Certain People (28 page)

Also, the bank has lost the emotional power in the black community that it once held. During segregation years, a black bank could count on the black community to support it out of racial loyalty. Once the restrictions against blacks began to lift, this racial loyalty began to diminish. White banks are now actively competing for black customers, offering them better service than black banks can afford to give, and blacks are less willing to accept the poorer service of black banks.

To help itself out of a mare's nest of financial problems, and recapitalize itself, the bank has managed to raise $3,000,000 in new capital—by turning to the Ford Foundation for $1,000,000, to
Atlanta Life for another $1,000,000, and the balance from a number of other small black banks in Georgia as well as from MINBANC, a federal agency that has guaranteed half of the sum borrowed in capital notes, and another half in stock. Since January 1975, the bank has had a young and energetic new black president named I. Owen Funderburg, who is determined to do his best to turn the bank's fortunes around. A native of Monticello, Georgia, Mr. Funderburg graduated from Morehouse and from the business college of the University of Michigan. He has a solid banking background, having started as a teller at the Mechanics and Farmers Bank of Birmingham, where he rose to the position of cashier and a member of the board of directors. In 1966, he left Birmingham to become executive vice president and chief executive officer of the Gateway National Bank in St. Louis, where he was also a member of the board. One of the things Mr. Funderburg hopes to do is to change Citizens Trust from a bank that dealt only with black customers into a bank that will deal with the entire community. “Blacks used to subscribe to the motto, ‘Don't put your money where you can't work,' but now that rallying cry no longer works, since blacks can work anywhere,” says Mr. Funderburg. If he can turn Citizens Trust into a bank with a racially mixed clientele, he will have accomplished a considerable feat. Since Citizens Trust is universally known in Atlanta as “the black bank,” one wonders whether whites can really be persuaded to be depositors or borrowers. But Mr. Funderburg insists that he knows Atlanta. Though he was not born there, he grew up in a small town nearby, where his father was a country doctor, and he visited the city often as a young man. In Atlanta, Funderburg has many friends and a number of relatives. On the plus side, he points out that the bank's shiny new building is now more than ninety-five percent rented, with a number of prominent white tenants, including several government agencies and the offices of the Atlanta Bell Telephone Company.

And yet Owen Funderburg was distressed when, in the summer of 1975,
Black Enterprise
—the monthly black answer to
Business Week
—published a list of the thirty-eight largest black-owned banks in the country (led by George Johnson's Independence Bank of Chicago), and Citizens Trust did not make the list. Funderburg wrote a complaining letter to the magazine's New York publisher, Earl Graves, who printed a correction in the next issue of the magazine, saying that with the bank's stated assets and deposits, it should have been
listed in eighth place. Mr. Funderburg shows the correction to visitors.

And as news of the bank's woes has crept into the newspapers, more black depositors have begun pulling out. “I wouldn't put my money in that bank,” says a black Atlanta taxicab driver with emphasis. And there is a persistent rumor in Atlanta that, in the end, the Citizens Trust will be absorbed by the Citizens-Southern Trust Company—a white bank.

19

“King's Wigwam,” and Other Unhappy Memories

The segregation era left deep psychological scars on the blacks of the South, and the old people remember it best. Mrs. Edward Miller is a tall, dignified lady in her early seventies, with fair skin and softly waved gray hair, who lives in a large brick house in southwest Atlanta not far from Peyton Forest. The wife of a prominent architect, who has designed a number of Atlanta's churches and university buildings, Mrs. Miller is a woman with a healthy distrust of taking things at face value. Though she agrees that blacks in Atlanta are infinitely better off than when she was growing up, she wonders how sincere white Atlantans really are when they say that they want black people to continue to advance. “People here say things that they don't really mean,” she says.

She remembers, for example, when the last white family on her street sold their house and moved away. The man was a minister, and he repeatedly told his neighbors that he liked the street and was happy living there. He often told his black neighbors how proud he was to be in this lovely neighborhood, where black families took care of their houses, their spacious lawns, gardens, and boxwood hedges. He told them how happy he was so often, in fact, that some of his neighbors, including Mrs. Miller, became just a bit suspicious. When the minister's house went on the market, he gave the neighbors some excuse about having to move to California to care for an elderly sister. Nobody quite believed him.

And in the days when the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was struggling to effect radical changes for blacks throughout the South,
Mrs. Miller recalls that a white friend said to Dr. King, Sr.—whom most people in Atlanta call Daddy King—“I think your son is going too far.” Dr. King replied, “Have you ever heard my son preach?” The man said, “No—I'm afraid he might convince me.” “And that was a white man speaking,” says Nina Miller.

Mrs. Miller's father was the late Cornelius King, another great patriarchal figure in Atlanta. Cornelius King was no relation to Martin Luther King and, in fact, there is an enormous social gap between the two King families of Atlanta. “We knew those Kings,” Mrs. Miller says, “and in fact our house was a stone's throw from theirs, and I went to kindergarten with Mrs. King, senior. But we weren't visiting friends. After all, Daddy King was nothing but a little old Baptist preacher, and Ebenezer Baptist Church was
not
the sort of church that families like ours attended. Not in the same category at all. It wasn't until his son became so famous that anybody paid any attention to those Kings.” Many in black Atlanta society feel that the Martin Luther Kings used their famous son to climb socially, and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., has not made herself popular in the city. She is “too full of herself,” they say, and blacks mock the way Coretta King has of speaking, theatrically, of
“Mah Husband.”
Behind her back, Coretta King's nickname has become “Mah Husband.”

“Everyone thought the sun rose and set on my Papa,” says Nina King Miller. “He was a true aristocrat. He made something out of nothing.” Cornelius King's father had been a slave, but his mother was a Cherokee Indian. One of his grandfathers, furthermore, was a white Irish missionary who had been sent West to convert the Indians. “And so what does that make me?” Mrs. Miller asks. “I'm part Irish, part Indian, and part Negro. I'm certainly
colored
, but I'm not black.” Like many others of her generation and caste, Nina Miller dislikes and disapproves of the word “black,” and looks forward to the day when it will go out of fashion. Cornelius King grew up in the Indian territory of Oklahoma, where his Indian mother owned some property. There he met the daughter of Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, who was traveling in the territory, and married her and moved to Atlanta. “Bishop Turner thought the world of Papa,” Mrs. Miller says. “He regarded him more highly than he did his own two sons, both of whom were drunkards.” Cornelius King's wife lived only a few years in Atlanta before she died. Then he married Mrs. Miller's mother, a Spelman-educated Warrington, Georgia, girl. “My
grandmother was white, or at least you couldn't tell her from white. It was something we never talked about,” Mrs. Miller says. “She may not have had much education, but she was a perfect lady. Even when she was very old and in a wheelchair, she wouldn't be wheeled out to the porch without her hat and gloves on, and the little black velvet ribbon tied around her throat.”

For a while, Mr. King worked as a machinist. Then he worked for an Atlanta law firm, as a detective. From there, he moved to the Department of the Interior, and, in 1895, was a member of the Henry Dawes Commission on Indian Affairs, and went into Indian territory again as a liaison man. Mrs. Miller has a picture of him in his elaborate Indian headdress. There was a brand of tennis ball called “Indian King,” and Mr. King, with his Indian looks and his Indian headdress, posed for the picture that became the company's trademark. Back in Atlanta, Mr. King worked for a number of years as the steward of the Atlanta Athletic Club, “where he got to know who was who in Atlanta. All the top white businessmen in Atlanta knew Papa. He was
eminently
well respected.” He was so well respected, in fact, that white businessmen helped him establish his own real estate business on Auburn Avenue, where he prospered. Mrs. Miller's brother runs the family business now.

“Papa was a very good provider,” Mrs. Miller says. “We always had the best of everything, and we were very protected. We lived in a big corner house on Auburn Avenue. I remember that when I was in the fifth grade we were the first family to have a furnace, and we were among the first to have electricity. We always had a laundress. My mother and Grace Hamilton's mother both worked for the Gate City Free Kindergarten, which was a charity school for less fortunate Negroes.” Growing up in Atlanta in the early 1900s was a cozy and secure experience for little girls like Nina King, surrounded as she was by doting parents, grandparents, and family friends, and free from any real financial worries. On weekends, the family and visiting friends gathered in the Kings' parlor for tea and talk while the children were sent upstairs or into the yard to play. Everyone played the piano, and there were musical Sunday afternoons after church where everyone played and sang or listened to the old wind-up Edison gramophone. Birthday parties were great occasions, with homemade blueberry ice cream and cakes with candles, all manner of cookies and other sweets. Little girls dressed up in white dresses with crinoline underskirts, and tied pink satin sashes about their waists, and the
boys wore suits with Eton collars and wore black patent-leather shoes with silver buckles. There were games—musical chairs, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, in-and-out-the-windows—and story-telling hours. At bedtime, children said their prayers and thanked Jesus for all the beautiful presents they had received that day.

As Cornelius King's real estate business continued to prosper, he purchased a summer home for his family in the country at Kennesaw, Georgia, and forty-five acres of surrounding land. Here in the piney hills the Kings began spending each summer, while Papa stayed in Atlanta during the week and joined his family in the country for weekends. On his land, Cornelius King built a spring-fed artificial lake and a tennis court. All the young people—Nina King had an older sister and two brothers—played tennis. Because the house was large, there were nearly always a number of weekend guests consisting, again, of family and friends—the Hamiltons, Yateses, Murphys, and Townses. In fact, the idyllic little retreat became so popular with the Kings' Atlanta friends that the real estate, man in Cornelius King made him decide to put his summer place to a use that would turn a profit. He built a number of small summer cabins in the surrounding woods and glades and offered them for rent. Black Atlantans flocked out to Kennesaw in the summertime, taking Mr. King's cabins for a weekend or an entire month, and before he knew it he was operating a small, select black summer resort. He built an outdoor dance pavilion and hired a piano player to play for dancing on weekend evenings. He christened his place “King's Wigwam.”

Then, all at once, a terrible thing happened. Bertram Hamilton, Henry Cooke Hamilton's brother, had come up to “King's Wigwam” to visit Nina King's brother. Both boys were tall and slender and were superb tennis players and, for an entire weekend, the two youths were hardly ever off the court. The Kings and their friends had always assumed that they got along well with their white neighbors in Kennesaw. There had been no friction, no unpleasantness of any sort. The Kings and their friends shopped at the white stores in town, and had always been scrupulously prompt about paying their bills. And so, when what happened happened, it seemed like a horrible dream, and Mrs. Miller's eyes still cloud over when she thinks about it. Bertram Hamilton was accused of raping a white girl in the village.

The sheriff came, and the Ku Klux Klan. Terrified, the family telephoned Cornelius King in Atlanta. He urged them to get out of
Kennesaw as quickly as possible, and back to Atlanta. That night, Bertram Hamilton was smuggled out in the trunk of a car, and everyone made it safely home. That was over fifty years ago, but none of the family or their friends has ever gone back to Kennesaw. Cornelius King put “King's Wigwam” up for sale—the house, the land, the lake, and the little dance pavilion. It was sold at a great loss. Today, Nina King Miller is half convinced that the rape allegation was part of a plot on the part of the Kennesaw whites to get her father's property. She hopes this isn't true, but it might have been. Such things, in those days, happened often in the South and, if it was a plot, it succeeded. She tries not to be bitter, and to look upon what happened all those years ago in the most charitable light. “I know that it's hard, for people who have led hard lives, to see another person, particularly a colored person, have a little success,” she says. “Perhaps that was it. It was a poor, sharecropping town. It may have been difficult for them to see us there, having such good times as we did. All people are not alike.” Still, when she thinks about it, her eyes cloud over.

“Some of the myths about the South in segregation days were not true,” says Donald Hollowell, a young Atlanta lawyer and regional director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with a territory covering eight Southern states from Kentucky to Florida. “But some of the facts were more brutal than most people ever knew.” Hollowell, who successfully defended Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was threatened with prison in 1960, has specialized in defending blacks accused of such crimes as rape and murder, and is credited with having saved a number of men from Georgia's infamous chain gang. Rape is the charge black men in the South dread the most. White women who have dallied with black men and who have the misfortune of becoming pregnant frequently charge “rape” in order to protect themselves in the eyes of their families and friends, and Southern judgments in these cases can be swift and harsh. In one such case, a fifteen-year-old boy was charged with rape on a Saturday and sentenced to die in the electric chair the following Wednesday. In four days' time, however, Hollowell managed to get the judge's decision reversed, and to save the boy.