King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

After his speech, King went to dinner at the Washington, D.C., home of a young white man named J. Blanton Belk. A year earlier, Belk and a friend had driven to Montgomery hoping to meet the young minister they’d been reading about in the paper. King had invited Belk and his friend to dinner that afternoon in 1956, and they had lingered for four hours over Coretta’s fried chicken and lemon meringue pie. Eager to return the hospitality, Belk invited King and his guests to have dinner at a posh home on Embassy Row that he had borrowed from a friend. Gathered around the table were Daddy King, his brother Joel, A.D. King, Ralph Abernathy, and others. Belk, a southerner whose family owned a chain of department stores, would go on to found Up with People, an interracial youth group that worked to unite cultures through song, a group that he hoped would carry forth the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.’s quest for the beloved community. When King asked Belk what he had thought of his speech that day, Belk said he had been moved by the sincerity in King’s tone as much as by his words. The sound of King’s voice expressed “the total commitment of the man to what he believed,” Belk said. He told King that he thought southern white people, if they had listened without prejudice, would have sensed his honesty and good intentions. King thanked him for the compliment and asked Belk to bring the two Black cooks out of the kitchen to join the group for a prayer before dinner.