Manufacturing and Farming Community," Georgia Historical Quarterly 48 (March 1964): 51-63; Raper,Tenants of the Almighty, pp. 111-112, 365; and Rice and Williams, History of Greene County, pp. 380-381.

13. "Adam Daniel Williams," in Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, p. 212 and Ellington, "Short Sketch." Although A. D. Williams's name does not appear on the extant rolls of ministers in the Jeruel Baptist Association minutes during these years, a transcriptionist's error may be at fault. The rolls list an "O. W. Williams" of Crawford, Georgia, in 1891, and an "E. D. Williams" in 1892. See Minutes of Jeruel Baptist Association, Convened with Thankful Baptist Church, Days Station, Oglethorpe County, Georgia, September 24th, 25th, 26th, and 27th, 1891 (Augusta: Georgia Baptist Book Print, 1891); and Minutes of Jeruel Baptist Association, Convened with Spring Creek Baptist Church, The Fork, Greene County, Georgia, September 21st,

22nd, 23rd, and 24th, 1892 (Augusta: Georgia Baptist Book Print, 1892 j).

14. [C. Shaw?], "Rev. John Parker," [1950?], EBCR; Christine King Farris, interview by Ralph E. Luker, 6 February 1989, MLKJrP-GAMK; and Ellington, "Short Sketch."

15. Ellington, "Short Sketch."

16. Ellington, "Short Sketch"; and "Adam Daniel Williams," in Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, p. 212.

17. Reverend Parker had studied at Atlanta Baptist Seminary and earned his living as a drayman. See [C. Shaw?], "Rev. John Parker"; and E. R. Carter, The Black Side: A Partial History of the Business, Religious, and Educational Side of the Negro in Atlanta, Ga. (Atlanta: N. p., 1894), pp. 243-250.

18. Ellington, "Short Sketch." Three biographical sketches of A. D. Williams published in his lifetime gave three different figures for Ebenezer's membership at the time Williams began his ministry; a newspaper's sketch reported seventeen members, Caldwell estimated seven members, and Ellington counted thirteen members in 1893; see "Rev. A. D. Williams," Atlanta Independent, 12 April 1904; "Adam Daniel Williams," in Caldwell, ed.,History of the American Negro, p. 213

19. "Adam Daniel Williams," in Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, p. 213; and Ellington, "Short Sketch."

20. Ellington, "Short Sketch." Organized as the Augusta Baptist Institute by the black Baptist churches of Augusta in 1867, the school sought to prepare newly emancipated black men for teaching and preaching. In 1879 the institute was relocated to Atlanta and renamed the Atlanta Baptist Seminary. Its name was later changed to Atlanta Baptist College and then to Morehouse College, in honor of Dr. Henry Morehouse, a white executive of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Morehouse College operated under the sponsorship of the society.Catalogue of the Atlanta Baptist Seminary, 1895-1896 (Atlanta: Atlanta Seminary Press, 1896); Catalogue of the Atlanta Baptist Seminary, 1897-1898 (Atlanta: Atlanta Seminary Press, 1898); Georgia Baptist, 2 June 1898; Edward A. Jones, A Candle in the Dark: A History of Morehouse College (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1967), pp. 17-47, 53-67; and Addie Louise Joyner Butler, The Distinctive Black College: Talladega, Tuskegee, and Morehouse (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977), pp. 102-103.

21. Ellington, "Short Sketch." In 1881 the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary was founded in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church; subsequently it was renamed Spelman Seminary, in honor of the mother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, a financial supporter.

22. Ellington, "Short Sketch"; Census entry for A. D. Williams and Jennie Celeste Parks Williams, 18 June 1900, Fulton County, Ga.; and Marriage license for A. D. Williams and Jennie Celeste Parks, 29 October 1899, Fulton County, Ga. See Loree Dionne Lynne Jones, "A Study of Spelman Seminary, Jennie Celeste Parks Williams, and

Alberta Christine Williams King," King Project seminar paper, 1987, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

23. Census entries for A. D. Williams and Jennie Celeste Parks Williams, 18 June 1900 and 28 April 1910, Fulton County, Ga.; and Atlanta City Directories, 1897-1905, 1907.

24. Ellington, "Short Sketch."

25. Indenture between Oscar Davis and the Trustees of Ebenezer Baptist Church, 26 May 1899, Fulton County, Ga., G-Ar; Indenture between Mrs. D. C. Shaw and the Trustees of Ebenezer Baptist Church, 20 June 1900, Fulton County, Ga., G-Ar; Indenture between the Fifth Baptist Church and the Trustees of Ebenezer Baptist Church, 12 December 1900, Fulton County, Ga., G-Ar; and "Rev. A. D. Williams," Atlanta Independent, 2 April 1904.

26. For more information on the origin of the National Baptist Convention and Williams's involvement in denominational activities, see James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986), pp. 159-185; Porter, "Black Atlanta," pp. 71,

209-212;Georgia Baptist, 2 June, 21 July, and 27 October 1898; and Atlanta Independent, 12 April and 17 June 1904. The Atlanta Baptist Ministers' Union, in which A. D. Williams and Martin Luther King, Sr., were prominent for six decades, was an organization of black Baptist ministers in the city. The General State Baptist Convention was one of two black Baptist conventions in Georgia from 1893 to 1915. In 1893, a dispute over leadership of the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia led to the establishment of the General State Baptist Convention. In 1915, the two conventions were reunited as the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia. See Wagner,Profiles of Black Georgia Baptists, pp. 79-81.

27. For more information on these events, see Georgia Baptist, 17 May 1900; Walter White, A Man Called White(New York: Viking Press, 1948), pp. 20-21; Clarence A. Bacote, "The Negro in Atlanta Politics," Phylon 16 (1955): 333-350; Bacote, "Negro Proscriptions, Protests, and Proposed Solutions in Georgia, 1880-1908," Journal of Southern History 25 (November 1959): 474; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, "The Boycott Movement Against Jim Crow Streetcars in the South, 1900-1906," Journal of American History 55 (March 1969): 756-775; Jean Martin, "Mule to MARTA," Atlanta Historical Bulletin 20 (Winter 1976): 14-26; and John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 16-17, 94-97.

28. Edwin S. Redkey, ed., Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner (New York: Arno, 1971), pp. 196-197.

29. Augusta's William Jefferson White issued the call for a convention of black Georgians to consider a wide range of grievances in December 1905. Founder of the Augusta Institute, trustee of Atlanta Baptist College, founder and editor of the Georgia Baptist, and pastor of Augusta's Harmony Baptist Church, White was the venerated patriarch of Georgia's black Baptists. See "A Call For a Conference," Voice of the Negro 3 (February 1906): 90; "The Macon Convention" and "The Leaders of the Convention," Voice of the Negro 3 (March 1906): 163-166; "Address of the First Annual Meeting of the Georgia Equal Rights Convention," Voice of the Negro 3 (March 1906): 175-177; "A Few Corrections," Voice of the Negro 3 (April 1906): 291; Redkey, ed., Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner, pp. 196-199; Dittmer, Black Georgia, pp. 173-174; Atlanta Independent, 9 December 1905, 20 January 1906, 27 January 1906, and 24 February 1906; W. J. Simmons, "Rev.

W. J. White: Editor of the Georgia Baptist," Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland: George M. Rewell, 1887), pp. 791-792; and "Rev. William Jefferson White, D.D.," in Pegues, Our Baptist Ministers and Schools, pp. 526-539.

30. For more information on the Atlanta race riot, see Charles Crowe, "Racial Violence and Social

Reform--Origins of the Atlanta Riot of 1906," Journal of Negro History 53 (July 1968): 234-256; Charles Crowe, "Racial Massacre in Atlanta, September 22, 1906," Journal of Negro History 54 (April 1969): 150-169; Dittmer, Black Georgia, pp. 123-131; and Clarence A. Bacote, "Some Aspects of Negro Life in Georgia, 1880-1908," Journal of Negro History 43 (July 1958): 186.

31. For more information on the house, see U.S. Department of the Interior, "Historic Structure Report: The Martin Luther King Birth Home" (Denver: National Park Service, n.d.).

32. "Is It a Fraud?" Atlanta Independent, 25 September 1909.

33. "Judge for Yourself," Atlanta Independent, 2 October 1909. See also Dittmer, Black Georgia, pp. 13-14; Porter, "Black Atlanta," pp. 126-158; Silver Queen Mining Company, Stock certificate for A. D. Williams, 28 January 1908, CKFC. On Davis and Turner, see Mungo Melanchthon Ponton, The Life and Times of Bishop Henry

M. Turner, (Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell, 1917); J. Minton Batten, "Henry M. Turner: Negro Bishop Extraordinary,"Church History, 7 (September 1938): 231-246; E. Merton Coulter, "Henry M. Turner: Georgia Preacher-Politician During the Reconstruction Era," Georgia Historical Quarterly 48 (December 1964): 371-410; John Dittmer, "The Education of Henry McNeal Turner" in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 253-272; "Benjamin Jefferson Davis" in Who's Who in Colored America: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Persons of Negro Descent in America, ed. Joseph J. Boris (New York: Who's Who in Colored America Corp., 1927), 1:52-53; and Benjamin J. Davis, Jr.,Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentiary (New York: International Publishers, 1969), pp. 21-39, 145-160.

34. "Ebenezer Baptist Church," Atlanta Independent, 12 July 1913.

35. Atlanta Independent, 14 March 1914; J. H. Edwards, "Ebenezer History," March 1976, EBCR. See also Fulton County, Ga., Bond for Title between A. J. Delbridge and A. D. Williams, 10 January 1913.

36. A. D. Williams was moderator of the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association from 1913 until 1920. Martin Luther King, Sr., was later moderator of the Association for more than twenty years. See Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association, "Minutes of the Fifty-second Annual Session of the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association, Inc.," Atlanta, 13 October 1955.

37. In 1915, the National Baptist Convention was incorporated in order to claim ownership of the National Baptist Publishing House in Nashville, Tennessee. Insisting that the publishing house was his property, its director Richard H. Boyd led his followers out of the National Baptist Convention, Inc., to form the National Baptist Convention, Unincorporated. In November 1916, hoping to explain his position, Boyd appeared at a meeting of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia, where Benjamin Davis sought to introduce him. A. D. Williams and Peter James Bryant of Wheat Street Baptist Church seized the rostrum and declared that they would not allow Boyd to speak. See Atlanta Independent, 22 May 1915, 25 November 1916, and 15 September 1917; Wagner, Profiles of Black Georgia Baptists, pp. 79-81, 134; Lewis Garnett Jordan, Negro Baptist History, U.S.A. (Nashville, Tenn: Sunday School Publishing Board, [1930]), pp. 126-142, 247-255; Owen D. Pelt and Ralph Lee Smith, The Story of the National Baptists (New York: Vantage Press, 1960), pp. 97-109; and Joseph Harrison Jackson, A Story of Christian Activism: The History of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. (Nashville, Tenn.: Townsend Press, 1980), pp. 93-126.

38. For more details on Williams's activities during the period, see Atlanta Independent, 25 August 1911, 10 September 1911, 31 May 1913, 15 November 1913, 21 February 1914, 22 May 1915, and 14 August 1915; Morehouse College, Annual Catalogue, 1917-1918, p. 95; Dittmer, Black Georgia, p. 179; and Jones, A Candle in the Dark, pp. 91-92.

39. At the end of 1916, following several unsuccessful efforts, Walter White began to organize a local branch of the NAACP. At an organizing conference held in February 1917, Harry H. Pace, an executive of Standard Life Insurance Company, was elected president and Walter White, Standard Life's cashier, was elected secretary. NAACP national field secretary James Weldon Johnson addressed the conference in a crowded assembly room of Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Although police officers were stationed around the room, he noted, the crowd was not intimidated. "The organization conference which was held at Atlanta was unique," Johnson recalled years later; "it was the only one in which no woman was invited to take part. There were present fifty or so of the leading colored men of the city; lawyers, doctors, college professors, public school teachers, editors, bankers, insurance officials, and businessmen" (James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson [New York: Viking Press, 1933], pp. 315-316). For further information on the creation of the Atlanta NAACP branch, see Atlanta Independent, 10 February 1917 and 24 February 1917; Minutes of the Board of Directors Meeting, 9 April 1917, NAACPP-DLC: Part I, Reel 1; Reports from the

Annual Meetings of the NAACP, 7 January 1918, NAACPP-DLC, Part I, Reel 4; and White, A Man Called White, pp. 28-31.

40. Atlanta Independent, 24 February 1917. A Neighborhood Union investigation of black schools in 1913 found students studying in unsanitary, poorly equipped, crowded classrooms. The group protested these conditions to the school board, which took only token remedial action. See Atlanta Independent, 18 October 1913; and Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 74-79. For more information on the schools campaign see Edgar A. Toppin, "Walter White and the Atlanta NAACP's Fight for Equal Schools, 1916-1917," History of Education Quarterly 7 (Spring 1967): 8-10.

41. On 21 May, a fire fueled by a strong wind burned through the heart of Atlanta, gutting nearly two thousand buildings, including many churches. The "Great Conflagration" left ten thousand people homeless, most of them black. See Atlanta Independent, 26 May 1917; Garrett, Atlanta and Its Environs 2:700-706, 730; John Robert Smith, "The Day of Atlanta's Big Fire," Atlanta Historical Journal 24 (Fall 1980): 58-66; and Alan Patureau, "Atlanta's Other Great Fire," Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 17 May 1987.

42. Toppin, "Walter White and the Atlanta NAACP," pp. 12-15; Adam Daniel Williams, "Speech to the Tenth Annual Convention of the NAACP," 26 June 1919, NAACPP-DLC: Part I, Reel 8; and White, A Man Called White, pp. 32-37.

43. "Adam Daniel Williams," in Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, p. 214.

44. Atlanta Independent, 18 January, 8 March, and 15 March 1919; "The Atlanta Negro Vote," Crisis 18 (June 1919): 90-91; "Address Delivered by Miss Cora Finley at the Tenth Anniversary Conference of the NAACP," 25 June 1919, NAACPP-DLC: Part I, Reel 8; "The Atlanta Branch," Crisis 18 (July 1919): 141; Cora Finley, "Registered Fighters," Crisis 18 (August 1919): 181; White, A Man Called White, p. 37; Garrett, Atlanta and Its Environs, 2:756; Toppin, "Walter White and the Atlanta NAACP," p. 15; and Dittmer, Black Georgia, pp. 147-148.

45. The memorial pointed out the inadequate number and condition of black schools, pay inequity for black teachers, and limited library services, public services, and health and recreational facilities in the black community (Atlanta Independent, 8 March and 15 March 1919). Although black leaders claimed responsibility for defeating the measures, it was alleged in the white press (Atlanta Georgian, 24 April 1919) that the loss was due to manipulation of the black vote by the Georgia Railway & Power Company.

46. A. D. Williams, "Speech to the Tenth National Convention," 26 June 1919, NAACPP-DLC: Part I, Reel 8; andCrisis 19 (August 1919): 193. For the activities of black women in the Atlanta election campaigns see Rouse,Lugenia Burns Hope, pp. 74-79.

47. Crisis 20 (March 1920): 249; and "The Atlanta Conference," Crisis 20 (April 1920): 322.

48. Atlanta Independent, 3 May 1919.

49. Atlanta Independent, 26 June 1919, 2 August 1919, 23 August 1919, 16 May 1920, and 5 June 1920; Mary White Ovington, "Reminiscences," Baltimore Afro-American, 7 January 1933; and Johnson, Along This Way, pp. 356-357.

50. For more information on the 1921 bond campaign and the schools funded by the bonds, see Atlanta Constitution, 1, 6 and 9 March 1921; Atlanta Independent, 27 September 1923; Henry Reid Hunter, The Development of the Public Secondary Schools of Atlanta, Georgia: 1845-1937 (Atlanta: Atlanta Public Schools, 1974), pp. 51-56; Garrett, Atlanta and Its Environs, 2:795-796; and Toppin, "Walter White and the Atlanta NAACP," p. 16.

51. Atlanta Independent, 28 September 1922.

52. The victor was Professor James M. Nabrit of Morehouse College. See ibid., 30 November 1922.

53. Atlanta Independent, 14 and 28 February 1924; Programme of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Pastorate of Rev. A. D. Williams of Ebenezer Baptist Church, 16 March 1924, CKFC.

54. Jordan, Negro Baptist History, pp. 142-143; Jackson, A Story of Christian Activism, pp. 125-128; and Atlanta Independent, 28 September 1922.

55. Atlanta Independent, 7 February 1924.

56. Atlanta Independent, 19 April, 29 November, 6 December, 13 December, 20 December 1923; 7 February, 6 March, 20 March 1924; 25 February, 25 March 1926; 11 August 1927; and 13 September 1928.

57. Atlanta Independent, 28 February 1924.

58. Martin Luther King, Sr., with Clayton Riley, Daddy King: An Autobiography (New York: William Morrow, 1980), pp. 15, 62, 64-66.

59. Born about 1842 in Virginia or Georgia, Long and his two brothers registered in 1867, despite intimidating activity by the Ku Klux Klan, which was organized in Henry County the previous year. See Henry County, Ga., Voter Qualification Form for James Long, 11 August 1867, G-Ar; and Ranier, Henry County, Georgia, pp.

283-284.

60. Census records for 1870 show that Jim Long settled after the war in Henry County, where he lived with his wife, Francis, and five children. In 1880, Jim and Francis Long lived with their ten children in Henry County's Stockbridge district. The records suggest that Jim Long maintained another family, which included

twenty-seven-year-old Jane Linsey and their five children. See Census entries for James Long and family, 1870 and 29 June 1880, Henry County, Ga.; Census entry for Jane Linsey and family, 28 June 1880, Henry County, Ga.; and Woodie King Brown, interview by Ralph E. Luker, 21 April 1989, MLKJrP-GAMK.

61. Information regarding James Albert King's lineage is contradictory. The 1900 census reported that he was born in Ohio and that his father was born in Pennsylvania and his mother in Ohio. In 1910, though, the census listed his father's place of birth as Ireland, while the 1920 census reported his place of birth as Georgia, an unlikely location given the absence of records placing King or his father in Georgia before the 1890s. See Census entry for James Albert King and family, 23 June 1900, Clayton County, Ga.; Census entries for James Albert King and family, 11 May 1910 and 14 January 1920, Henry County, Ga. Jim King's death certificate, filed by Martin Luther King, stated that Jim King and his parents were born in Georgia; see Georgia Department of Public Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of death for James King, 17 November 1933, GAHR.

62. Marriage license for James Albert King and Delia Linsey, 20 August 1895, Henry County, Ga., HCPC; Tax Digest Records for James Albert King, 1897-1898, 1901-1907, 1910-1913, 1916-1918, Henry County, Ga., G-Ar; and Tax Digest Records for James Albert King, 1900, Clayton County, Ga., G-Ar. See also Alisa Duffey and Phyllis Heaton, "The King Family: 1880-1920," King Project seminar paper, 1987, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

63. Although King would later date his birth in 1899, the census records for 1900 and 1910 support an earlier birthdate. See Census entry for James Albert King, 23 June 1900, Clayton County, Ga.; Census entry for James Albert King, 28 April 1910, Henry County, Ga. Although M. L. King was christened Michael L., he later changed it to Martin Luther; see note 98.

64. King, with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 25, 40-44. 65. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

66. Ibid., p. 37. See also Henry County Weekly, 14 July 1905; Henry County School Census, Stockbridge Colored School, 1903, 1908, and 1913, G-Ar.

67. King reported witnessing the lynching of a black man by white mill workers. Although lynchings were common enough in the rural Georgia of his youth, there was no report in the Henry County Weekly or the Henry County News of a lynching or a murder in the Stockbridge area that fits King's description. See Duffey and Heaton, "King Family," pp. 4, 16-18; and King, with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 30-31.

68. King, with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 39-45; Reddick, Crusader, pp. 44-45; Bennett, What Manner of Man, p. 8; David L. Lewis, King: A Biography (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 6; King, My Life, pp. 75-76. These versions of the story vary in detail, but the Daddy King version corresponds best with Jim King's disappearance from the Henry County tax records in 1911 and 1912; See Tax Digest Records, 1911 and 1912, Henry County, Ga., G-Ar; Duffey and Heaton, "King Family," pp. 14-15.

69. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 27. King remembers his childhood minister explaining the meaning of hymns to the congregation and urging them "to sing with the spirit and understanding" (King, Sr., "What Part Should Singing Play in Our Church Worship?" Georgia Baptist, 1 March 1936).

70. Henry County School Census, 1913, G-Ar.

71. King, with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 27, 45.

72. King, with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 59-60; and Atlanta City Directory, 1919.

73. King, with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 68-72; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 32-36.

74. Ellington, "Short Sketch"; Jones, "Spelman Seminary," p. 12; and King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 72.

75. Delia King died in 1924, and her youngest daughter, Ruby, suffered a ruptured appendix shortly thereafter and died. Still reeling from these losses, Jim King was ordered to leave his sharehold. With his remaining children, he moved to College Park near Atlanta, where he earned a living as a porter and day laborer. He remained there until his death on 17 November 1933. See Georgia State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death for Delia Lindsay King, 27 May 1924, GAHR; King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 73-75, 88; Rainer, Henry County, Georgia, p. 331; Atlanta City Directory, 1928; Georgia Department of Public Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death for James Albert King, 17 November 1933, GAHR; andAtlanta Daily World, 19 November 1933.

76. At the time, the Morehouse faculty included Brailsford R. Brazeal in economics; Walter R. Chivers, E. Franklin Frazier, and Garry W. Moore in sociology; Claude B. Dansby in mathematics; William Kemper Harreld in music; Edward A. Jones in French; Samuel M. Nabrit in biology; Benjamin E. Mays in philosophy and psychology; and Nathaniel P. Tillman in English. See Morehouse College, The Torch '23; Morehouse Alumnus 1 (November 1928); Butler, Distinctive Black College, pp. 111-112; Jones, A Candle in the Dark, pp. 108-109, 284-285; Benjamin E. Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 66-98; and King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 75-77.

77. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 77-79, 87; Morehouse College Catalogue, 1928-1929 (Atlanta: Morehouse College, 1928), p. 106; and Morehouse College Catalogue, 1929-1930 (Atlanta: Morehouse College, 1929), p. 110.

78. Adam Daniel Williams and Jennie Celeste Parks Williams, Wedding Invitation for Marriage of Alberta Christine Williams and Michael Luther King, 25 November 1926, EBCR; and King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 80-82.

79. Martin Luther King, Sr., interview by E. A. Jones, [1972?], MLKJrP-GAMK. See also King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 82.

80. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 83, 87-88; Georgia Department of Public Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Birth for Martin Luther King, Jr., 15 January 1929 [revised 12 April 1934 and 23 July 1957], GAHR.

81. In 1929, Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University joined in forming the Atlanta University Center. Morehouse and Spelman specialized in educating undergraduate men and women respectively and Atlanta University concentrated on graduate and professional education. Later, Clark University, Morris Brown College, the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Morehouse Medical School affiliated with the Atlanta University Center institutions, creating the largest center of black higher education in the United States. See Porter, "Black Atlanta," p. 294; Henderson and Walker, "Sweet Auburn," p. 17; Garrett, Atlanta and Its Environs 2:842; Myron W. Adams, A History of Atlanta University (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1930), pp. 115-118; Clarence A. Bacote,The Story of Atlanta University: A Century of Service, 1865-1965 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1969), pp. 256-315; Jones, A Candle in the Dark, pp. 113-132; and George A. Sewell and Cornelius V. Troup, Morris Brown College: The First Hundred Years, 1881-1981 (Atlanta: Morris Brown College, 1981), pp.

135-143.

82. King, with Riley, Daddy King, p. 90.

83. "Rev. Adam Daniel Williams" and "Noted Atlanta Divine Dies," Georgia Baptist, 10 April 1931. See also Lizzie Hunnicut, "In Memoriam," Georgia Baptist, 25 August 1931; and Ebenezer Baptist Church, Program for Rev. Adam Daniel Williams's Funeral Service, 24 March 1931, CKFC.

84. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 91-95.

85. King, Jr., "An Autobiography of Religious Development," 360 in this volume. Adult recollections of childhood are often unreliable as historical evidence, but the available accounts of King's childhood display an underlying consistency while differing over details. For more information on King, Jr.'s childhood, see: King, Sr., with Riley,Daddy King; King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958). For other sources that rely on first-hand knowledge of King's childhood, see Reddick, Crusader Without Violence; and Lerone Bennett, Jr., What Manner of Man (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1964, Sixth Revised Edition, 1986).

86. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 94.

87. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 130.

88. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence, p. 51.

89. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 130, 131.

90. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," p. 360 in this volume.

91. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence, p. 51; King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," p. 359 in this volume.

92. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," pp. 000-000 in this volume.

93. King, Sr., "What Part Should Singing Play in Our Church Worship?"

94. Ebenezer Baptist Church Anniversary Program, 9-16 March 1936, EBCR; Wagner, Profiles of Black Georgia Baptists, p. 94; and Reddick, Crusader Without Violence, p. 56.

95. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 127.

96. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 94.

97. Ibid., p. 97; "Royally Welcomed on Return," Atlanta Daily World, 28 August 1934.

98. Documents from this period indicate that King, Sr.'s name change was achieved gradually rather than through a single legal process, which was not required under Georgia law. By the time he moved to Atlanta and enrolled in Morehouse College, he identified himself as M. L. King, or formally as Michael Luther King, which appeared on his wedding invitation in 1926. He stated in his autobiography that his mother and father had different preferences regarding his name: his mother preferring Michael, after the archangel, his father insisting that he have the names of Jim King's brothers, Martin and Luther. See King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King,

p. 26. The coincidence of the name change and King, Sr.'s visit to Germany may also suggest an attempt to identify with the founder of Protestantism. After returning from Europe in 1934, he rarely referred to himself as Michael Luther King and typically used either Martin Luther King or M. L. King. As for King, Jr., his birth certificate was filed on 12 April 1934, before the European tour, under the name Michael King, but was altered on 23 July 1957 to list King as Martin Luther, Jr. Atlanta public school transcripts for King, Jr., obtained by the King Papers Project, initially listed him as M. L. King, although this record was altered, probably during the 1930s, to identify him as Martin Luther King, the name that is also on his elementary school "Test Scores and Ratings" (Dulcie Shrider, Records Manager, Atlanta Public Schools to King Papers Project, 9 June 1987).

99. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence, p. 84. This story is told slightly differently by King, Sr.: "I have give a hundred dollars while the man with the good speech have give nothin'!" (King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 90).

100. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," p. 359 in this volume.

101. Ibid., pp. 362-363 in this volume. A different account, mentioning two white playmates, appears in Stride Toward Freedom (pp. 18-19): "My mother took me on her lap and began by telling me about slavery and how it had ended with the Civil War. She tried to explain the divided system of the South--the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing; the white and colored signs on drinking fountains, waiting rooms, lavatories--as a social condition rather than a natural order. Then she said the words that almost every Negro hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: `You are as good as anyone.'" King's father also recounted this incident--mentioning "two young sons of a local grocery-store owner": Alberta "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'" (King, Sr., with Riley,Daddy King, p. 130). See also King, Jr., BBC interview by John Freeman on "Face to Face," 29 October 1961, MLKJrP-GAMK.

102. His sister later recalled that he was "not too studious" during his elementary school days, although she remembered that he enjoyed competing in spelling bees. King's elementary school grades were generally satisfactory; a fifth grade intelligence test rated him slightly below the mean for youngsters his age. See Reddick, Crusader Without Violence, p. 54; Jerry Tallmer, "Martin Luther King, Jr., His Life and Times," New York Post, 8 April 1968; "Christine King Farris," USA Weekend, 17-19 January 1986; Christine King Farris, "The Young Martin," Ebony 41 (January 1986): 56-58; "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Grade School Records, 1934-1940," APS.

103. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence, p. 54. King's report cards from the Laboratory High School are: Beulah Bolen, Report Card in Science for King, January 1942; B. A. Jones, Report Card in 8th Grade Social Studies for King, 23 January 1942; E. R. Thomas, Report Card in 8th Grade Shop for King, 23 January 1942; E. R.

Thomas, Report Card in P.E. for King, 23 January 1942; Roland G. Anderson, Report Card in 8th Grade Math for King, 26 January 1942; Mary J. Dean, Report Card in 8th Grade Art for King, 26 January 1942; and Report Card in 8th or 9th Grade English for King, September 1941-June 1942; all in CKFC.

104. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 100, 104-107, 124-125. King incorrectly dated this event to 1935 rather than 1939; see Atlanta Daily World, 8 November 1939.

105. King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom, p. 20.

106. King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom, p. 19. See also the description of this incident in King, Sr., Daddy King, pp. 108-109.

107. King, Sr., Moderator's Annual Address, Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association, 17 October 1940, CKFC.

108. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 109.

109. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," p.362 in this volume.

110. Ibid; pp. 361 in this volume.

111. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence, p. 56.

112. King, Jr., "Interview," Playboy, January 1965, p. 66. On the oratorical contest, which was part of a national competition, see Atlanta Daily World, 16 and 22 April 1944.

113. King, Jr., "The Negro and the Constitution," p.110 in this volume.

114. King, Jr., to King, Sr., 15 June 1944; King, Jr., to Alberta Williams King, 11 June 1944; and King, Jr., to Alberta Williams King, 18 June 1944; pp. 111-116 in this volume.

115. King, Jr., later remembered his first time sitting behind a curtain in a dining car: "I never will forget the deep sense of resentment. . . Although I was only thirteen years old, this experience disturbed me greatly" (draft ofStride Toward Freedom, MLKP-MBU; Box 94A, folder 17B.)

116. King, Jr., to Alberta Williams King, 18 June 1944, p. 116 in this volume.

117. King, Application for Admission to Crozer Theological Seminary, pp. 144 in this volume.

118. Mays, Born to Rebel, pp. 170-178; and Jones, A Candle in the Dark, p. 152.

119. Mays, "The Color Line Around the World," Journal of Negro Education 6 (April 1937): 141.

120. Mays's militancy is evident in the articles he wrote during this period. See his "Color Line Around the World," pp. 134-143; "The American Negro and the Christian Religion," Journal of Negro Education 8 (July 1939): 530-538; "Veterans: It Need Not Happen Again," Phylon 6, no. 3 (1945): 205-211; "Democratizing and Christianizing America in This Generation," Journal of Negro Education 14 (Fall 1945): 527-534; "Segregation in Higher Education," Phylon 10, no. 4 (1949): 401-406. Mays later wrote that while president "I never ceased to raise my voice and pen against the injustices of a society that segregated and discriminated against people because God made them black" (Born to Rebel, p. 188). In 1950 he edited a collection of Walter Rauschenbusch's writings entitled A Gospel for the Social Awakening.

121. Mays, "The Role of the Negro Liberal Arts College in Postwar Reconstruction," Journal of Negro Education9 (July 1942): 402.

122. Mays, "The Religious Life and Needs of Negro Students," Journal of Negro Education 9 (July 1940): 337, 341, 342.

123. Mays, Born to Rebel, p. 265.

124. King, Stride Toward Freedom, p. 145. Mays's influence on King is also discussed by Robert E. Johnson, William G. Pickens, and Charles V. Willie in Renee D. Turner, "Remembering the Young King," Ebony 43 (January 1988): 42-46; and Oliver "Sack" Jones in an interview by Herbert Holmes, 8 April 1970, MLKP/OH-GAMK.

125. King, Application for Admission to Crozer Theological Seminary, p. 144 in this volume; YMCA, Certificate of Participation in Annual Basketball League, 1947-1948, ATL-AAHM.

126. Walter R. McCall, interview by Herbert Holmes, 31 March 1970, MLK/OH-GAMK.

127. "King later described [Chandler] as `one of the most articulate, knowledgeable and brilliant professors' at Morehouse, `one of those rare unique individuals who was so dedicated to his work that he forgot himself into immortality'" (King to Mrs. G. Lewis Chandler, 28 September 1965, quoted in Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, [New York: Harper & Row, 1982] p. 17).

128. See the following works by Walter R. Chivers: "Current Trends and Events of National Importance in Negro Education," Journal of Negro Education 12 (Winter 1943): 104-111; "Negro Business and the National

Crisis,"Opportunity (April 1942): 113-115; "Modern Educational Leadership of Negroes," Southern Frontier 3 (October 1942); and "Negro Church Leadership," The Southern Frontier 3 (December 1942) and 4 (January 1943).

129. Bennett, What Manner of Man, p. 28. King drew a somewhat different conclusion when he described his summer work experiences, years later in Stride Toward Freedom: "During my late teens I worked two summers, against my father's wishes - he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions - in a plant that hired both Negroes and whites. Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro" (King, Stride Toward Freedom, p. 90).

130. King, Jr., "Kick up Dust," Letter to the Editor, Atlanta Constitution, 6 August 1946 (pp.121 in this volume).

131. King, Jr., "The Purpose of Education," pp. 123-124 in this volume. See also the recollections of Charles V. Willie, in Renee D. Turner, "Remembering the Young King," Ebony 43 (January 1988): 46. King's essay was undoubtedly influenced by Mays's ideas. Mays had presented an argument similar to King's in a 1942 article: "One of the fundamental defects in the world today is the fact that man's intellect has been developed to a point beyond his integrity and beyond his ability to be good The trouble with the world lies primarily in the

area of ethics and morals. It will not be sufficient for the Negro liberal arts colleges, nor any colleges, to produce clever graduates, men fluent in speech and able to argue their way through; but rather honest men who can be trusted both in public and private life--men who are sensitive to the wrongs, sufferings, and injustices of society and who are willing to accept responsibility for correcting the ills" (Mays, "The Role of the Negro Liberal Arts College in Postwar Reconstruction," pp. 407-408).

132. This article, which has not been located by the King Papers Project, is mentioned in "M'house Students Publish Annual Sociology Digest," Maroon Tiger, May-June 1948.

133. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 141; Kelsey, "Protestantism and Democratic Intergroup Living," Phylon7 (1947): 77-82.

134. See Kelsey, "Social Thought of Contemporary Southern Baptists" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1946); and Kelsey, "Negro Churches in the United States," in Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, ed. Lefferts A. Loetscher (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1955), 2:789-791.

135. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," p. 362 in this volume. Kelsey (who remembered the class as occurring during King's sophomore year) recalled that King "stood out in class not simply academically, but in the sense that he absorbed Jesus' teachings with his whole being. I made it my business to present lectures on the most strenuous teachings of Jesus. It was precisely at this time that Martin's eyes lit up most and his face was graced with a smile" (quoted in Turner, "Remembering the Young King," p. 44). For Kelsey's restrained letter supporting King's seminary application, see Kelsey to Charles E. Batten, 12 March 1948, p. 155 in this volume.

136. King, Jr., "Ritual," p. 128 in this volume. "Ritual" is the only extant essay from King's Morehouse education.

137. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 128.

138. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," p. 363 in this volume. Despite King, Jr.'s definition of his father's theology as "fundamentalist," the term is a misleading description of King, Sr.'s conservatism on matters of biblical interpretation. In a 1956 interview, King, Jr., noted that he was disturbed that "most Negro ministers were unlettered, not trained in seminaries, and that gave me pause. I revolted, too, against the emotionalism of much Negro religion, the shouting and stamping. I didn't understand it, and it embarrassed me" (William Peters, "`Our Weapon Is Love'," Redbook 107 [August 1956]: 42).

139. King quoted in "Attack on the Conscience," Time, 18 February 1957, p. 18. A Morehouse classmate, William

G. Pickens, recalled that King's image of the black Baptist preacher was negative: "He saw them as

anti-intellectual and prone to establish or maintain emotionalism as the chief sign of salvation" (quoted in Turner, "Remembering the Young King," p. 46).

140. Samuel DuBois Cook, quoted in Turner, "Remembering the Young King," p. 42.

141. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," p. 363 in this volume.

142. Peters, "Our Weapon is Love," p. 42.

143. King's 7 August 1959 statement written in response to a request by Joan Thatcher, Publicity Director of the Board of Educationn and Publication of the American Baptist Convention, Division of Christian Higher

Education, 30 July 1959, MLKP-MBU, quoted in Mervyn Alonzo Warren, "A Rhetorical Study of the Preaching of Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., Pastor and Pulpit Orator" (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1966), pp.

35-36.

144. Ibid.

145. King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, p. 141.

146. In a mock presidential election during the spring of 1948, a Wallace for President committee (led by Morehouse student Floyd B. McKissick) succeeded in winning the support of a majority of Morehouse students. Williams's hopes for the radical political party were dashed in the November general election, however, when less than 1 percent of Georgia's voters favored Wallace. Nine months later, Williams resigned from the leadership of the Progressive Party over differences in "basic philosophy." Soon thereafter he published two articles, one outlining his understanding of the party's failure to appeal to large numbers of Georgia voters, black or white, the other presenting a Christian critique of Communism: "The People's Progressive Party of Georgia,"Phylon 10 (September 1947): 226-230; and "Communism: A Christian Critique," Journal of Religious Thought 6 (Autumn/Winter 1949): 120-135. See also "Wallace Committee," Maroon Tiger, March-April 1948; "Student Poll Favors Wallace; Supports A. Philip Randolph," Maroon Tiger, May-June 1948; Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1985), p. 357; and Progressive Party Correspondence, 1949, SWWC-GAU.

147. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," pp. 362-363 in this volume. King was later quoted as saying, "I was ready to resent all the white race. As I got to see more of white people, my resentment was softened, and a spirit of cooperation took its place. But I never felt like a spectator in the racial problem. I wanted to be involved in the very heart of it" ("Attack on the Conscience," Time, 18 February 1957, p. 18). See also Brailsford Brazeal, interview by Judy Barton, 16 February 1972, MLK/OH-GAMK; and King, Sr., with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 141-142.

148. King, with Riley, Daddy King, pp. 144.

149. Lucius M. Tobin to Charles E. Batten, 25 February 1948; Benjamin Elijah Mays to Batten, 28 February 1948; George D. Kelsey to Batten, 12 March 1948; King, Sr., to Batten, 5 March 1948; also Phoebe Burney to Batten, 9 March 1948; pp. 151-155 in this volume.

150. King, Jr., to Alberta Williams King, October 1948, p. 161 in this volume.

151. Quoted in Peters, "'Our Weapon Is Love,'" p. 72.

152. Charles E. Batten to King, Jr., 29 October 1947, p. 126 in this volume.

153. King, Jr., to Albert Williams King, October 1948, p. 161 in this volume.

154. King, Jr., "Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East," pp. 163, 180 in this volume.

155. King, Jr., "The Significant Contributions of Jeremiah to Religious Thought," pp. 194-195 in this volume.

156. For a fuller discussion of the issue, see the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project, "The Student Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Summary Statement on Research," Journal of American History 78 (June 1991): 23-31; and Clayborne Carson et al., "Martin Luther King, Jr., as Scholar: A Reexamination of His Theological Writings," ibid., pp. 93-105.

157. King, Jr., "How to Use the Bible in Modern Theological Construction," pp. 000-000 in this volume.

158. King, Jr., "The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus," p. 253 in this volume.

159. King, Jr., "The Christian Pertinence of Eschatological Hope," p. 159 in this volume.

160. King, Jr., "What Experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century led to the Christian Doctrines of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Bodily Resurrection," p. 226 in this volume.

161. King, Jr., "The Sources of Fundamentalism and Liberalism Considered Historically and Psychologically," p. 253 in this volume.

162. King, Jr., "How to Use the Bible in Modern Theological Construction," pp. 253-254 in this volume.

163. King, Jr., "The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God," p. 254 in this volume.

164. Ibid. Cf. Edgar S. Brightman, The Finding of God (New York: Abingdon Press, 1931), pp. 69, 72.

165. King, Jr., "How Modern Christians Should Think of Man," pp. 274-275 in this volume.

166. King, Jr., "Examination Answers, Christian Theology for Today," p. 290 in this volume.

167. King, Jr., "Religion's Answer to the Problem of Evil," p. 432 in this volume.

168. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence, p. 82.

169. See W. Thomas McGann, Statement on Behalf of Ernest Nichols, State v. Ernest Nichols, pp. 327-328 in this volume.

170. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); pp. 75-77.

171. Gardner was the black pastor of First Baptist Church in Corona, New York. See William E. Gardner, Crozer Theological Seminary Field Work Department: Rating Sheet for Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 380-381 in this volume.

172. King, Jr., "Autobiography of Religious Development," p. 363 in this volume. The dependability of the paper is limited by the fact that King self-consciously fits his life experiences into the framework of then popular theories of personality and attitudinal development during childhood. In his notes for the course, for example, King defines an attitude as a "habitual manner of reaction with strong emotional components." King was encouraged to see his childhood experiences as of primary importance to his religious development: "The social reaction in the home is of primary importance in a child's religious dev. This is because out of experience grows concepts and only through finding mutual love between parents can the child conceive of a God of love

. . . Rel. finds the beginning of its ethical quality in the early soc. situation which involves distinctions of right and wrong" (King, "Class Notes, Religious Development of Personality," 12 September 1950-22 November 1950, MLKP-MBU: Box 106, folder 22).

173. According to his account in Stride Toward Freedom, King had read Marx during his spare time in 1949. He concluded that Marx had "pointed to weaknesses of traditional capitalism, contributed to the growth of a definite self-consciousness in the masses, and challenged the social conscience of the Christian Churches" (Stride Toward Freedom, p. 95.)

174. King reported in his autobiography that after hearing Muste speak, he felt that "while war could never be a positive or absolute good, it could serve as a negative good in the sense of preventing the spread and growth of an evil force" (Stride Toward Freedom, p. 95). According to another report of Muste's talk, he received "a fairly good reception, marred by the chilly attitude of the acting president, and the worst outburst of invective...from a vet who apparently had a tough time during the war and is having a difficult time living with himself." (Charles Walker to Bayard Rustin, 14 November 1949, FORP-PSC-P).

175. King, Jr., "War and Pacifism," p. 435 in this volume. Although the evidence for King's authorship of this document is inconclusive, there is no convincing information identifying one of the other unsigned papers as the one submitted by King. One of the three papers that may have been authored by King linked democracy to the rise of Protestant Christianity. The Reformation, the author maintained, "was not primarily theological but social." It was part of a social movement, in which "the sacredness of man and his rights were the cardinal doctrines," attempting to overcome the "weight of centuries of oppression." In the New World, the ideals of religious dissenters "were imposed on their political action and we have the foundation of an essentially Christian nation." Having been linked in their origins, democracy and Protestant Christianity were interdependent. "So long as the Christian ideals hold true for individual men, so long will democracy grow and flourish. When Christianity dies, democracy too will fade away and die for it will have lost the wellspring of its life" ("Christianity and Democracy," 20 February 1951-4 May 1951, MLKP-MBU: Box 112, folder 17).

176. King asserted that his initial reading of Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis "left an indelible imprint on my thinking by giving me a theological basis for the social concern which had already grown up in me as a result of my early experiences" (King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom, p. 91). See also Kenneth L. Smith, "Reflections of a Former Teacher," Bulletin of Crozer Theological Seminary April 1965, p. 3.

177. Smith, "Reflections of a Former Teacher," p. 3. Smith also speculated that King's direct-action approach to civil rights indicated an eventual acceptance of Niebuhr's brand of realism.

178. King, Jr., "A Conception and Impression of Religion Drawn from Dr. Brightman's Book Entitled A Philosophy of Religion," pp. 411 and 415-416 in this volume.

179. Crozer Theological Seminary Placement Committee: Confidential Evaluations of Martin Luther King, Jr., by George W. Davis, Morton Scott Enslin, and Charles E. Batten, 15 November 1950, 21 November 1950, and 23

February 1951, respectively, pp. 334, 354, and 406-407 in this volume; and Charles E. Batten, "Martin L. King," 1951, pp. 390-391 in this volume.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta about noon on Tuesday, 15 January 1929. The difficult delivery occurred in the second-floor master bedroom of the Auburn Avenue home his parents shared with his maternal grandparents. From the moment of his birth, King's extended family connected him to

African-American religious traditions. His grandparents A. D. Williams and Jennie Celeste Williams had transformed nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church from a struggling congregation in the 1890s into one of black Atlanta's most prominent institutions. Martin Luther King, Sr., would succeed his father-in-law as Ebenezer's pastor, and Alberta Williams King would follow her mother as a powerful presence in Ebenezer's affairs.

Immersed in religion at home and in church, King, Jr., acquired skills and contacts that would serve him well once he accepted his calling as a minister. He saw his father and grandfather as appealing role models who combined pastoring with social activism. Although King's theological curiosity and public ministry would take him far from his Auburn Avenue origins, his basic identity remained rooted in Baptist church religious traditions that were intertwined with his family's history.

* * * * *

King, Jr.'s family ties to the Baptist church extended back to the slave era. His great-grandfather, Willis Williams, described as "an old slavery time preacher" and an "exhorter," entered the Baptist church during the period of religious and moral fervor that swept the nation in the decades before the Civil War.1   In 1846, when

Willis joined Shiloh Baptist Church in the Penfield district of Greene County, Georgia (seventy miles east of Atlanta), its congregation numbered fifty white and twenty-eight black members;2   his owner, William N.

Williams, joined later.3

Although subordinate to whites in church governance, blacks actively participated in church affairs and served on church committees. In August 1848, members of such a committee investigated charges of theft against Willis. After listening to the committee's report the church expelled him, but two months later the church minutes reported that "Willis, servant to Bro. W. N. Williams, came forward and made himself confession of his guilt and said that the Lord had forgiven him for his error. He was therefore unanimously received into fellowship with us."4

Extant records provide no documentation of Willis's ministry, but he probably helped recruit some of the slaves who joined the church during a major revival in 1855. Between April and December of that year, nearly a hundred blacks, more than one-tenth of the slaves in the Penfield district, joined the congregation. Among them was a fifteen-year-old named Lucrecia (or Creecy) Daniel. Shiloh's minutes report that she "related an experience and was received" into church membership in April 18555   She and Willis were married in the late

1850s or early 1860s, and she bore him five children--including Adam Daniel (A. D.), who celebrated 2 January 1863, the day after the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation, as his birthday.6

The family left Shiloh Baptist Church when it, like other southern congregations, divided along racial lines at the end of the Civil War. At war's end, Shiloh's 77 white members were outnumbered by 144 black members, but in the following years all the black members left. Willis Williams and his family may have joined other black members of Shiloh in organizing a large black-controlled Baptist church in Penfield.7

Divorced. By Sir Joshua Hassan, 53, chief minister of Gibraltar: Lady Daniela Hassan, 48, his Spanish wife; after 24 years of marriage, two children; in Gibraltar. Sir Joshua angered the Rock's mainly Roman Catholic citizenry and embarrassed the British government by getting his divorce with a private member's bill that he rammed through the legislative assembly—all of which may damage his bid for another term in this week's elections. Died. The Rev. A. D. Williams King, 38, younger brother of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and himself an active civil rights leader; of accidental drowning in his swimming pool; in Atlanta. For years, "A.D.," as he was called, worked in his brother's shadow as an organizer and detail man. In 1963, after the Ku Klux Klan bombed his home, he led movements for racial integration in Birmingham and open housing in Louisville. In 1968, he assumed his slain brother's co-pastorate at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Died. Charlotte Armstrong, 64, grande dame of American suspense novelists; of cancer; in Glendale, Calif. Occasional poet, fashion reporter and playwright, Miss Armstrong turned mistress of the macabre with the 1942 publication of Lay On, Mac Duff; she went on to write more than a score of chillers, and in 1957 won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award for A Dram of Poison. "Maybe we are all potential murderers," she once said, "and reading stories about that crime releases us in some way." Died. Sidney Weinberg, 77, financial giant who deserved the sobriquet "Mr. Wall Street" (see BUSINESS). Died. Hallie Flanagan Davis, 78, director from 1935 to 1939 of the New Deal's WPA Theater Project; of Parkinson's disease; in Old Tappan, N.J. Unemployment was skyrocketing in the Depression-bound U.S. theater when Mrs. Davis, who founded Vassar College's Experimental Theater, was asked to help the show go on. She established theaters in 40 cities across the country, opened up jobs for some 13,000 actors, directors and theater workers, and helped introduce such playwrights as Christopher Marlowe, Maxwell Anderson and Clifford Odets. Died. Mrs. Helen de Young Cameron, 86, matriarch of San Francisco high society, wealthy daughter of Michel H. de Young, co-founder of the San Francisco Chronicle, who for half a century was a notable patron of the arts, and a director of both the symphony and opera associations; of a heart attack; at Rose-court, her pink-stucco château in suburban Hillsborough. Alfred Daniel Williams King (July 30, 1930 – July 21, 1969) was an American Baptist minister and civil rights activist. He was the younger brother of Martin Luther King Jr. Contents 1 Early life 2 Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement 3 Later life and death 4 References 5 External links Early life Alfred Daniel Williams King was born July 30, 1930, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a son of Reverend Martin Luther King (1899–1984), and Alberta Williams King (1904–1974), the youngest of their three children (the other two being Willie Christine, born September 11, 1927, and Martin Luther King Jr., born January 15, 1929). In contrast to his peacemaking brother, Martin, A. D.—according to his father—was "a little rough at times" and "let his toughness build a reputation throughout our neighborhood".[1]:126 Less interested in academics than his siblings, King started a family of his own while still a teenager and attended college later in his life. He was married on June 17, 1950, to Naomi Ruth Barber (born November 17, 1932), with whom he had five children: Alveda, Alfred Jr., Derek, Darlene, and Vernon. Although as a youth King had strongly resisted his father's ministerial urgings, he eventually began assisting his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church. In 1959, King graduated from Morehouse College. That same year, he left Ebenezer Baptist to become pastor of Mount Vernon First Baptist Church in Newnan, Georgia. Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement King was arrested along with his brother Martin and 70 others while participating in an October 1960 lunch-counter sit-in in Atlanta. In 1963, King became a leader of the Birmingham campaign, while pastoring at First Baptist Church of Ensley in Birmingham, Alabama. On May 11, 1963, King's house was bombed.[2] In August, after a bomb exploded at the home of a prominent black lawyer in downtown Birmingham, outraged citizens, intent on revenge, poured into the city streets. While rocks were being thrown at gathering policemen and the situation escalated, King climbed on top of a parked car and shouted to the rioters in an attempt to quell their fury: "My friends, we have had enough problems tonight. If you're going to kill someone, then kill me; ... Stand up for your rights, but with nonviolence."[3] Like his brother, King was a staunch believer in the importance of maintaining nonviolence in direct action campaigns. However, unlike his brother, King remained mostly outside the media's spotlight. As one of his associates said, "Not being in the limelight never seemed to affect him, but because he stayed in the background, many people never knew that he was deeply involved, too."[4] King tended to stay in his brother's shadow and many people never even knew that Martin Luther King Jr. had a brother. He supported his brother throughout the movement but never took the limelight away from him. King often traveled with his brother and was with him in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when his brother was shot dead. King was in the room directly beneath Martin's at the Lorraine Hotel when the gun blast went off, and when he saw his brother lying mortally wounded, he had to be restrained by others due to the shock and overwhelming emotion he was experiencing. Later life and death For the last part of his life, he suffered from alcoholism and depression.[5] In 1965, King moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he became pastor at Zion Baptist Church. While there, King continued to fight for civil rights and was successful in a 1968 campaign for an open housing ordinance. After his brother's assassination in April 1968, there was speculation that King might become the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King, however, made no effort to assume his deceased brother's role, although he did continue to be active in the Poor People's Campaign and in other work on behalf of SCLC. After Martin's death, King returned to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where, in September 1968, he was installed as co-pastor. He was praised by his father as "an able preacher, a concerned, loving pastor". On July 21, 1969, nine days before his 39th birthday, King was found dead in the swimming pool at his home.[5] The cause of his death was listed as an accidental drowning.[4][6][7][8] However, it is likely that the stress of his brother's high-profile activist work and the trauma of his assassination exacerbated A.D.'s heart problems, of which there was a family history (three of A.D.'s children later died of heart attacks: Alfred II in 1986, Darlene at age 20 on July 9, 1976,[9] and Vernon at the age 49 on May 1, 2009; his father, Martin Luther King Sr., also died of a heart attack in 1984). His father, Martin Luther King, said in his autobiography, "Alveda had been up the night before, she said, talking with her father and watching a television movie with him.[1]:192 He'd seemed unusually quiet...and not very interested in the film. But he had wanted to stay up and Alveda left him sitting in an easy chair, staring at the TV, when she went off to bed... I had questions about A.D.'s death and I still have them now. He was a good swimmer. Why did he drown? I don't know – I don't know that we will ever know what happened." Naomi King, his widow, said, "There is no doubt in my mind that the system killed my husband."[10] Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr. From the Birmingham jail, where he was imprisoned as a participant in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in longhand the letter which follows. It was his response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. Dr. King, who was born in 1929, did his undergraduate work at Morehouse College; attended the integrated Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of six black pupils among a hundred students, and the president of his class; and won a fellowship to Boston University for his Ph.D. WHILE confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms. I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every Southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliate organizations all across the South, one being the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Whenever necessary and possible, we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago our local affiliate here in Birmingham invited us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promises. So I am here, along with several members of my staff, because we were invited here. I am here because I have basic organizational ties here. Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid. Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider. You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. I am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative. IN ANY nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is known in every section of this country. Its unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in this nation. These are the hard, brutal, and unbelievable facts. On the basis of them, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation. Then came the opportunity last September to talk with some of the leaders of the economic community. In these negotiating sessions certain promises were made by the merchants, such as the promise to remove the humiliating racial signs from the stores. On the basis of these promises, Reverend Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to call a moratorium on any type of demonstration. As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. The signs remained. As in so many experiences of the past, we were confronted with blasted hopes, and the dark shadow of a deep disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community. We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through a process of self-purification. We Letter From Birmingham Jail 2 started having workshops on nonviolence and repeatedly asked ourselves the questions, "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" and "Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?" We decided to set our direct-action program around the Easter season, realizing that, with exception of Christmas, this was the largest shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this was the best time to bring pressure on the merchants for the needed changes. Then it occurred to us that the March election was ahead, and so we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that Mr. Conner was in the runoff, we decided again to postpone action so that the demonstration could not be used to cloud the issues. At this time we agreed to begin our nonviolent witness the day after the runoff. This reveals that we did not move irresponsibly into direct action. We, too, wanted to see Mr. Conner defeated, so we went through postponement after postponement to aid in this community need. After this we felt that direct action could be delayed no longer. You may well ask, "Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. We therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue. One of the basic points in your statement is that our acts are untimely. Some have asked, "Why didn't you give the new administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this inquiry is that the new administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one before it acts. We will be sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Mr. Boutwell will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is much more articulate and gentle than Mr. Conner, they are both segregationists, dedicated to the task of maintaining the status quo. The hope I see in Mr. Boutwell is that he will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from the devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was "well timed" according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodyness" -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Letter From Birmingham Jail 3 YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I - it" relationship for the "I - thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong. Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured? These are just a few examples of unjust and just laws. There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust. Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws. I MUST make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn't this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical delvings precipitated the misguided popular mind to make him drink the hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because His unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to His will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see, as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. Letter From Birmingham Jail 4 I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said, "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. YOU spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodyness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and, on the other hand, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable devil. I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest. I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, I am convinced that by now many streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who are working through the channels of nonviolent direct action and refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, he has been swept in by what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. Recognizing this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand public demonstrations. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sitins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, "Get rid of your discontent." But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized. But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love? -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice? -- "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? -- "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist? -- "Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God." Was not John Bunyan an extremist? -- "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience." Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? -- "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe I expected too much. I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some, like Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, and James Dabbs, have written about our struggle in eloquent, prophetic, and understanding terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They sat in with us at lunch counters and rode in with us on the freedom rides. They have languished in filthy roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of angry policemen who see them as "dirty nigger lovers." They, unlike many of their moderate brothers, have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Letter From Birmingham Jail 5 LET me rush on to mention my other disappointment. I have been disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand this past Sunday in welcoming Negroes to your Baptist Church worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Springhill College several years ago. But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say that as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel who loves the church, who was nurtured in its bosom, who has been sustained by its Spiritual blessings, and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen. I had the strange feeling when I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery several years ago that we would have the support of the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be some of our strongest allies. Instead, some few have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows. In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and with deep moral concern serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed. I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother. In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular. There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But they went on with the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven" and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation -- and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. I must close now. But before closing I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I don't believe you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I don't believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I'm sorry that I can't join you in your praise for the police department. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Letter From Birmingham Jail 6 It is true that they have been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been publicly "nonviolent." But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. I wish you had commended the Negro demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested." They will be young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Never before have I written a letter this long -- or should I say a book? I'm afraid that it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers? If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me. Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1963 WMU Speech Found MLK at Western Introduction This Web site highlights Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, December 18, 1963 speech at Western Michigan University. The pages include historical background, details about the recovery of the tape recording, transcription of the speech and question and answer session, primary source documents, and a list of library and Internet sources about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   The speech transcription is important for several reasons. It adds to the body of knowledge about the development of Dr. King's work and ideas. Dr. King spoke at WMU just four months after he made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. King's WMU address contains elements of earlier speeches and sermons, including his address at the Freedom Rally in 1957 and a sermon about loving enemies that he had given at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.   The speech transcription is also an important document for studying the continuing dialogue about racial prejudice and race relations on Western's campus. The speech transcription and accompanying documents provide additional information to better understand Dr. King's enduring influence on Western's campus through the programs and curricula established in the late 1960s and the broader societal changes brought about by his nonviolent movement for civil rights and social justice for all.   The Lost Tape The tape recording of the live broadcast of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s December 18, 1963 speech was lost for almost 30 years. The tape was rebroadcast at the time of Dr. King's assassination in 1968 but was later lost until 1997 when Phill Novess contacted WMUK general manager, Garrard Macleod.   A copy of King's address had been found on a reel‐to‐reel machine that Novess had acquired from his grandfather, Phillip Novess. The senior Novess owned a small grocery store on the east side of Kalamazoo and accepted the reel‐to‐reel tape recorder as collateral for groceries in the early 1970s. When he sold the grocery store and the tape player had not been reclaimed, Novess took it home and put it in his basement. He gave the tape to his grandson for restoration purposes. Novess' business, Eclipse Media Group, specializes in noise reduction and restoration of audio tapes. Novess restored the tape with the assistance of Kevin Brown, of Brown & Brown Recording & Music Productions in Portage. Martin Luther King, Jr. is remembered for his achievements in civil rights and for the methods he used to get there — namely, nonviolence. More than just a catchphrase, more than just the “absence of violence,” and more than just a tactic, nonviolence was a philosophy that King honed over the course of his adult life. It has had a profound, lasting influence on social justice movements at home and abroad. In September 1962, King convened a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the main organizational force behind his civil rights activism, in Birmingham, Alabama. King was giving a talk on the need for nonviolent action in the face of violent white racism when a white man jumped on stage and, without a word, punched him in the face repeatedly. King naturally put up his hands to deflect the blows. But after a few punches, he let his hands fall to his side. The man, who turned out to be an American Nazi Party member, continued to flail. The integrated audience at first thought the whole thing was staged, a mock demonstration of King’s nonviolent philosophy in action. But as King reeled, and real blood spurted from his face, they began to realize it was no act. Finally, several SCLC members rushed the stage to stop the attack. But they stopped short when King shouted, “Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! We have to pray for him.” The SCLC men pulled the Nazi off King, who was beaten so badly he couldn’t continue the speech. Precisely because the attack wasn’t staged, it left an immense impression on the convention attendees, and anyone else who heard about it in the coming days. King © 2017, Constitutional Rights Foundation, Los Angeles. All Constitutional Rights Foundation materials and publications, including Bill of Rights in Action, are protected by copyright. However, we hereby grant to all recipients a license to reproduce all material contained herein for distribution to students, other school site personnel, and district administrators. (ISSN: 1534-9799) SUMMER 2017 Volume 32 No4 CHALLENGING IDEAS This edition of Bill of Rights in Action focuses on ideas that provoke change. The first article traces the development of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolent philosophy in the civil rights movement. The second article reviews political and economic changes in Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War. The third article analyzes conflicts over free speech on today’s college campuses. U.S. History: Martin Luther King and the Philosophy of Nonviolence by guest writer and New York Times deputy op-ed editor Clay Risen World History: Vietnam Today by longtime contributor Carlton Martz U.S. Government/Current Issues: Free Speech on Campus: Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, and Controversial Speech at U.S. Colleges by guest writer Aimée Koeplin, Ph.D. Constitutional Rights Foundation Wikimedia Commons Bill of Rights in Action MARTIN LUTHER KINGAND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NONVIOLENCE Martin Luther King, Jr. addressing the crowd of about 250,000 people at the March on Washington in August 1963. BRIA 32:4 (Summer 2017) U.S. HISTORY 2 hadn’t been just preaching nonviolence; confronted, without warning, by racist violence, he lived it, even at great risk to himself. King did not invent nonviolence as a doctrine for achieving social justice. But he adapted it for an American context, and showed how compelling yet flexible it could be. Influences on King’s Nonviolence King’s earliest exposure to the ideas that would coalesce in his nonviolent philosophy occurred when he was an undergraduate at Morehouse College, in Atlanta. He read Henry David Thoreau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” which outlined the idea of resisting an unjust government through nonviolent resistance, several times. And yet he had a hard time seeing how Thoreau’s highly intellectual New England mentality could provide much of a model for the problem of blacks in the American South, where lynching and plain murder were common fates for African Americans who challenged white supremacy. King continued his academic studies, and his personal research into nonviolence, at Pennsylvania’s Crozier Theological Seminary, where he began his graduate studies in 1948. There he read deeply the growing literature around Christianity as a social movement, which placed the demands of political and economic justice at the heart of a Christian’s religious calling. But it was not until he began to study the life and works of Mahatma Gandhi that he began to see the possibility of applying nonviolence to the specific problems of African Americans, especially in the South. As he later told it, in Philadelphia he listened to a sermon by the president of Howard University, Mordecai Johnson, who spoke at length about the teachings and actions of Gandhi, and in particular his use of nonviolent mass protest to challenge British control over India. King left the sermon transfixed. Though Gandhi was Hindu, King saw immediately the similarity with the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the possibility of applying Gandhian nonviolence in an American and Christian context. King had struggled to see how the lessons of the New Testament could be useful in the struggle for racial justice. “Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationship,” he wrote. “But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.” Would Nonviolence Work? For King, the heart of Gandhi’s nonviolence was love, in the spiritual, transcendent form of the word. In the face of coercive, racist British rule, Gandhi so loved his oppressors that he refused to take up arms against them. But Gandhi was not without his critics. Some observers said he was lucky that the British were the ones doing the oppressing and questioned whether the Nazis – or racist American whites – would have allowed similar flouting of the law, however nonviolent. King was willing to take a chance that, at least in America, the answer was yes. King also had to deal with another criticism. Some, like the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, said that nonviolence too often became a way of sealing off one’s moral superiority, of accepting suffering at the hands of one’s oppressors as a form of soul-cleansing, while losing sight of the goal of social justice. “All too many had an unwarranted optimism concerning man and leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness,” King wrote. It was a point he took to heart – and it was one reason, he said, “why I never joined a pacifist organization.” But nonviolence, he argued, was anything but passive. “Nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice,” he said. “It does resist. It is not a method of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent resister but he resists without violence.” What did King mean by nonviolence? It was not merely the refusal to hit back, an insistence on turning the other cheek. It was, in its own way, aggressive. It meant putting oneself in the face of violence, of actively confronting it and, responding with love to the jabs and punches. It also meant organizing thousands across the South in specific mass actions that would force face-to-face encounters with white, racist power. Doing so, King taught, would demonstrate both the impotence of white violence and show the country that the black community was not afraid to insist on its rights. For King, responding to violence in kind would show the weakness of the black community, not its strength. Nonviolence would also strengthen the activist community through shared suffering and struggle. Wikimedia Commons Mahatma Gandhi was a major leader of the movement for Indian independence from Great Britain from 1915 until 1947, when Britain granted independence. His nonviolent philosophy was a central influence on Martin Luther King. This experience would expand outward to encompass the black community broadly and, King hoped, all Americans in what he called “the beloved community.” Of course, King also understood the practical reasons for nonviolence. Given that blacks were a minority, and that Southern whites often had the power of the local and state police behind them, violence was a dead end. Even demonstrating the possibility of a violent response would elicit a massive backlash, potentially destroying the civil rights movement. And it would negate whatever good will the movement was building in the national community, and especially in Washington, where King and other leaders hoped to see federal civil rights legislation. Testing Nonviolence King’s first foray into nonviolent protest was with the Montgomery bus boycott, which began in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person while riding home from work. She was arrested, leading to an organized effort by Montgomery blacks to avoid riding the bus system, relying instead on carpools. The boycott was a classic Gandhian move: a demonstration of economic independence as a way of eliciting concessions from the white establishment. It was also classic King: intricately organized, well-publicized, and while noble in itself, also leading in a lengthy negotiation with the local white political establishment to desegregate the bus service. And it worked. It would be several years before King’s next major action, but already others followed his model. The 1961 Freedom Riders, who traveled across the Deep South on desegregated interstate buses, demonstrated King’s highest ideal when they reached Montgomery, Alabama, where a mob of angry whites attacked and beat them savagely. Not a single rider, black or white, hit back. Meanwhile, King was leading seminars and workshops on nonviolence. While King was trying to build a mass movement, he also was preparing a vanguard of experts in nonviolence who could walk in the front of marches and absorb the brunt of any assault. They also could do their own training in seminars across the South. Perhaps the most noteworthy trainee to come out of King’s workshops was John Lewis. Lewis was a young seminarian who became a leading activist in Nashville, participated in the Freedom Rides, spoke at the 1963 March on Washington and, most famously, was beaten severely in the so-called Bloody Sunday incident in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. From Birmingham to D.C. As the ranks of the Southern civil rights movement grew, King began to set his sights higher. Nonviolent protest on a large enough scale would overwhelm any possible response. Police could arrest several dozen marchers, but not several thousand. In late spring 1963, King decided to focus on organizing a boycott by black shoppers of the downtown retailers in Birmingham, Alabama, calling for integration of the city’s shops and restaurants. When talks between King’s SCLC, the city government, and local business leaders faltered, King organized hundreds of school children to march through downtown Birmingham, despite not having a permit. The city police and fire departments, under the command of Theophilus “Bull” Connor, met them with dogs and fire hoses. The water pressure was so high it stripped the clothes off the children’s backs. Those who didn’t turn around were arrested. King and his associates had trained the students in nonviolence, however, and not a single one struck out. Images from Birmingham appeared in newspapers and on evening news programs around the world. Not only did the protests force the city’s leaders to reach a compromise with King and the SCLC, but the fear of more incidents such as the one in Birmingham spurred President Kennedy (and later President Lyndon Johnson) to push for the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, ending segregation across the South. King followed up on his success in Birmingham with the August 1963 March on Washington. Despite widespread fears of violence, the march of a quarter of a million people who came to the city to hear King, Lewis, and other civil rights leaders speak was entirely peaceful, a demonstration that Birmingham was no fluke and that nonviolence could indeed become a mass movement. From Selma to Chicago Perhaps the most powerful moment in the civil rights movement came a little over a year later, in early 1965, when King and Lewis joined local leaders James Bevel and Amelia Boynton in organizing a march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. The march would protest the lack of voting rights protections in the South. King was unable to join the protesters when they first set off on Sunday, March 7, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, headed east out of town. As they reached the far side, they were met by dozens of state troopers. They pressed on and the officers set on them, raining down billy clubs and boot kicks. Lewis had his head split open. Eventually the marchers fled back over the bridge. This incident became known as “Bloody Sunday.” King arrived to lead a second march three days later but turned back at the last minute, fearing a trap. Finally, with federal protection, the peaceful march set off on March 21 and reached Montgomery three days later. That BRIA 32:4 (Summer 2017) U.S. HISTORY 3 Nonviolence,King argued,was anything but passive. 4 U.S. HISTORY BRIA 32:4 (Summer 2017) summer, with images of Bloody Sunday still fresh in the nation’s mind, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. As a philosophy, nonviolence was unassailable. As a tactic, it worked well in the context of an embattled South, where national attention focused on the shrinking hard core of white racists who refused to give ground to the civil rights movement. But nonviolence proved less effective as King tried to take his movement national. In 1966, he launched the Chicago campaign, a combination of marches and education intended to highlight the entrenched, but complex, racial disparities in the Windy City. The marchers again encountered white racists who shouted epithets at them, but many Northern whites saw racial disparities as merely the unfortunate outcome of economic disparities. Markets, not men, were to blame, and they refused to see the moral appeal behind King’s nonviolent activism. At the same time, while King dominated the civil rights story in the media during the late 1950s and early 1960s, other leaders and other factions of the movement were often just as active in demanding change but significantly less committed to nonviolence. As the 1960s progressed, these groups, especially the next generation emerging from college, began to gain prominence by taking a more aggressive, even violent stance, embracing armed self-defense complete with automatic weapons. King disparaged these activists, like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, as immature and unsophisticated. But he could see as well as anyone the diminishing appeal of nonviolence in a country where violence was spreading both at home and in the Vietnam War. Indeed, Brown memorably argued that “violence is necessary. It’s as American as cherry pie.” From Memphis to Today King’s last attempt at a nonviolent movement came in Memphis in 1968, where a garbage workers’ strike was dragging on. In late March, King arrived in the city to lead a protest march, but he couldn’t control it. Hoodlums on the edges of the march began shattering windows, and the police moved in. Dozens were injured, and one boy was killed. King returned to the city a few days later to try again, hoping that success in Memphis could illustrate the continued power of nonviolence. Instead, on the early evening of April 4, 1968, he was shot and killed by James Earl Ray, a white drifter, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. In the days that followed, riots broke out in more than 100 cities across America; scores were killed and thousands injured; and active-duty military forces occupied Washington, Baltimore, and Chicago. As skeptics noted, it was a very violent end to the life of a proponent of nonviolence. Despite his violent end, nonviolent protest did not die with King. In fact, protest movements have adopted it time and again in America and around the world – the gay rights movement, the Solidarity trade union in Poland, the Green Revolution in Iran, and recent demonstrations throughout the U.S. (such as Occupy Wall Street and the Women’s March on Washington). Not all of them have referenced King specifically. But that’s all the more to his credit: Their reliance on the philosophy of nonviolence as the cornerstone of protest politics is the greatest tribute that the world could give to Martin Luther King, Jr. WRITING & DISCUSSION 1. What did the violent incident with the American Nazi in 1962 reveal about Martin Luther King’s philosophy? What did it reveal about his character? 2. Describe the influences on Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence. How did he interpret those influences in an American context? 3. How was King’s philosophy of nonviolence more than just an “absence of violence”? Use examples from the article. 4. What do you think was the greatest success of the civil rights movement described in the article. How did King’s philosophy of nonviolence play a part in its success? The class is a group of civil rights protesters planning an action in a Southern town in 1962 calling for desegregation of a local lunch counter. Divide students into groups of four. Each group will discuss and then answer the following questions: A. What is the best method to protest? (Choices include: sitting at the lunch counter without moving (a sit-in), marching down the center of the town, boycotting the lunch counter, starting a petition to deliver to the owner of the lunch counter, etc.) B. What sort of response do they expect from the owners and authorities? C. Who are some local allies they can engage with? D. What is the best way to publicize the action? E. What sort of training is necessary? After answering the questions, each group’s spokesperson will share: • The method of protest his or her group chose, and • Reasons for the choice (incorporating answers to the questions as part of the rationale).MARTIN LUTHER KING FJ ® PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: a candid conversation with the nobel prize-winning leader of the civil rights movement On December 5, 1955, to the amused annoyance of the white citizens of Montgornery, Alabama, an obscure young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, ]1-., called a city-wide Negro boycolt of its segregated bus system. To thei1· constemation, however, it was almost 100 pe1·cent successful; it lasted for 381 days and nearly bankrupted the bus line. When King's home was bombed dming the siege, thousands of enraged Negroes wae ready to riot, but the soft-spoken clergyman prevailed on them to channel their anger into nonviolent protest-and became world· 1·enowned as a champion of Gandhi's philosophy of passive resistance. Within a year the Supreme Court had ruled jim Crow seating unlawful on JVI.on tgomery's buses, and King found himself, at 27, on the front lines of a nonviolent Negro revolution against mcial injustice. Moving to Atlanta, he formed the Southern ChTistian Leadership Conference, an alliance of chuTCh-affiliated civil rights oTganizations which joined such activist gToups as CORE and SNCC in a widening campaign of sit-in demonstrations and freedom rides throughout the South. Dissatisfied with the slow pace of the protest movement, King decided to create a c1·isis in 1963 that would " dramatize the Negro plight and galvanize the national conscience." He was abundantly successful, for his mass nonviolent demonstmtion in arch-segregationist Bi1·mingham resulted in · the arrest of moTe than 3300 Negroes, including King "Measures must be taken at the· Federal level to wrb the reign of terror in the South. It's getting so anybody can kill a Negro and get away with it, as long as they go through the motions of a trial." himself; and millions were outraged by front-page pictures of Negro demonstrators being brutalized by the billy sticks, police dogs and fire hoses of police chief Bull Connor. In the months that followed, mass sitins and demonstrations erupted in 800 Southern cities; Presiden t Kennedy proposed a Civil Rights Bill aimed at the enforcement of voting rights, equal employment opportunities, and the desegregation of public facilities; and the now-famous march on Washington, 200,- 000 strong, was eloquently addressed by King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. By the end of that "long hot summer," Ame1·ica's Negroes had won more tangible gains than in any year since 1865-and Mm·tin Luther King had become their aclmowledged leader and most respected spokesman. He earned it the hard way: In the course of his civil rights work he has been jailed 14 times and stabbed once in the chest; his home has been bombed three times; and his daily mail brings a steady flow of death threats and obscenities. Undeterred, he works 20 hours a day, travels 325,000 miles anrl'makes 450 speeches a year throughout the country on behalf of the Negro cause. 1mmdated by calls, callers and correspondence at his S.C. L. C. office in Atlanta, he also finds time somehow to preach, visit the sick and help th e poor among his congregation at the city's Ebeneza Baptist Church, of which he and his father are the pastors. "I'm getting sicli and tired of people saying that this movement has been infiltrated by Communists. There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida." Reprinted from the January 1965 issue of PLAYBOY @1 965 HM H Publishing Co., Inc. So heavy, in fact, were his commitments when we called him last summer for an interview, that two months elapsed before he was able to accept Ottr request for an appointment. We kept it -only to spend a week in Atlanta waiting vainly for him to find a moment for more than an apology and a hun·ied handshal<e: A bit less pressed when we 1·etumed for a second visit, King was finally able to sandwich in a series of hour and half-hour conversations with us among the other demands of a grueling week. The resultant interview is the longest he has ever granted to any publication. Though he spoke with heartfelt and often eloqu ent sincerity, his tone was one of bwinesslike detachment. And his mood, except for one or two flickering smiles of irony, was gravely se1·ious-never more so than the moment, during a rare evening with his family on our first night in town, when his four children chided him affectionately for "not being home enough." After dinner, we began the interview on this per-sonal note. PLAYBOY: Dr. King, are your children old enough to be aware of the issues at stake in the civil rights movement, and of your role in it? KING: Yes, they are-especially my oldest child, Yolanda. Two years ago, I remember, I returned home after serving one of my terms in the Albany, Georgia, jail, and she asked me, "Daddy, why do "The Nobel award Tecognizes the amazing discipline of the Negro. Though we have had 1·iots, the bloodshed we would have lin own without the discipline of nonviolence would have been frightening." you have to go to jail so much?" I told her that I was involved in a struggle to make conditions better for the colored people, and thus for all people. I explained that because things are as they are, someone has to take a stand, that it is necessary for someone to go to jail, because many Southern officials seek to maintain the barriers that have historically been erected to exclude the colored people. I tried to make her understand that someone had to do this to make the world better-for all children. She was only six at that time, but she was already aware of segregation because of an experience that we had had. PLAYBOY: Would you mind telling us about it? KING: Not at all. The family often used to ride with me to the Atlanta airport, and on our way, we always passed Funtown, a sort of miniature Disneyland with mechanical rides and that sort of thing. Yolanda would inevitably say, "I want to go to Funtown," and I would always evade a direct reply. I really didn't know how to explain to her why she couldn't go. Then one day at home, she ran downstairs exclaiming that a TV commercial was urging people to come to Funtown. Then my wife and I had to sit down with her between us and try to explain it. I have won some applause as a speaker, but my tongue twisted a'nd my speech stammered seeking to explain to my six-year-old daughter why the public invitation on television didn't include her, and others like her. Dne of the most painful experiences I have ever faced was to see her tears when I told her that Funtown was closed to colored children, for I realized that at that moment the first dark cloud of inferiority had floated into her little mental sky, that at that moment her personality had begun to warp with that-first unconscious bitterness toward white people. It was the first time that prejudice based upon skin color had been explained to her. But it was of paramount importance to me that she not grow up bitter. So I told her that although many white people were against her going to Funtown, there were many others who did want colored children to go. It helped somewhat. Pleasantly, word came to me later that Funtown had quietly desegregated, so I took Yolanda. A number of white persons there asked, "Aren't. you Dr. King, and isn't this your daughter?" I said we were, and she heard them say how glad they were to see us there. PLAYBOY: As one who grew up in the economically comfortable, socially insulated environment of a middle-income home in Atlanta, can you recall when it was that you yourself first became painfully and personally aware of racial prejudice? KING: Very clearly. When I was 14, I had traveled from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia, with a dear teacher of mine, Mrs. Bradley; she's dead now. I had participated there in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks. It turned out to be a memorable day, for I had succeeded in winning the contest. My subject, I recall, ironically enough, was "The Negro and the Constitution." Anyway, that night, Mrs. Bradley and I were on a bus returning to Atlanta, and at a small town along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white driver ordered us to get up and. give the whites our seats. We didn't move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us, calling us "black sons of bitches." I intended to stay right in that scat, but Mrs. Bradley finally urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. And so we stood up in the aisle for the 90 miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life. PLAYBOY: Wasn't it another such incident on a bus, years later, that thrust you into your present role as a civil rights leader? KING: Yes, it was-in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter long identified with the NAACP, telephoned me late one night to tell me that Mrs. Rosa Parks had been arrested around seven-thirty that evening when a bus driver demanded that she give up her seat, and she refused-because her feet hurt. Nixon had already bonded Mrs. Parks out of prison. He said, "It's time this stops; we ought to boycott the buses." I agreed and said, "Now." The next night we called a meeting of Negro community leaders to discuss it, and on Saturday and Sunday we appealed to the Negro community, with leaflets and from the pulpits, to boycott the buses on Monday. We had in mind a one-day boycott, and we were banking on 60-percent success. But the boycott saw instantaneous 99-percent success. We were so pleasantly surprised and impressed that we continued, and for the next 381 days the boycott of Montgomery's buses by Negroes was 991 YJ 0 successful. PLAYBOY: Were you sure you'd win? KING: There was one dark moment when we doubted it. We had been struggling to make the boycott a success when the city of Montgomery successfully obtained an injunction from the court to stop our car pool. I didn't know what to say to our people. They had backed us up, and we had let them down. It was a desolate moment. I saw, all of us saw, that the court was leaning against us. I remember telling a group of those working closest with me to spread in the Negro community the message, "We must have the faith that things will work out somehow, that God will make a way for us when there seems no way." It was about noontime, I remember, when Rex Thomas of the Associated Press rushed over to where I was sitting and told me of the news flash that the U. S. Supreme Court had declared that bus segregation in Montgomery was unconstitutional. It had literally been the darkest hour before the dawn. PLAYBOY: You and your followers were criticized, after your arrest for participating in the boycott, for accepting bail and leaving jail. Do you feel, in retrospect, that you did the right thing? KING: No; I think it was a mistake, a tactical error for me to have left jail, by accepting bail, after being indicted along with 125 others, mainly drivers of our car pool, under an old law of doubtful constitutionality, an "antiboycott" ordinance. I should have stayed in prison. It would have nationally dramatized and deepened our movement even earlier, and it would have more quickly aroused and keened America's conscience. PLAYBOY: Do you feel you've been guilty of any comparable errors in judgment since then? KING: Yes, I do-in Albany, Georgia, in 1962. If I had that to do again, I would guide that community's Negro leadership differently than I did. The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters. One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale. But I don't mean that our work in Albany ended in failure. The Negro people there straightened up their bent backs; you can't ride a man's back unless it's bent. Also, thousands of Negroes registered to vote who never had voted before, and because of the expanded Negro vote in the next election lor governor of Georgia-which pitted a moderate candidate against a rabid segregationist-Georgia elected its first governor who had pledged to respect and enforce the law impartially. And what we learned from our mistakes in Albany helped our later campaigns in other cities to be more effective. We have never since scattered our efforts in a general attack on segregation, but have focused upon specific, symbolic objectives. PLAYBOY: Can you recall any other mistakes you've made in leading the movement? KING: Well, the most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our cause to the white power structures. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, ami cl:rect appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands--and some even took stands against us. PLAYBOY: Their stated reason for refusing to help was that it was not the proper role of the church to "intervene in secular affairs." Do you disagree with this view? KING: Most emphatically. The essence of the Epistles of Paul is that Christians should rejoice at being deemed worthy to suffer for: what they believe. The projection of a soci al gospel, in my opinion, is the true witness of a Christian life. This is the meaning of the true ekklesia-the inner, spiritual church. The church once changed society. It was then a thermostat of society. But today I feel that too much of the church is merely a thermometer, which measures rather than molds popular opinion. PLAYBOY: Are you speaking of the church in general-or the white church in particular? KING: The white church, I'm sorry to say. Its leadership has greatly disappointed me. Let me h asten to say there are some outstanding exceptions. As one whose Christian roots go back through three generations of ministers-my father, grandfather and great-grandfather -I will remain true to the church as long as I live. But the laxity of the white church collectively has caused me to weep tears of love. There cannot be deep disappointment without deep love. Time and again in my travels, as I have seen the outward beauty of white churches, I have had to ask myself, "What kind of people worship there? Who is their God? Is their God the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and is their Savior the Savior who hung on the cross a t Golgotha? Where were their voices when a black race took upon itself the cross of protest against man's injustice to man? Where were their voices when defiance and hatred were called for by white men who sat in these very churches?" As the Negro struggles against grave injustice, most white churchmen offer pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. As you say, they claim that the gospel of Christ should have no concern with social issues. Yet white churchgoers, who insist that they are Christians, practice segregation as rigidly in the house of God as they do in moviehouses. Too much of the white church is timid and ineffectual, and some of it is shrill in its defense of bigotry and prejudice. In most communities, the spirit of status quo is endorsed by the churches. i\ly personal disillusionment with the church began when I was thrust into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery. I was confident that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would prove strong allies in our just cause. But some became open adversaries, some cautiously shrank from the issue, and others hid behind silence. My optimism about help from the white church was shattered; and on too many occasions since, my hopes for the white church have been dashed. There are many signs th at the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. Unless the early sacrificial spirit is recaptured, I am very much afraid that today's Christian church will lose its authenticity, for· feit t-he loyalty of millions, and we will see the Christian church dismissed as a social club with no meaning or effectiveness for our time, as a form without substance, as salt without savor. The real tragedy, though, is not Martin Luther King's disillusionment with the churchfor I am sustained by its spiritual blessings as a minister of the gospel with a lifelong commitment; the tragedy is that in my travels, I meet young people of all races whose disenchantment with the church has soured into outright disgust. PLAYBOY: Do you feel that the Negro church has come any closer to "the projection of a social gospel" in its commitment to the cause? KING: I must say that when my Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its work in Birmingham, we encountered numerous Negro church reactions that had to be overcome. Negro ministers were among other Negro leaders who felt they were being pulled into something that they had not helped to organize. This is almost always a problem. Negro community unity was the first requisite if our goals were to be realized. I talked with many groups, including one group of 200 ministers, my theme to them being that a minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration. These ministers finally decided to entrust our movement with their support, and as a result, the role of the Negro church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches. I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!" I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? \Vas there any hope? Was there any way out? PLAYBOY: Do you still feel this way? KING: No, time has healed the wounds -and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting-ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor's police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor's bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor's men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor's lilen fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence. Another time I will never forget was one Saturday night, late, when my brother telephoned me in Atlanta from Birmingham-that city which some call "Bombingham"-which I had just left. He told me that a bomb had wrecked his home, and that another bomb, positioned to exert its maximum force · upon the motel room in which I had been staying, had injured several people. l\fy brother described the terror in the streets as Negroes, furious at the bombings, fought whites. Then, . behind his voice, I heard a rising chorus of beautiful singing: "We shall overcome." Tears came into my eyes that at such a tragic moment, my race still could sing .its hope and faith . PLAYBOY: We Shall Overcome has become the unofficial song and slogan of the civil rights movement. Do you consider such inspirational anthems important to morale? KING: In a sense, songs are the soul of a movement. Consider, in World War Two, Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, and in World War One, Over There and Tipperary, and during the Civil War, Battle Hymn of the Republic and john Brown's Body . A Negro song anthology would include sorrow songs, shouts for joy, battle hymns, anthems. Since slavery, the Negro has sung throughout his struggle in America. Steal Away and Go Down, 1\1.oses were the songs of faith and inspiration which were sung on the plantations. For the same reasons the slaves sang, Negroes today sing freedom songs, for we, too, are in bondage. We sing out our determination that "We shall overcome, black and white together, we shalt overcome someday." I should also mention a song parody that I enjoyed very much which the Negroes sang during our campaign in Albany, Georgia. It goes: ''I'm comin', I'm comin'/ And my head ain't bendin' low /I'm walkin' tall, I'm talkin' strong/I'm America's N ew Black Joe." PLAYBOY: Your detractors in the Negro community often refer to you snidely as "De Lawd" and "Booker T. King." What's your reaction to this sort of Uncle Tom label? KING: I hear some of those names, but my reaction to them is never emotional. I don't think you can be in public life without being called bad names. As Lincoln said, "If 1 answered all criticism, I'd have time for nothing else." But with regard to both of the names you mentioned, I've always tried to be what I call militantly nonviolent. 1 don't believe that anyone could seriously accuse me of not being totally committed to the breakdown of segregation. PLAYBOY: What do you mean by "militantly nonviolent"? KING: I mean to say that a strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist. If I am to merit the trust invested in me by some of my race, I must be both of these things. This is why nonviolence is a powerful as well as a just weapon. If you confront a man who has long been cruelly misusing yp u, and say, "Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong," then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed. Wherever i:his weapon is used in a manner that stirs a community's, or a nation's, anguished conscience, then the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause. Another of the major strengths of the nonviolent weapon is its strange power to transform and transmute the individuals who subordinate themselves to its disciplines, investing them with a cause that is larger than themselves. They become, for the first time, somebody, and they have, for the first time, the courage to be free. When the Negro finds the courage to be free, he faces dogs and guns and clubs and fire hoses totally unafraid, and the white men with those dogs, guns, clubs and fire hoses see that the Negro they have traditionally called "boy" has become a man. We should not forget that, although nonviolent direct action did not originate in America, it found a na tural home where it has been a revered tradition to rebel against injustice. This great weapon, which we first tried out in Montgomery during the bus boycott, has been further developed throughout the South over the past decade, until by today it has become instrumental in the greatest mass-action crusade for freedom that has occurred in America since the Revolutionary War. The effectiveness of this weapon's ability to dramatize, in the world's eyes, an oppressed peoples' struggle for justice is evident in the fact that of 1963's top ten news stories after the assassination of President Kennedy and the events immediately connected with it, nine stories dealt with one aspect or another of the Negro struggle. PLAYBOY: Several of those stories dealt with your own nonviolent campaigns against segregation in various Southern cities, where you and your followers have been branded "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators." Do you feel you've earned these labels? KING: Wherever the early Christians appeared, spreading Christ's doctrine of love, the resident power structure accused them of being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But the small Christian band continued to teach and exemplify love, convinced that they were "a colony of heaven" on this earth who were missioned to obey not man but God. If those of us who employ nonviolent direct action today are dismissed by our white brothers as "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators," if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts and goals, we can be assured that the summer of 1965 will be no less long and hot than the summer of 1964. Our white brothers must be made to understand that nonviolence is a weapon fabricated of love. It is a sword that heals. Our nonviolent direct-action program has as its objective not the creation of tensions, but the surfacing of tensions already present. We set out to precipitate a crisis situation that must open the door to negotiation. I am not afraid of the words "crisis" and "tension." I deeply oppose violence, but constructive crisis and tension are necessary for growth. Innate in all life, and all growth, is tension. Only in death is there an absence of tension. To cure injustices, you must expose them before the light of human conscience and the bar of public opinion, regardless of whatever tensions that exposure generates. Injustices to the Negro must be brought out into the open where they cannot be evaded. PLAYBOY: Is this the sole aim of your Southern Christian Leadership Conference? KING: We have five aims: first, to stimulate nonviolent, direct, mass action to expose and remove the barriers of segregation and discrimina tion; second, to disseminate the creative philosophy and techniques of nonviolence through local and area workshops; third, to secure the right and unhampered use of the ballot for every citizen; fourth, to achieve full citizenship rights, and the total integration of the Negro into American life; and fifth, to reduce the cultural lag through our citizenship training program. PLAYBOY: How does S. C. L. C. select the cities where nonviolent campaigns and demonstrations are to be staged? KING: The operational area of S. C. L. C. is the entire South, where we have affiliated organizations in some 85 cities. Our major campaigns have been conducted only in cities where a request for our help comes from one of these affiliate organizations, and only when we feel that intolerable conditions in that community might be ameliorated with our help. I will give you an example. In Birmingham, one of our affiliate organizations is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which was organized by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a most energetic and indomitable man. It was he who set out to end Birmingham's racism, challenging the terrorist reign of Bull Connor. S. C. L. C. watched admiringly as the small Shuttlesworth-led organization fought in the Birmingham courts and with boycotts. Shuttlesworth was jailed several times, his home and church were bombed, and still he did not back down. His defiance of Birmingham's racism inspired and encouraged Negroes throughout the South. Then, at a May 1962 board meeting of the S. C. L. C. in Chattanooga, the first discussions began that later led to our joining Shuttlesworth's organization m a massive direct-action campaign to attack Birmingham's segregation. PLAYBOY: One of the highlights of that campaign was your celebrated "Letter from a Birmingham Jail''-written during one of your jail terms for civil disobedience-an eloquent reply to eight Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergymen who had criticized your activities in Birmingham. Do you feel that subsequent events have justified the sentiments expressed in your letter? KING: I would say yes. Two or three important and constructive things have happened which can be at least partially attnbuted to that letter. By now, nearly a million copies of the letter have been widely circulated in churches of most of the major denominations. It helped to focus greater international attention upon what was happening in Birmingham. And I am sure that without Birmingham, the march on Washington wouldn't have been called-which in my mind was one of the most creative steps the Negro struggle has taken. The march on Washington spurred and galvanized the consciences of millions. It gave the American Negro a new national and international stature. The press of the world recorded the story as nearly a quarter of a million Americans, white and black, assembled in grandeur as a testimonial to the Negro's determination to achieve freedom in this generation. It was also the image of Birmingham which, to a great extent, helped to bring the Civil Rights Bill into being in 1963. Previously, President Kennedy had decided not to propose it that year, feeling that it would so arouse the South that it would meet a bottleneck. But Birmingham, and subsequent developments, caused him to reorder his legislative priorities. One of these decisive developments was our last major campaign before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act-in St .. Augustine, Florida. We received a plea for help from Dr. Robert Hayling, the leader of the St. Augustine movement. St. Augustine, America's oldest city, and one of the most segregated cities in America, was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. Such things had happened as Klansmen abducting four Negroes and beating them unconscious with clubs, brass knuckles, ax handles and· pistol butts. Dr. Hayling's home had been shot up with buckshot, three Negro homes had been bombed and several Negro night clubs shotgunned. A Negro's car had been destroyed by fire because his child was one of the six Negro children permitted to attend white schools. And the homes of two of the Negro children in the white schools had been burned down. Many Negroes had been fired from jobs that some had worked on for 28 years because they were somehow connected with the demonstrations. Police had beaten and arrested Negroes for picketing, marching and singing freedom songs. Many Negroes had served up to 90 days in jail for demonstrating against segregation, and four teenagers had spent six months in jail for picketing. Then, on 'February seventh of last year, Dr. Hay}ing's home was shotgunned a second time, with his pregnant wife and two children barely escaping death; the family dog was killed while standing behind the living-room door. So S. C. L. C. decided to join in last year's celebration of St. Augustine's gala 400th birthday as America's oldest city-by converting it into a nonviolent battleground. This is just what we did. PLAYBOY: But isn't it true, Dr. King, that during this and other "nonviolent" demonstrations, violence has occurredsometimes resulting in hundreds of casualties on both sides? KING: Yes, in part that is true. But what is always overlooked is how few people, in ratio to the numbers involved, have been casualties. An army on maneuvers, against no enemy, suffers casualties, even fatalities. A minimum of whites have been casualties in demonstrations solely because our teaching of nonviolence disciplines our followers not to fight even if attacked. A minimum of Negroes are casualties for two reasons: Their white oppressors know tha t the world watches their actions, and for the first time they are being faced by Negroes who display no fear. PLAYBOY: It was shortly after your St. Augustine campaign last summer, as you mentioned, that the Civil Rights Bill was passed-outlawing many of the injustices against which you had been demonstrating. Throughout the South, predictably, it was promptly anathematized as unconstitutional and excessive h:~ its concessions to Negro demands. How do you feel about it? KING: I don't feel that the Civil Rights Act has gone far enough in some of its coverage. In the first place, it needs a stronger voting section. You will never have a true democracy until you can eliminate all restrictions. We need to do away with restrictive literacy tests. I've seen too much of native intelligence to accept the validity of these tests as a ~riterion for voting qualifications. Our nation needs a universal method of voter registration-one man, one vote, literally. Second, there is a pressing, urgent need to give the attorney general the right to initi ate Federal suits in any area of civil rights denial. Third, we need a strong and strongly enforced fair-housing section such as many states already have. President Kennedy initiated the present housing law, but it is not broad enough. Fourth, we need an extension of FEPC to grapple more effectively with the problems of poverty. Not only are millions of Negroes caught in the clutches of poverty, but millions of poor whites as well. And fifth, conclusive and effective measures must be taken immediately at the Federal level to curb the worsening reign of terror in the South-which is aided and abetted, as everyone knows, by state and local lawenforcement agencies. It's getting so that anybody can kill a Negro and get away with it in the South, as long as they go through the motions of a jury ".rial. There is very little chance of conviction from lily-white Southern jurors. It must be fixed so that in the case of interracial murder, the Federal Government can prosecute. PLAYBOY: Your dissatisfaction with the Civil Rights Act reflects that of most other Negro spokesmen. According to recent polls, however, many whites resent this attitude, calling the Negro "ungrateful" and "unrealistic" to press his demands for more. KING: This is a litany to those of us in this field. "What more will the Negro want?" "What will it take to make thest demonstrations end?" Well, I would likt tu reply with another rhetorical question : Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America? I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom. This continued arrogant ladling out of pieces of the rights of citizenship has begun to generate a fury in the Negro. Even so, he is not pressing for revenge, or for conquest, or to gain spoils, or to ensla,·e, or even to marry the sisters of those who have injured him. What the Negro wants-and will not stop until he getsis absolute and unqualified freedom and equality here in this land of his birth, and not in Africa or in some imaginary state. The Negro no longer will be tolerant of anything less than his due right ;md heritage. He is pursuing only that which he knows is honorably his. He knows that he is right. But every Negro leader since the turn of the century has been saying this in one form or another. It is because we haYe been so long and so conscientiously ignored by the dominant white society that the situation has now reached such crisis proportions. Few white people, even today, will face the clear fact that the very future and destiny of this country are tied up in what answer will be given to the Negro. And that answer must be gi,·en soon. PLAYBOY: Relatively few dispute the justness of the struggle to eradicate racial injustice, but many whites feel that the Negro should be more patient, th;tt only the passage of time-perhaps generations -will bring about the sweeping changes he demands in traditional attitudes and customs. Do you think this is true? KING: No, I do not. I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the ,·ery How of time will cure all ills. In truth, time itself is only neutral. Increasingly, 1 feel that time has been used destructively by people of ill will much more than it has been used constructively by those of good will. If I were to select a timetable for the equalization of human rights, it would be the intent of the "all deliberate speed" specified in the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision. But what has happened? A Supreme Court decision was met, and balked, with utter defiance. Ten years later, in most areas of the South, less than one percent of the Negro children ha,·e been integrated in schools, and in · some of the deepest South, not e\·en one tenth of one percent. Approximately 25 percent of employable Negro youth, for another example, are presently unemployed. Though many would prefer not to, we must face the fact that progress for the Negro--to which white "moderates" like to point in justifying gradualism-has been relatively insignificant, particularly in terms of the Negro masses. What little progress has been made-and that includes the Civil Rights Act-has applied primarily to the middle-class Negro. Among the masses, especially in the Northern ghettos, the situation remains about the same, and for some it is worse. PLAYBOY: It would seem that much could be done at the local, state and Federal levels to remedy these inequities. In your own contact with them, have you found Government officials--in the North, if not in the South-to be generally sympathetic, understanding, and receptive to appeals for reform? KING: On the contrary, I have been dismayed at the degree to which abysmal ignorance seems to prevail among many state, city and even Federal officials on the whole question of racial justice and injustice. Particularly, I have found that these men seriously-and dangerouslyunderestimate the explosive mood of the Negro and the gravity of the crisis. Even among those whom I would consider to be both sympathetic and sincerely intellectually committed, there is a lamentable lack of understanding. But this white failure to comprehend the depth and dimension of the · Negro problem is far from being peculiar to Government officials. Apart from bigots and backlashers, it seems to be a malady even among those whites who like to regard themselves as "enlightened." I would especially refer to those who counsel, "Wait!" and to those who say that they sympathize with our goals but cannot condone our methods of direct-action pursuit of those goals. I wonder at men who dare to feel that they have some paternalistic right to set the timetable for another man's liberation. Over the past several years, I must s<;ty. I have been gravely disappointed with such white "moderates." I am often inclined to think that they are more of a stumbling block to the Negro's progress than the White Citizen's Counc::iler or the Ku Klux Klanner. PLAYBOY: Haven't both of these segregationist societies been implicated in connection with plots against your life? KING: It's difficult to trace the authorship of these death threats. I seldom go through a day without one. Some are telephoned anonymously to my office; others are sent-unsigned, of coursethrough the mails. Drew Pearson wrote not long ago about one group of unknown affiliation that was committed to assassinate not only me but also Chief Justice Warren and President Johnson. And not long ago, when I was about to visit in Mississippi, I received some very urgent calls from Negro leaders in Mobile, who had been told by a very reliable source that a sort of guerrilla group led by a retired major in the area of Lucyville, Mississippi, was plotting to take my life during the visit. I was strongly urged to cancel the trip, but when I thought about it, I decided that I had no alternative but to go on into Mississippi. PLAYBOY: Why? KING: Because I have a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn't function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically. I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause. PLAYBOY: That statement exemplifies the total dedication to the civil rights movement for which you are so widely admired-but also denounced as an "extremist" by such segregationist spokesmen as Alabama's Governor Wallace. Do you accept this identification? KING: It disturbed me when I first heard it. But when I began to consider the true meaning of the word, I decided that perhaps I would like to think of myself as an extremist-in the light of the spirit which made Jesus an extremist for love. If it sounds as though I am comparing myself to the Savior, let me remind you that all who honor themselves with the claim of being "Christians" should compare themselves to Jesus. Thus I consider myself an extremist for that brotherhood of man which Paul so nobly expressed: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Love is the only force on earth that can be dispensed or received in an extreme manner, without any qualifications, without any harm to the giver or to the receiver. PLAYBOY: Perhaps. But the kind of extremism for which you've been criticized has to do not with love, but with your advocacy of willful disobedience of what you consider to be "unjust laws." Do you feel you have the right to pass judgment on and defy the law-nonviolently or otherwise? KING: Yes-morally, if not legally. For there are two kinds of laws: man's and God's. A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law. But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law. And an unjust law, as St. Augustine said, is no law at all. Thus a law that is unjust is morally null and void, and must be defied until it is legally null and void as well. Let us not forget, in the memories of 6,000,000 who died, that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal," and that everything the Freedom Fighters in Hungary did was "illegal." In spite of that, I am sure that I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers if I had Jived in Germany during Hitler's reign, as some Christian priests and ministers did do, often at the cost of their lives. And if I lived now in a Communist country where principles dear to the Christian's faith are suppressed, I know that I would openly advocate defiance of that country's antireligious laws--again, just as some Christian priests and ministers are doing today behind the .Iron Curtain. Right here in America today there are white ministers, priests and rabbis who have shed blood in the support of our struggle against a web of human injustice, much of which is supported by immoral man-made laws. PLAYBOY: Segregation laws? KING: Specifically, court mJunctions. Though the rights of the First Amendment guarantee that any citizen or group of citizens may engage in peaceable assembly, the South has seized upon the device of invoking injunctions to block our direct-action civil rights demonstrations. \Vhen you get set to stage a nonviolent demonstration, the city simply secures an injunction to cease and desist. Southern courts are well known for "sitting on" this type of case; conceivably a two- or three-year delay could be incurred. At first we found this to be a highly effective subterfuge against us. \Ve first experienced it in Montgomery when, during the bus boycott, our car pool was outlawed by an injunction. An injunction also destroyed the protest movement in Talladega, Alabama. Another injunction outlawed the oldest t:ivil rights organization, the NAACP, from the whole state of Alabama. Still another injunction thwarted our organization's efforts in Albany, Georgia. Then in Birmingham, we felt that we had to take a stand and disobey a court injunction against demonstrations, knowing the consequences and being prepared to meet them-or the unjust law would break our movement. We did not take this step hastily or rashly. We gave the matter intense thought and prayer before deciding that the right thing was being done. And when we made our decision, I announced our plan to the press, making it clear that we were not anarchists advocating lawlessness, but that in good conscience we could not comply with a misuse of the judicial process in order to perpetuate injustice and segregation. When our plan was made known, it bewildered and immobilized our segregationist opponents. We felt that our decision had been morally as well as tactically right-in keeping with God's law as well as with the spirit of our nonviolent direct-action program. PLAYBOY: If it's morally right for supporters of civil rights to violate segregation laws which they consider unjust, why is it wrong for segregationists to resist the enforcement of integration laws which they consider unjust? KING: Because segregation, as even the segregationists know in their hearts, is morally wrong and sinful. If it weren't, the white South would not be haunted as it is by a deep sense of guilt for what it has done to the Negro-guilt for patronizing him, degrading him, brutalizing him, depersonalizing him, thingifying him; guilt for lying to itself. This is the source of the schizophrenia that the South will suffer until it goes through its crisis of conscience. PLAYBOY: Is this crisis imminent? KING: It may not come next week or next year, but it is certainly more imminent in the South than in the North. If the South is honest with itself, it may well outdistance the North in the improvement of race relations. PLAYBOY: Why? KING: Well, the Northern white, having had little actual contact with the Negro, is devoted to an abstract principle of cordial interracial relations. The North has long considered, in a theoretical way, that it supported brotherhood and the equality of man, but the truth is that deep prejudices and discriminations exist in hidden and subtle and covert disguises. The South's prejudice and discrimination, on the other hand, has been applied against the Negro in obvious, open, overt and glaring forms-which make the problem easier to get at. The Southern white man has the advantage of far more actual contact with Negroes than the Northerner. A major problem is that this contact has been paternalistic and poisoned by the myth of racial superiority. PLAYBOY: Many Southern whites, supported by the "research" of several Southern anthropologists, vow that white racial superiority-and Negro infe. riority-are a biological fact. KING: You may remember that during the rise of Nazi Germany, a rash of books by respected, German scientists appeared, supporting the master-race theory. This utterly ignorant fallacy has been so thoroughly refuted by the social scientists, as well as by medical science, that any individual who goes on believing it is standing in an absolutely misguided and diminishing circle. The American Anthropological Association has unanimously adopted a resolution repudiating statements that Negroes are biologically, in innate mental ability or in any other way inferior to whites. The collective weight and authority of world scientists are embodied in a Unesco report on races which flatly refutes the theory of innate superiority among any ethnic group. And as far as Negro "blood" is concerned, medical science finds the same four blood types in all race groups. When the Southern white finally accepts this simple fact-as he eventually must-beautiful results will follow, for we will have come a long way toward transforming his master-servant perspective into a person-to-person perspective. The Southern white man, discovering the "nonmyth" Negro, exhibits all the passion of the new convert, seeing the black man as a man among men for the first time. The South, if it is to survive economically, must make dramatic changes, and these must include the Negro. People of good will in the South, who are the vast majority, have the challenge to be open and honest, and to turn a deaf ear to the shrill cries of the irresponsible few on the lunatic fringe. I think and pray they will. PLAYBOY: Whom do you include among "the irresponsible few"? KING: I include those who preach racism and commit violence; and those who, in various cities where we have sought to peacefully demonstrate, have sought to goad Negroes into violence as an excuse for violent mass reprisal. In Birmingham, for example, on the day it was flashed about the world that a "peace pact" had been signed between the moderate whites and the Negroes, Birmingham's segregationist forces reacted with fury, swearing vengeance against the white businessmen who had "betrayed" them by negotiating with Negroes. On Saturday night, just outside of Birmingham, a Ku Klux Klan meeting was held, and that same night, as I mentioned earlier, a bomb ripped the home of my brother, the Reverend A. D. King, and another bomb was planted where it would have killed or seriously wounded anyone in the· motel room which I had been occupying. Both bombings had been timed just as Birmingham's bars closed on Saturday midnight, as the streets filled with thousands of Negroes who were not trained in nonviolence, and who had been drinking. Just as whoever planted the bombs had wanted to happen, fighting began, policemen were stoned by Negroes, cars were overturned and fires started. PLAYBOY: Were none of your S, C. L. C. workers involved? KING: If they had been, there would have been no riot, for we believe that only just means may be used in seeking a just end. We believe that lasting gains can be made-and they have been made -only by practicing what we preach: a policy of nonviolent, peaceful protest. The riots, North and South, have involved mobs-not the disciplined, nonviolent, direct-action demonstrators with whom I identify. We do not condone lawlessness, looting and violence committed by the racist or the reckless of any color. I must say, however, that riots such as have occurred do achieve at least one partially positive effect: They dramatically focus national attention upon the Negro's discontent. Unfortunately, they also give the white majority an excuse, a provocation, to look away from the cause of the riots-the poverty and the deprivation and the degradation of the Negro, especially in the slums and ghettos where the riots occur-and to talk instead of looting, and of the breakdown of law and order. It is never circulated that some of the looters have been white people, similarly motivated by their own poverty. In one riot in a Northern city, aside from the Negroes and Puerto Ricans who were arrested, there were also 158 white people-including mothers stealing food, children's shoes and other necessity items. The poor, white and black, were rebelling together against the establishment. PLAYBOY: Whom do you mean by "the establishment"? KING: I mean the white leadershipwhich I hold as responsible as anyone for the riots, for not removing the conditions that cause them. The deep frustration, the seething desperation of the Negro today is a product of slum housing, chronic poverty, woefully inadequate education and substandard schools. The Negro is trapped in a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign, caught in a vicious socioeconomic vise. And he is ostracized as is no other minority group in America by the evil of oppressive and constricting prejudice based solely upon his color. A righteous man has no alternative but to resist such an evil system. If he does not have the courage to resist nonviolently, then he runs the risk of a violent emotional explosion. As much as I deplore violence, there is one evil that is worse than violence, and that's cowardice. It is still my basic article of faith that social justice can be achieved and democracy advanced only to the degree that there is firm adherence to nonviolent action and resistance in the pursuit of social justice. But America will be faced with the ever-present threat of violence, rioting and senseless crime as long as Negroes by the hundreds of thousands are packed into malodorous, rat-plagued ghettos; as long as Negroes remain smothered by poverty in the midst of an affluent society; as long as Negroes are made to feel like exiles in their own land; as long as Negroes continue to be dehumanized; as long as Negroes see their freedom endlessly delayed and diminished by the head winds of tokenism and small handouts from the white power structure. No nation can suffer any greater tragedy than to cause millions of its citizens to feel that they have no stake in their own society. Understand that I am trying only to explain the reasons for violence and the threat of violence. Let me say again. that by no means and under no circumstance do I condone outbreaks of looting and lawlessness. I feel that every responsible Negro leader must point out, with all possible vigor, that anyone who perpetrates and participates in a riot is immoral as well as impractical-that the use of immoral means will not achieve the moral · end of racial justice. PLAYBOY: Whom do you consider the most responsible Negro leaders? KING: Well, I would say that Roy Wilkins of the NAACP has proved time and again to be a very articulate spokesman for the rights of Negroes. He is a most able administrator and a dedicated organization man wi1h personal resources that have helped the whole struggle. Another outstanding man is Whitney Young Jr. of the National Urban League, an extremely able social scientist. He has developed a meaningful balance between militancy and moderation. James Farmer of CORE is another courageous, dedicated and thoughtful civil rights spokesman. I have always been impressed by how he maintains a freshness in his awareness of the meaning of the whole quest for freedom. And John Lewis of SNCC symbolizes the kind of strong militancy, courage and creativity that our youth have brought to the civil rights struggle. But I feel that the greatest leader of these times that the Negro has produced is A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, whose total integrity, depth of dedication and caliber of statesmanship set an example for us all. PLAYBOY: Many whites feel that last summer's riots occurred because leadership is no longer being offered by the men you named. KING: The riots we h ave h ad are minute compared to what would h ave happened without their effective and restraining leadership. I am convinced that unless the nonviolent philosophy had emerged and taken hold among N egroes, North and South, by today the streets of dozens of American communities would have flowed with blood. Hundreds of <;ities might now be mourning countless dead, of both races, were it not for the nonviolent influence which has given political surg~ons the time and opportunity to boldly and safely excise some aspects of the peril of violence that faced this nation in the summers of 1963 and 1964. The whole world has seen what happened in communities such as Harlem, Brooklyn, Rochester, Philadelphia, Newark, St. Petersburg and Birmingham, where this emergency operation was either botched or not performed at all. PLAYBOY: Still, doesn 't the very fact that riots have occurred tend to indicate that many .Negroes are no longer heeding the counsels of nonviolence? KING: Not the majority, by any means. But it is true that some Negroes subscribe to a deep feeling that the tactic of nonviolence is not producing enough concrete victories. We have seen, in our experience, that nonviolence thrives best in a climate of justice. Violence grows to the degree that injustice prevails; the more injustice in a given community, the more violence, or potential violence, smolders in that community. I can give you a clear example. If you will notice, there have been fewer riots in the South. The :reason for this is that the Negro in the South can see some visible, concrete victories in civil rights. Last year, the police would have been called if he sat down at a community lunch counter. This year, if he chooses to sit at that counter, he is served. More riots have occurred in the North because the fellow in Harlem, to name one Northern ghetto, can't see any victories. He remains throttled, as he has always been, by vague, intangible economic and social deprivations. Until the concerned power structures begin to grapple creatively with these fundamental inequities, it will be difficult for violence to be eliminated. The longer our people see no progress, or halting progress, the easier it will be for them to yield to the counsels of hatred and demagoguery. PLAYBOY: The literature of the John Birch Society, accusing you of just such counsels, has branded you "a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." KING: As you know, they have sought to link many people with communism, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and a former President of the United States. So I'm in good company, at least. The Birchers thrive on sneer and smear, on the dissemination of half-truths and outright lies. It would be comfortable to dismiss them as the lunatic fringe-which, by and large, they are; but some priests and ministers have also shown themselves to be among them. They are a very dangerous group--and they could become even more dangerous if the public doesn't reject the un-American travesty of patriotism that they espouse. PLAYBOY: \.Vas there any basis in fact for the rumors, still circulating in some quarters, that last summer's riots were fomented and stage-directed by Communist agitators? KING: I'm getting sick and tired of people saying that this movement has been infiltrated by Communists. There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida. The FBI provided the best answer to this absurd rumor in its report to the President after a special investigation which he had requested. It stated that the riots were not caused or directed by any such groups, although they did try to capitalize upon and prolong the riots. All Negro leaders, including myself, were most happy with the publication of these findings, for the public whisperings had troubled us. We knew that it could prove vitally harmful to the Negro struggle if the riots had been catalyzed or manipulated by the Communists or some other extremist group. It would h ave sown the seed of doubt in the public's mind that the Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals-the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations. PLAYBOY: Is it destined to be a violent revolution? KING: God willing, no. But white Americans must be made to understand the basic motives underlying Negro demonstrations. Many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations are boiling inside the Negro, and he must release them. It is not a threat but a fact of history that if an oppressed people's pent-up emotions are not nonviolently released, they will be violently released. So let the Negro march. Let him make pilgrimages to city hall. Let him go on freedom rides. And above all, make an effort to understand why he must do this. For if his frustration and despair are allowed to continue piling up, millions of Negroes will seek solace and security in blackna tionalist ideologies. And this, inevitably, would lead to a frightening racial nightmare. PLAYBOY: Among whites, the best-known and most feared of these militantly racist Negro sects is the Black Muslims. What is your estimation of its power and influence among the Negro masses? KING: Except in a few metropolitan ghettos, my experience has been that few Negroes have any interest a t all in this organization, much less give any allegiance to its pessimistic doctrines. The Black Muslims are a quasi-religious, sociopolitical movement tha t has appealed to some Negroes who formerly were Christians. For the first time, the Negro was presented with a choice of a religion other than Christianity. What this appeal actually represented was an indictment of Christian failures to live up to Christianity's precepts; for there is nothing in Christianity, nor in the Bible, that justifies racial segregation. But when the Negroes' genuine fighting spirit rose during 1963, the appeal of the Muslims began to diminish. PLAYBOY: One of the basic precepts of black nationalism has been the attempt to engender a sense of communion between the American Negro and his African "brother," a sense of identity between the emergence of black Africa and the Negro's struggle for freedom in America. Do you feel that this is a constructive effort? KING: Yes, I do, in many ways. There is a distinct, significant and inevitable correlation. The Negro across America, looking at his television set, sees black statesmen voting in the United Nations on vital world issues, knowing that in many of America's cities, he himself is not yet permitted to place his ballot. The Negro hears of black kings and · potentates ruling in palaces, while he remains ghettoized in urban slums. It is only natural that Negroes would react to this extreme irony. Consciously or unconsciously, the American Negro has been caught up by the black Zeitgeist. He feels a deepening sense of iden- tification with his black African brothers, and with his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean. With them he is moving with a sense of increasing urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. PLAYBOY: Do you feel that the African nations, in turn, should involve themselves more actively in American Negro affairs? KING: I do indeed. The world is now so small in terms of geographic proximity and mutual problems that no nation should stand idly by and watch another's plight. I think that in every possible instance Africans should use the influence of their governments to make it clear that the struggle of their brothers in the U.S. is part of a world-wide struggle. In short, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, for we are tied together in a garment of mutuality. What happens in Johannesburg affects Birmingham, however indirectly. We are descendants of the Africans. Our heritage is Africa. We should never seek to break the ties, nor should the Africans. PLAYBOY: One of the most articulate champions of black Afro-American brotherhood has been Malcolm X, the former Black Muslim leader who recently renounced his racist past and converted to orthodox Mohammedanism. What is your opinion of him and his career? KING: I met Malcolm X once in Washington, but circumstances didn't enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. He is very articulate, as you say, but I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views-at least insofar as I understand where he now stands. I don't want to seem to sound self-righteous, or absolutist, or that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. I don't know how he feels now, but I know that I have often wished tha t he would talk less of violence, because violence is not going to solve our problem. And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief. PLAYBOY: For them or for whites? KING: For everyone, but mostly for them. Even the extremist leaders who preach revolution are invariably unwilling to lead what they know would certainly end in bloody, chaotic and total defeat; for in the event of a violent revolution, we would be sorely outnumbered. And when it was all over, the Negro would face the same unchanged conditions, the same squalor and deprivation-the only difference being that his bitterness would be even more intense, his disenchantment even more abject. Thus, in purely practical as well as moral terms, the American Negro has no rational alternative to nonviolence. PLAYBOY: You categorically reject violence as a tactical technique for social change. Can it not be argued, however, that violence, historically, has effected massive and sometimes constructive social change in some countries? KING: I'd be the first to say that some historical victories have been won by violence; the U. S. Revolution is certainly one of the foremost. But the Negro rev:olution is seeking integration, not independence. Those fighting for independence have the purpose to drive out the oppressors. But here in America, we've got to live toget!ter. We've got to find a way to reconcile ourselves to living in community, one group with the other. The struggle of the Negro in America, to be successful, must be waged with resolute efforts, but efforts that are kept strictly within the framework of our democratic society. This means reaching, educating and moving large enough groups of people of both races to stir the conscience of the nation. PLAYBOY: How do you propose to go about it? KING: Before we can make any progress, we must avoid retrogression-by doing everything in our power to avert further racial violence. To this end, there are three immediate steps that I would recommend. Firstly, it is mandatory that people of good will across America, particularly those who are in positions to wield influence and power, conduct honest, soul-searching analyses and evaluations of the environmental causes that spawn riots. All major industrial and ghetto areas should establish serious biracial discussions of community problems, and of ways to begin solving them. Instead of ambulance service, municipal leaders need to provide preventive medicine. Secondly, these communities should make serious efforts to provide work and training for unemployed youth, through job-and-training programs such as the HARYOU-ACT program in New York City. Thirdly, all cities concerned should make first-priority efforts to provide immediate quality education for Negro youth-instead of conducting studies for the next five years. Young boys and girls now in the ghettos must be enabled to feel that they count, that somebody cares about them; they must be able to feel hope. And on a longer-range basis, the physical ghetto itself must be eliminated, because these are the environmental conditions that germinate riots. It is both socially and morally suicidal to continue a pattern of deploring effects while failing to come to grips with the causes. Ultimately, law and order will be maintained only when justice and dignity are accorded impartially to all. PLAYBOY: Along with the other civil rights leaders, you have often proposed a massive program of economic aid, financed by the Federal Government, to improve the lot of the nation's 20,000,- 000 Negroes. Just one of the projects you've mentioned, however-the HARYOU-ACT program to provide jobs for Negro youths-is expected to cost $141,- 000,000 over the next ten years, and that includes only Harlem. A nationwide program such as you propose would undoubtedly run into the billions. KING: About 50 billion, actually-which is less than one year of our present defense spending. It is my belief that with the expenditure of this amount, over a ten-year period, a genuine and dramatic transformation could be achieved in the conditions of Negro life in America. I am positive, moreover, that the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils. PLAYBOY: Do you think it's realistic to hope that the Government would consider an appropriation of such magnitude other than for national defense? KING: I certainly do. This country has the resources to solve any problem once that problem is accepted as national policy. An example is aid to Appalachia, which has been made a policy of the Federal Government's mud1-touted war on poverty; one billion was proposed for its relief-without making the slightest dent in the defense budget. Another example is the fact that after World War Two, during the years when it became policy to build and maintain the largest military machine the world has ever known, America also took upon itself, through the Marshall Plan and other measures, the financial relief and rehabilitation of millions of European people. If America can afford to underwrite its allies and ex-enemies, it can certainly afford-and has a much greater obligation, as I see it-to do at least as well by its own no-less-needy countrymen. PLAYBOY: Do you feel it's fair to request a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group? KING: I do indeed. Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages-potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America's wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated inter- est. In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro; it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races. Within common law, we have ample precedents for special compensatory programs, which are regarded as settlements. American Indians are still being paid for land in a settlement manner. Is not two centuries of labor, which helped to build this country, as real a commodity? Many other easily appl icable precedents are readily at hand: our child labor laws, social security, unemployment compensation, man-power retraining programs. And you will remember that America adopted a policy of special treatment for her millions of Yeterans after the War-a program which cost far more than a policy of preferential treatment to rehabilitate the traditionally disadvantaged Negro would cost today. The closest analogy is the GI Bill of Rights. Negro rehabilitation in America would require approximately the same breadth of program-which would not place an undue burden on our economy. Just as was the case with the returning soldier, such a bill for the disadvantaged and impoYerished could enable them to buy homes without cash, at lower and easier repayment terms. They could negotiate loans from banks to launch businesses. They could receive, as did ex-Gis, special points to place them ahead in competition for civil service jobs. Under certain circumstances of physical disability, medical care and long-term financial grants could be made available. And together with these rights, a favorable social climate could be created to encourage the preferential employment of the disadvantaged, as was the case for so many years with veterans. During those years, it might- be noted, there was no appreciable resentment of the preferential treatment being giYen to the special group. America was only -compensating her veterans for their time lost from school or from business. PLAYBOY: If a nationwide program of preferential employment for Negroes were to be adopted, how wou:d you propose to assuage the resentment of whites who already feel that their jobs are being jeopardized by the influx of Negroes resulting from desegregation? KING: 'Ve must develop a Federal program of puhlic works, retraining and jobs for all-so that none, white or black, will have cause to feel threatened. At the present time, thousands of jobs a week are disappearing in the wake of automation and other production efficiency techniques. Black and white, we will all be harmed unless something grand and imaginative is done. The unemployed, poverty-stricken white man must be made to realize that he is in the very same boat with the Negro. Together, they could exert massive pressure on the Government to get jobs for all. Together, they could form a grand alliance. Together, they could merge all people for the good of all. PLAYBOY: If Negroes are also granted preferential treatment in housing, as you propose, how would you allay the alarm with which many white homeowners, fearing property devaluation, greet the arrival of Negroes in hitherto allwhite neighborhoods? KING: We must expunge from our society the myths and half-truths that engender such groundless fears as these. In the first place, there is no truth to the myth that Negroes depreciate property. The fact is that most Negroes are kept out of residential neighborhoods so long that when one of us is finally sold a home, it's already depreciated. In the second place, we must dispel the negative and harmful atmosphere that has been created by avaricious and unprincipled realtors who engage in ".blockbusting." If we had in America really serious efforts to break down discrimination in housing, and at the same time a concerted program of Government aid to improve housing for Negroes, I think that many white people would be surprised at how many Negroes would choose to live among themselves, exactly as Poles and Jews and other ethnic groups do. PLAYBOY: The B'nai B'rith, a prominent social-action organization which undertakes on behalf of the Jewish people many of the activities that you ask the Government to perform for Negroes, is generously financed by Jewish charities and private donations. All of the Negro civil rights groups, on the other hand-including your own-are perennially in financial straits and must rely heavily on white philanthropy in order to remain solvent. Why do they receive so little support from Negroes? KING: We have to face and live with the fact that the Negro has not developed a sense of stewardship. Slavery was so divisive and brutal, so molded to break up unity, that we never developed a sense oL oneness, as in Judaism. Starting with the individual family unit, the Jewish people are closely knit into what is, in effect, one big family. But with the Negro, slavery separated families from families, and the pattern of disunity that we see among Negroes today derives directly from this cruel fact of history. It is also a cruel fact that the Negro, generally speaking, has not developed a responsible sense of financial values. The best economists say that your automobile shouldn't cost more than half of your annual income, but we see many Negroes earning $7000 a year paying $5000 for a car. The home, it is said, should not cost more than twice the annual income, but we see many Negroes earning, say, $8000 a year living in a $30,000 home. Negroes, who amount to about II percent of the America population, are reported to consume over 40 percent of the Scotch whisky imported into the U.S., and to spend over $72,000,000 a year in jewelry stores. So when we come asking for civil rights donations, or help for the United Negro College Fund, most Negroes are trying to make ends meet. PLAYBOY: The widespread looting that took place during last summer's riots would seem to prove your point. Do you agree with those who feel that this looting-much of which was directed against Jewish-owned stores-was anti-Semitic in motivation? KING: No, I do not believe that the riots could in any way be considered expressions of anti-Semitism. It's true, as I was particularly pained to learn, that a large percentage of the looted stores were owned by our Jewish friends, but I do not feel that anti-Semitism was involved. A high percentage of the merchants serving most Negro communities simply happen to be Jewish. How could there be anti-Semitism among Negroes when our Jewish friends have demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice? Can we ever express our appreciation to the rabbis who chose to give moral witness with us in St. Augustine during our recent protest against segregation in tha t unhappy city? Need I remind anyone of the awful beating suffered by Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland when he joined the civil rights workers there in Hattiesburg, Mississippi? And who can ever forget the sacrifice of two Jewish lives, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, in the swamps of Mississippi? It would be impossible to record the contribution that the Jewish people have made toward the Negro's struggle for freedom-it has been so great. PLAYBOY: In conspicuous contrast, according to a recent poll conducted by Ebony, only one Negro in ten has ever participated physically in any form of social protest. vVhy? KING: It is not always sheer numbers that are the measure of public support. As I see it, every Negro who does participate represents the sympathy and the moral backing of thousands of others. Let us never forget how one photograph, of those Birmingham policemen with th eir knees on that Negro woman on the ground, touched something emotionally deep in most Negroes in America, no matter who they were. In city after city, where S.C. L. C. has helped to achieve sweeping social changes, it has been not only because of the quality of its members' dedication and discipline, but because of the moral support of many Negroes who never took an active part. It's significant, I think, that during each of our city struggles, the usual aver- age of crimes committed by Negroes has dropped to almost nothing. But it is true, undeniably, that there are many Negroes who will never fight for freedom-yet who will be eager enough to accept it when it comes. And there are millions of Negroes who have never known anything but oppression, who are so devoid of pride and selfrespect that they have resigned themselves to segregation. Other Negroes, comfortable and complacent, consider that they are above the struggle of the masses. And still others seek personal profit from segregation. PLAYBOY: Many Southern whites have accused you of being among those who exploit the race problem for private gain. You are widely believed throughout the South, in fact, to have amassed a vast personal fortune in the course of your civil rights activities. KING: Me wealthy? This is so utterly fallacious and erroneous that I often wonder where it got started. For the sixth straight year since I have been S.C. L. C.'s president, I have rejected our board's insistent recommendation that I accept some salary beyond the one dollar a year which I receive, which entitles me to participate in our employees' group insurance plan. I have rejected also our board's offer of financial gifts as a measure and expression of appreciation. My only salary is from my church, $4000 a year, plus $2000 more a year for what is known as "pastoral care." To earn a grand total of about $.10,000 a year, I keep about $4000 to $5000 a year for myself from the honorariums that I receive from various speaking engagements. About 90 percent of my speaking is for S.C. L. C., and it brings into our treasury something around $200,000 a year. Additionally, I get a fairly sizable but fluctuating income in the form of royalties from my writings. But all of this, too, I give to my church, or to my alma mater, Morehouse College, here in Atlanta. I believe as sincerely as I believe anything that the struggle for freedom in which S. C. L. C. is engaged is not one that should reward any participant with individual wealth and gain. I think I'd rise up in my grave if I died leaving two or three hundred thousand dollars. But people just don't seem to believe that this is the way I feel about it. If I have any weaknesses, they are not in the area of coveting wealth. My wife knows this well; in fact, she feels that I overdo it. But the Internal Revenue people, they stay on me; they feel sure that one day they are going to find a fortune stashed in a mattress. To give you some idea of my reputed affluence, just last week I came in from a trip and learned that a television program had announced I was going to purchase an expensive home in an all-white neighborhood here in Atlanta. It was news to me! PLAYBOY: Your schedule of speaking engagements and civil rights commitments throughout the country is a punishing one-often 20 hours a day, seven days a week, according to reports. How much time do you get to spend at home? KING: Very little, indeed. I've averaged not more than two days a week at home here in Atlanta over the past year-or since Birmingham, actually. I'm away two and three weeks at a time, mostly working in commumues across the South. WhereYer I am, I try to be in a pulpit as many Sundays as possible. But eYery day when I'm at home, I break from the office for dinner and try to spend a few hours with the children before I return to the office for some night work. And on Tuesdays when I'm not out of town, I don't go to the office. I keep this for my quiet day of reading and silence and meditation, and an entire evening with Mrs. King and the children. PLAYBOY: If you could have a week's uninterrupted rest. with no commitments whatever, how would you spend it? KING: It's difficult to imagine such a thing, but if I had the luxury of an entire week, I would spend it meditating and reading, refreshing myself spiritually and intellectually. I have a deep nostalgia for the periods in the past that I was able to devote in this manner. Amidst the struggle, amidst the frustrations, amidst the endless work, I often reflect that I am forever giving-never pausing to take in. I feel urgently the need for even an hour of time to get away, to withdraw, to refuel. I need more time to think through what is being done, to take time out from the mechanics of the movement, to reflect on the meaning of the movement. PLAYBOY: If you were marooned on the proverbial desert island, and could have with you only one book-apart from the Bible-what would it be? KING: That's tough. Let me think about it-one book, not the Bible. Well, I think I would have to pick Plato's Republic. I feel that it brings together more of the insights of history than any other book. There is not a creative idea extant that is not discussed, in some way, in this work. Whatever realm of theology or philosophy is one's interest-and I am deeply interested in both-somewhere along the way, in this book, you will find the matter explored. PLAYBOY: If you could send someoneanyone-to that desert island in your stead, who would it be? KING: That's another tough one. Let me see, I guess I wouldn't mind seeing Mr. Goldwater dispatched to a desert island. I hope they'd feed him and everything, of course. I am nonviolent, you know. Politically, though, he's already on a desert island, so it may be unnecessary to send him there. PLAYBOY: We take it you weren't overly distressed by his defeat in the Presidential race. KING: Until that defeat, Goldwater was the most dangerous man in America. He talked soft and nice, but he gave aid and comfort to the most vicious racists and the most extreme rightists in America. He gave respectability to views totally alien to the democratic process. Had he won, he would have led us down a fantastic path that would have totally destroyed America as we know it. PLAYBOY: Until his withdrawal from the race following Goldwater's nomination, Alabama's Governor Wallace was another candidate for the Presidency. What's your opinion of his qualifications for that office? KING: Governor \Vallace is a demagog with a capital D. He symbolizes in this country many of the evils that were alive in Hitler's Germany. He is a merchant of racism, peddling hate under the guise of States' rights. He wants to turn bao:;k the clock, for his own personal aggrandizement, and he will do literally anything to accomplish this. He represents the misuse, the corruption, the destruc- ' tion of leadership. I am not sure that he beli eves all the poison that he preaches, but he is artful enough to o:;onvince others that he does. Instead of guiding people to new peaks of reasonableness, he intensifies misunderstanding, deepens suspicion and prejudice. He is perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today. PLAYBOY: One of the most controversial issues of the past year, apart from civil rights, was the question of school prayer, which has been ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court. Governor Wallace, among others, has denounced the decision. How do you feel about it? KING: I endorse it. I think it was correct. Contrary to what many have said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in God. In a pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken, and by whom? Legally, constitutionally or otherwise, the state certainly has no such right. I am strongly opposed to the efforts that have been made to nullify the decision. They have been motivated, I think, by little more than the wish to embarrass the Supreme Court. When I saw Brother Wallace going up to Washington to testify against the decision at the Congressional hearings, it only strengthened my conviction that the decision was right. PLAYBOY: Governor Wallace has intimated tha t President Johnson, in championing the cause of civil rights only since he became Vice-President, may be guilty of "insincerity." KING: How President Johnson may or may not have felt about or voted on civil rights during his years in Congress is less relevant, at this point, than what he has said and done about it during his tenure· as President of the United States. In my opinion, he has done a good job up to now. He is an extremely keen political man, and he has demonstrated his wisdom and his commitment in forthrightly coming to grips. with the problem. He does not tire of reminding the nation of the moral issues involved. My impression is that he will remain a strong President for civil rights. PLAYBOY: Late in 1963, you wrote, "As I look toward 1964, one fact is unmistakably clear: The thrust of the Negro toward full emancipation will increase rather than decrease." As last summer's riots testified, these words were unhappily prophetic. Do you foresee more violence in the year ahead? KING: To the degree that the Negro is not thwarted in his thrust forward, I believe that one can predict less violence. I am not saying that there will be no demonstrations. There assuredly will, for the Negro in America has not made one civil rights gain without tense legal. and extralegal pressure. If the Constitution were today applied equally and impartially to all of America's citizens, in every section of the country, in every court and code of law, there would be no need for any group of citizens to seek extralegal redress. Our task has been a difficult one, and will continue to be, for privileged groups, historically, have not volunteered to give up their privileges. As Reinhold Niebuhr has written, individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily abandon their unjust posture, but groups tend to be more immoral, and more intransigent, than individuals. Our nonviolent direct-action program, therefore-which has proved its strength and effectiveness in more than a thousand American cities where some baptism of fire has taken place-will continue to dramatize and demonstrate against local injustices to the Negro until the last of those who impose those injustices are forced to negotiate; until, finally, the Negro ·wins the protections of the Constitution that have been denied to him; until society, at long last, is stricken gloriously and incurably color-blind. PLAYBOY: In well-earned recognition of your dedication to and leadership of the struggle to achieve these goals, you became, in October of last year, the youngest man ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. What was your reaction to the news? KING: It made me feel very humble indeed. But I would like to think that the award is not a personal tribute, but a tribute to the entire freedom movement, and to the gallant people of both races who surround me in the drive for civil rights which will make the American dream a reality. I think that this internationally known award will call even more attention to our struggle, gain even greater sympathy and understanding for our cause, from people all over the world. I like to think that the award recognizes symbolically the gallantry, the courage and the amazing discipline of the Negro in America, for these things are to his eternal credit. Though we have had riots, the bloodshed that we would have known without the discipline of nonviolence would have been truly frightening. I know that many whites feel the civil rights movement is getting out of hand; this may reassure them. It may let them see that basically this is a disciplined struggle, let them appreciate the meaning of our struggle, let them see that a great struggle for human freedom can occur within the framework of a democratic society. PLAYBOY: Do you feel that this goal will be achieved within your lifetime? KING: I confess that I do not believe this day is around the corner. The concept of supremacy is so imbedded in the white society that it will take many years for color to cease to be a judgmental factor. But it is certainly my hope and dream. Indeed, it is the keystone of my faith in the future that we will someday achieve a thoroughly integrated society. I believe that before the turn of the century, if trends continue to move and develop as presently, we will have moved a long, long way toward such a society. PLAYBOY: Do you intend to dedicate the rest of your life, then, to the Negro cause? KING: If need be, yes. But I dream of the day when the demands presently cast upon me will be greatly diminished. I would say that in the next five years, though, I can't hape for much letup-either in the South or in the North. After that time, it is my hope that things will taper off a bit. PLAYBOY: If they do, what are your plans? KING: Well, at one time I dreamed of pastoring for a few years, and then of going to a university to teach theology. But I gave that up when I became deeply involved in the civil rights struggle. Perhaps, in five years or so, if the demands on me have lightened, I will have the chance to make that dream come true. PLAYBOY: In the meanwhile, you are now the universally acknowledged leader of the American civil rights movement, and chief spokesman for the nation's 20,000,000 Negroes. Are there ever moments when you feel awed by this burden of responsibility, or inadequate to its demands? KING: One cannot be in my position, looked to by some for guidance, without being constantly reminded of the awesomeness of its responsibility. I live with one deep concern: Am I making the right decisions? Sometimes I am uncertain, and I must look to God for guidance. There was one morning I recall, when I was in the Birmingham jail, in solitary, with not even my lawyers permitted to visit, and I was in a nightmare of despair. The very future of our movement hung in the balance, depending upon capricious turns of events over which I could have no control there, incommunicado, in an utterly dark dungeon. This was about ten days after our Birmingham demonstrations began. Over 400 of our followers had gone to jail; some had been bailed out, but we had ·used up all of our money for bail, and about 300 remained in jail, and I felt personally responsible. It was then that President Kennedy telephoned my wife, Coretta. After that, my jail conditions were relaxed, and the following Sunday afternoon-it was Easter Sunday -two S.C.L.C. attorneys were permitted to visit me. The next day, word came to me from New York that Harry Belafonte had raised $50,000 that was available immediately for bail bonds, and if more was needed, he would raise that. I cannot express what I felt, but I knew at that moment that God's presence had never left me, that He had been with me there in solitary. I subject myself to self-purification and to endless self-analysis; I question and soul-search constantly into myself to be as certain as I can that -I am fulfilling the true meaning of my work, that I am maintaining my sense of purpose, that I am holding fast to my ideals, that I am guiding my people in the right direction. But whatever my doubts, however heavy the burden, I feel that I must accept the task of helping to make this nation and this world a better place to live in-for all men, black and white alike. I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. "What do you want?" the ·policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, "Fee-dom." She couldn't even pronounce it, but she knew.lt was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me. .Similarly, not long ago, I toured in eight communities of the state of Mississippi. And I have carried with me ever since a visual image of the penniless and the unlettered, and of the expressions on their faces--of deep and courageous determination to cast off the imprint of the past and become free people. I welcome the opportunity to be a part of this great drama, for it is a drama that will determine America's destiny. If the problem is not solved, America will be on the road to its self-destruction. But if it is solved, America will just as surely be on the high road to the fulfillment of the founding fathers' dream, when they wrote: "We hold these truths to be selfevident ..• " 
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