Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (16 page)

When you celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, don’t forget the gentle lady who helped create his dream.

A
t first glance, Alberta Christine Williams seemed an unlikely candidate to raise one of the United States’ most important social activists. Fashionable Alberta was born into a life of comfort. She always had access to the best schools, clubs, and social functions in black Atlanta. She was also so shy and quiet that not many people realized how strong she could be. And it didn’t seem likely that someone so elegant and refined would ever teach her son to rock the boat—let alone shake up an entire nation.

But when Martin Luther King, Jr., led the battle to end segregation in the Jim Crow South, his mother backed him. Meticulous, reserved Alberta became beloved “Mama King,” not only to her family but also to King’s followers throughout the country. Many people knew that she was a devoted warrior for the cause of justice. Only family and close friends knew that her loving nature started Martin Luther King, Jr., on his famous path of nonviolence.

In the early 1900s, the prosperous African American community in Atlanta thrived. The South might have been segregated, but in Atlanta the black middle-class and professionals were respected. They formed a tight
society that outsiders found hard to penetrate. In Ebenezer Baptist Church, many of the best and brightest of black Atlanta attended Sunday services. Reverend Williams, Alberta’s father, was an influential preacher and he made Ebenezer Baptist into one of the strongest black churches in the South.

In 1924 Alberta received her teaching certificate from Hampton Institute, but she taught school only briefly. Most of her life centered on Ebenezer. For 12 years she ran its Women’s Council, and for more than 40 years she was its musical director and organ player. When Alberta fell in love, she and minister Mike King (who later changed his name to Martin Luther) announced their engagement at Sunday services. On Thanksgiving Day 1926, the couple married in the old and venerable brick church. And when her father passed on, Alberta’s husband took over as the head minister of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

The new Mrs. King, also known by her nickname “Bunch,” had a strong sense of fashion, a great sense of humor, and a determination to practice Christian goodness, not just preach it—all qualities later remarked on in her famous son. Alberta loved music and fancy dancing, though what with being daughter, then wife, and finally mother of conservative Baptist ministers (the Baptists frowned on dancing), she didn’t often get the chance to strut her stuff.

It took some effort to get to know the soft-spoken, reserved young woman, but those who did often commented on her sweet nature. Her son Martin found her warmth and gentleness unfailing. To him, she was always “Mother Dear.”

Martin, his older sister, Christine, and his younger brother, Alfred Daniel, were all born in the Queen Anne home on 510 Auburn Street. Church became a second home to the children and Mama King echoed weekly sermons by encouraging high moral purpose.

Despite her high standards, Alberta told at least one fib. Sure that her eldest son was precocious, she lied about his age and put him in school a year early. When little Martin innocently bragged about his birthday cake with five candles on it, he was promptly expelled until he was six. That fib aside, Martin always praised his mother’s character and claimed that his own optimism about human nature had a lot to do with the love and goodness he’d experienced as her child.

While her children were young, Alberta was happy, but never secure. She constantly feared for her husband’s safety. Daddy King had grown up in the poverty of a sharecropper’s shack and worked his way through high school and college. He was a strong, proud man, too proud to accept the humiliation of Jim Crow.

When a police officer stopped Daddy King for missing a stop sign and ordered, “All right, boy, pull over and let me see your license,” the elder King pointed out in no uncertain terms that he was a man and wasn’t about to talk to anyone who couldn’t figure that out. Rattled, the officer hastily wrote out the ticket and sped off. But Alberta knew the confrontation could have led to a beating, imprisonment, or worse for her husband. Lynching was a very real threat.

Alberta also grieved at the hurts inflicted on her children by the unfairness of segregation. When six-year-old Martin came home in tears, announcing that his white friends wouldn’t play with him anymore because of his
race, Alberta tried to help him understand the unthinkable. “She told me about slavery,” Martin later wrote. “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. She made it clear that she opposed this system and that I must never allow it to make me feel inferior. 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.’ ”

Most days, Alberta’s kids had few worries; they enjoyed good clothes, good schools, and good times. When in trouble they relied on the strength of their parents. The future was bright, especially for Martin, who married Coretta Scott, a beautiful outsider from Alabama, and took over the pastorship of a church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Not long after Martin moved to Alabama, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her bus seat. She was arrested and taken to the Montgomery courthouse. At a rally to protest Parks’s arrest, Martin gave a stirring speech to an overflowing black crowd, urging a boycott of the bus line. His fellow ministers were stunned at the power of his oratory, while the inspired crowd responded with cheers. Martin’s life as America’s most powerful civil rights advocate had begun, and his mother prayed for his safety now.

Alberta had feared for Daddy King, but she agonized over Junior, who took far greater risks on a much larger scale. Even so, through years of dangerous sit-ins and mass rallies, arrests, beatings, stabbings, and bombings, Mama King forced herself to be a source of strength for her
crusading son. She was there when, to the young man’s own surprise, his work awakened the conscience of a nation and the world.

In 1964 Martin told his mother about going to the White House for the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Later that year, along with Daddy King and Coretta, Mama King accompanied Martin to Oslo, where he became, at 35, the youngest man ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Encouraged to retire and enjoy his accomplishments, Martin instead went back to righting wrongs. One afternoon in Memphis he had some rare relaxation, enjoying a long phone conversation with “Mother Dear”—laughing and talking about family instead of politics. Hours later on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated while standing on a motel balcony.

As the nation grieved for her son, Alberta rallied herself for the sake of her family and especially her grandchildren. Those who’d known only the sweet side of Mama King discovered that (yet again like her son) she was tougher than they knew. Many turned to her for strength.

Though she was always too reserved to speak out like her son did, Alberta gave her own legacy to history. Her husband said of his wife’s lessons to his children: “She taught them the sense of kindness, the sense of forgiveness, the sense of love.” With those teachings, Mama King raised a hero who never stopped fighting for the oppressed but always practiced nonviolence and forgiveness toward the oppressors.

Martin explained himself this way: “I think that my strong determination for justice comes from the very strong, dynamic personality of my father, and I would hope that the gentle aspect comes from a mother who is very gentle and sweet.”

Why is it that when a comic mouths off, Mom always gets into the act?

“My mom told us how she learned to swim. Someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. That’s how she learned how to swim. I said, ‘Mom, they weren’t trying to teach you how to swim.’”

Paula Poundstone

“My mother had so much work to do that when one of us was being born she never used to go to the hospital until the last possible second. In fact, three of us were born on a bus . . . and after each one, Dad would go up and ask for a transfer.”

Bob Hope

“My mother buried three husbands, and two of them were just napping.”

Rita Rudner

“My mother’s menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.”

Buddy Hackett

“My mother could make anyone feel guilty. She used to get letters of apology from people she didn’t even know.”

Joan Rivers

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.”

Ellen DeGeneres

“My mother treated us all equally . . . with contempt.”

Groucho Marx

“My mother taught me to think of myself as a sex symbol for the men who don’t give a damn.”

Phyllis Diller

“My mother talks to herself and complains of hearing voices.”

Phyllis Diller

“Changing a diaper is a lot like getting a present from your grandmother—you’re not sure what you’ve got but you’re pretty sure you’re not going to like it.”

Jeff Foxworthy

“Mother never stops complaining. She hired a nursing aide recently, so that she could complain someone was stealing from her.”

Judith Gold

“Mother always said that honesty was the best policy and money isn’t everything. She was wrong about other things, too.”

Gerald Bazan

“My mother thought the doctor had left the stork and taken the baby.”

Bob Hope

“I was so ugly when I was born, the doctor slapped my mother.”

Henny Youngman

“The hand that rocks the cradle usually is attached to someone who isn’t getting enough sleep.”

John Fiebig

“It is said that life begins when the fetus can exist apart from its mother. By this definition, many people in Hollywood are legally dead.”

Jay Leno

“What’s a home without a mother? Dirty.”

Soupy Sales

“Don’t forget Mother’s Day. Or as they call it in Beverly Hills, Dad’s Third Wife’s Day.”

Jay Leno

“If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?”

Milton Berle

“Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.”

Erma Bombeck

“There’s a lot more to being a woman than being a mother,
but there’s a hell of a lot more to being a mother than most people suspect.”

Roseanne

“I lost everything in the postnatal depression.”

Erma Bombeck

“Having a baby can be a scream.”

Joan Rivers

“My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can’t decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.”

Rita Rudner

“When my husband comes home, if the kids are still alive, I figure I’ve done my job.”

Roseanne

“Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he’s buying.”

Fran Lebowitz

“Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.”

Phyllis Diller

“You’re not famous until my mother has heard of you.”

Jay Leno