King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

In the summer of 1947—the season in which Jackie Robinson integrated big-league baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers—King returned to Simsbury, Connecticut, for another season of tobacco farming. He continued preaching to his fellow farmers. But he was more confident than the last time he’d traveled north—and perhaps wilder, too. One night, he and some of his friends were stopped by police. Were they stopped simply because they were Black? Had they been drinking? Speeding? It’s not clear. It’s not even clear if they were issued a citation. But the encounter was serious enough that King decided to call home and tell his parents before they found out about it from someone else. Perhaps hoping to soften the blow, he began the conversation by saying he had finally made up his mind to follow his father into the ministry, something he had not firmly declared until that moment. Daddy King, taking no chances, quickly scheduled a date for his son to deliver his first sermon at Ebenezer. Years later, the younger King’s friends would tease him, suggesting he was not called to the ministry by God so much as chased there by police. While admitting his calling was not “miraculous or supernatural,” as he put it, King offered a practical explanation, saying he recognized the central importance of the church in Black life, understood the power of the preacher, and glimpsed a future in which his talents might serve God and humanity. At eighteen, he imagined a career as a “rational” minister, ...