King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

In 1930, when a government census-taker visited the King household, he recorded “Marvin L. King” as the head of the household. His one-year-old son was recorded as “Marvin L. King Jr.” After a few years, the elder Michael King began listing his name in church programs as “M. L. King.” He later told one of his grandchildren that the decision to change his first name from Michael to Martin, and to make Martin Luther King his full name, was clinched during a 1934 trip to Germany, where King learned more about the sixteenth-century German friar Martin Luther, who purportedly nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in an act that split Western Christianity and led to the Protestant Reformation. “He really related to Martin Luther,” said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King’s grandson. “He had that same fighting spirit in him.” The switch would prove brilliant. “Martin Luther” gave the King name distinction. It served as a kind of honorific. It linked the King men to a fearless religious reformer who held fast to his beliefs despite excommunication and threats of death. As Martin Luther King Jr. would say years later, “Both father and I have fought all our lives for reform, and perhaps we’ve earned our right to the name.”