Fifties (90 page)

As a father Martin King, Sr., was unsparing. He beat his children for relatively minor infractions. (The father was surprised by the stoic quality of young Martin: “He was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him. He’d stand there and the tears would run down and he’d never cry out.”) He was a powerful preacher of the old school, all hellfire and brimstone. The Bible for him was a book of literal truths and stories that were not to be challenged, or to be interpreted to fit modern circumstances. He was uneasy when his son drank and danced as a young seminarian and ventured increasingly into the world of social gospel, which Daddy King thought at heart a world of leftists, which, if it threatened the white order, might threaten as well the existing black hierarchy in which he had so handsomely succeeded.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, earliest rebellion was not against his father’s house rules but against his fundamentalist teachings. As a boy he shocked his Sunday School teacher by questioning the bodily resurrection of Christ; he was clearly embarrassed by the raw emotion of his father’s preaching—the shouting, stomping, and wailing. It was only at Morehouse that more sophisticated men showed him the ministry could be socially valuable, intellectually respectable. At Morehouse, he would later note, “the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body.”

Unlike his father, young Martin had been raised with choices in life—which schools he could go to and which profession he might choose. His was a world with far greater possibilities than the world of his father: Upon graduation from Morehouse in 1948 he had pondered a career at divinity school or a career at law school and finally chose the former, going to Crozer Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania. He was the first member of his family to be educated outside the South. Martin King did well at Crozer, extending himself intellectually for the first time, so much so that several members of the faculty encouraged him to go on with his studies. But Daddy King felt that seven years of higher education was enough. It was time to come back and help out at Ebenezer. Martin never said no to his father, but he accepted a fellowship at Boston University to get his Ph.D.

In Boston, as at Crozer, King was determined to undo the white stereotypes of blacks. Were blacks supposed to be careless about
time? Martin King was the most punctual young man on campus, never late to class. Were blacks supposed to be noisy and loud? King was always sedate and respectful. Were they supposed to be a little flashy about clothes? King dressed as seriously and carefully as anyone on campus—always in a suit—and his clothes were
always
pressed, his shoes shined.

Boston, a great college town, was a delight for him socially; he was a leader among the young upper-class blacks in Boston in the early fifties, with his handsome wardrobe and his new Chevy, a gift from his father. He was, for all his theological studies, something of a young man about town, a great dancer, and very much on the lookout for the best-looking women. He was soon known in the small world of Boston black academia, Coretta Scott King later noted, as “the most eligible young black man in the Boston area at that time.” The first time he called Coretta Scott, at a friend’s suggestion, he talked a smooth line: “Every Napoleon has his Waterloo. I’m like Napoleon. I’m at my Waterloo and I’m on my knees.” Jive, she thought, but different than most jive, because it was “intellectual jive.” Meeting him on a blind date, she thought him too short. It was only as he began to talk that she got interested. After their first date, he took her home and virtually proposed to her. He demanded, he told her, four qualifications in the woman he was going to marry: character, intelligence, personality, and beauty. She had all four. Could he see her again? he asked. She would, though with some reluctance, for she had her own career as a singer and she was not thrilled by the idea of being the wife of a young minister. But gradually they became more serious, despite her doubts and despite Daddy King’s attempts to get her out of the picture in favor of a wealthy young black Atlanta heiress from, he said, “a fine family ... very talented ... wonderful personality. We love that girl.”

Intellectually, it was an exciting time for him; he was seeking a gospel that would fit the needs of a modern black minister working in the American South. He wanted to escape the raw fundamentalism he knew was so much a part of the existing black church. Instead, King sought a Christianity that allowed him to love his fellow man and yet to protest the abundant inhumanities and injustices being inflicted on blacks. He studied Marxism diligently and found it formidable as a critique of capitalism but empty as theology—shamelessly materialistic in its antimaterialism, unloving and, finally, totalitarian. But he was impressed by the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, a turn-of-the-century social critic who had blamed society’s ills on the raw, unchecked capitalism of his time. He was also impressed
by Reinhold Niebuhr and, more and more, by the teachings of Gandhi. Gandhi had had not merely the ability to lead but also to love, and to conquer inner darkness and rage. He felt that Niebuhr had misunderstood Gandhi’s notion of passive resistance. It was not, King wrote, nonresistance to evil but rather nonviolent resistance to evil. He was slowly finding a vision to fit the needs of his people and with which he was comfortable enough to devote his professional career. The faculty was impressed by him and encouraged him to become an academic. For a time he considered that: The life was pleasant and sheltered, and a young man could escape the ugly segregation of the South. But his obligations were real and immediate. The closer he came to finishing, the clearer his path became: He wanted a large Baptist church in the South. “That’s where I’m needed,” he told Coretta. They were married in 1953. Daddy King backed down from his opposition and advised Coretta of her good fortune. “You will not be marrying any ordinary young minister,” he told her.

Martin King, Jr., began looking over several churches. One in Chattanooga was interested in him, as was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. The Dexter Avenue offer intrigued him. It was a famous church, built in the days of Reconstruction, in the center of town, right across from the Alabama Supreme Court and diagonally across from the state capitol. Many of its parishioners were college-educated; they were the black Baptist elite of the city. His father warned him about them: The Dexter congregation was highly political, snobbish, and they had a reputation for devouring their pastors. They did not like a lot of whooping and hollering in their sermons. “At First Baptist,” Vernon Johns acidly told the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, “they don’t mind the preacher talking about Jesus, though they would never stoop so low as to talk about Him themselves. At Dexter Avenue they would prefer that you not mention his name.” King went to Montgomery and gave a guest sermon. Slightly nervous, he reminded himself, “Keep Martin Luther King in the background and God in the foreground and everything will be all right. Remember you’re a channel of the gospel, not a source.” The Montgomery people were so impressed they offered him their pulpit at $4,200 a year, which would make him the best-paid black minister in town. Coretta King had no great desire to return to Montgomery, which was only eighty miles from Moraine, Alabama, where she had grown up. She had seen the North and the South and her preference was for the North. But Martin believed that the South was where his future should be, so to Montgomery they went.

To the white leadership in Montgomery, Martin King was just another faceless preacher, surely ignorant. The popular caricature of a black minister was of a whooper and hollerer. Indeed, the whites kept calling him Preacher King at the beginning of the boycott, as if by denying him his proper title they could diminish him. He fought against such stereotyping with careful formality. One of the first local reporters to meet him, Tom Johnson of the
Montgomery Advertiser,
found him self-conscious, almost to the point of pomposity. He answered questions with references to Nietzsche and Kant. Johnson was amused when, in the middle of their long interview, an old friend of King’s from Atlanta arrived and King broke effortlessly into what Johnson considered a kind of jive talk; then he switched back to his formal lecture again without breaking stride.

As in his university days, he was always well dressed, in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie. “I don’t want to look like an undertaker,” he once said, describing his undertakerlike wardrobe, “but I do believe in conservative dress.” As the bus boycott began, he would get up at 5:30
A.M.
to work for three hours on his doctoral thesis and then join Coretta for breakfast before going off to his pastoral duties. (Critical parts of his thesis, it would turn out, were plagiarized, a reminder, like his womanizing, of the flaws in even the most exceptional of men.) From the start he became extremely close to the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a far earthier figure. Like King, Abernathy was anxious to break with the narrowness of the preachers of the past. “They preached the gospel of ‘otherworldliness,’ of a better time in the sweet by and by,” Abernathy later wrote. “Their ultimate solution to Jim Crow was death—when you died you were equal in the eyes of God. For such people the idea of desegregation was either frivolous or else threatening.” Abernathy helped him overcome a tendency toward snobbishness. King was better educated and able to articulate a broad social vision; Abernathy was comfortable with a wide range of people.

The white community had no idea how to deal with the boycott. The city leadership thought it was dealing with the black leadership from the past—poorly educated, readily divided, lacking endurance, and without access to national publicity outlets. When the boycott proved to be remarkably successful on the first day, the mayor of Montgomery, W. A. Gayle, did not sense that something historic was taking place, nor did he move to accommodate the blacks, who were in fact not asking for integrated buses but merely a minimal
level of courtesy and a fixed line between the sections. Gayle turned to a friend and said, “Comes the first rainy day and the Negroes will be back on the buses.” Soon it did rain, but the boycott continued. As the movement grew stronger, the principal response of Gayle and his two commissioners was to join the White Citizens’ Council. A month after the boycott began, it proved so successful that the bus-line operators were asking for permission to double the price from ten to twenty cents a ride. They were granted a five-cent raise. In late January, frustrated by the solidarity of the blacks, the white leadership went to three relatively obscure black ministers and tricked them into saying, or at least seeming to say, that they accepted the city’s terms and would show up at a meeting at city hall. Then the
Montgomery Advertiser
was brought in—a disgraceful moment for a newspaper—to report on the alleged agreement and make it seem, without using the names of the three ministers, that the real black leadership had conceded. By chance the real black leadership found out, and the ploy was not successful. But it was a sign of how terrified and out of touch the white leadership was—as if it could, by means of disinformation, halt a movement as powerful as this. When the hoax was discovered, the mayor was petulant. No more Mr. Nice Guy, he threatened. “No other city in the South of our size has treated the Negroes more fairly,” he said. Now he wanted his fellow whites to be made of sterner stuff and to stop helping their maids and workers to get to work by giving them transportation money and, worse, giving them rides. “The Negroes,” he said, “are laughing at white people behind their backs. They think it is funny and amusing that whites who are opposed to the Negro boycott will act as chauffeurs to Negroes who are boycotting the buses.”

The Montgomery authorities stopped the local black cabdrivers from ferrying people to and from work in groups of five and six for ten cents a ride (there was an old city ordinance that said the minimum fare for a ride had to be 45 cents), but money poured in from the outside to buy some fifteen new station wagons. Eventually, the MIA had some thirty cars of its own. Richard Harris, a local black pharmacist who was a crucial dispatcher in the downtown area, feared that his phone was tapped, so he spoke in comic black dialect to confuse the white authorities, and he used a code with other dispatchers—“shootin’ marbles,” for example, told how many people needed to be picked up.

Inevitably, the city leaders resorted to what had always worked in the past: the use of police power. The city fathers decided that it had to break the back of the carpool, and soon the police started
arresting carpool drivers. On January 26, 1956, some eight weeks into the boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested for driving 30 miles an hour in a 25-mile-an-hour zone. He was taken to the police station and fingerprinted; at first it appeared that he would be kept overnight, but because the crowd of blacks outside the station kept growing larger and noisier, the police let King go on his own recognizance. Two days later, King’s house was bombed by a white extremist, the first in a series of such incidents at the homes of black leaders and at black churches.

In unity and nonviolence the blacks found new strength, particularly as the nation began to take notice. Things that had for so long terrified them—the idea of being arrested and spending the night in prison, for example—became a badge of honor. Their purpose now was greater than their terror. More, because the nation was watching, the jails were becoming safer. King was, in effect, taking a crash course in the uses of modern media and proving a fast learner. Montgomery was becoming a big story, and the longer it went on, the bigger it became. In the past it had been within the power of such papers as the
Advertiser
and its afternoon twin, the far more racist
Alabama Journal,
either to grant or not grant coverage to black protests and to slant the coverage in terms most satisfying to the whites. The power to deny coverage was a particularly important aspect of white authority, for if coverage was denied, the blacks would feel isolated and gradually lose heart (for taking such risks without anyone knowing or caring); in addition, the whites would be able to crush any protest with far fewer witnesses and far less scrutiny. But that power deserted the local newspapers now, in no small part because the Montgomery story was too important for even the most virulently segregationist newspaper to ignore completely, affecting as it did virtually every home in the city; second, because even when the local newspapers tried to control the coverage, and at the very least minimize it, the arrival of television meant that the newspapers were no longer the only potential journalistic witnesses.