King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

In the process of canonizing King, we’ve defanged him, replacing his complicated politics and philosophy with catchphrases that suit one ideology or another. We’ve heard the recording of his “I Have a Dream” speech so many times we don’t really hear it anymore; we no longer register its cry for America to recognize the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality” or its petition for economic reparations. We don’t appreciate that King was making demands, not wishes. “In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he said that summer day in 1963 as he stood at the foot of Abraham Lincoln’s statue. We’ve mistaken King’s nonviolence for passivity. We’ve forgotten that his approach was more aggressive than anything the country had seen—that he used peaceful protest as a lever to force those in power to give up many of the privileges they’d hoarded. We’ve failed to recall that King was one of the most brutally divisive figures in American history—attacked not only by segregationists in the South but also by his own government, by more militant Black activists, and by white northern liberals. He was deliberately mischaracterized in his lifetime, and he remains so today.

Black Baptists outnumbered white Baptists in Georgia. Black culture and Black political activism rose from the pews and pulpits of the Black church. For many, religion offered release from the pain of ordinary life. Black Baptist preachers frequently imparted the radical message that all people were free and equal under God’s laws, that the rules and regulations handed down by white men were wrong, that the racial hierarchies invented by men to justify slavery were false and craven, that the savagery of the Ku Klux Klan and the segregation laws of the South were abominations in the eyes of God, and that God would never love one group of people more than another based on the color of their skin.

More than 90 percent of America’s ten million people of African ancestry—Negroes, as polite people called them at the time—lived in the South in the first decades of the century, usually in segregated communities. They were obstructed from voting and placed in inferior schools. Their sewer service, their garbage pickup, their recreational facilities, their law enforcement operations, and their health-care facilities were inferior to those found in white communities. Between 1885 and 1930, more than four thousand Black people were lynched as part of the enforcement of racial segregation and subordination. But a growing number of southern Black people, urged on by teachers and preachers, refused to accept second-class status without a struggle. Literacy rates rose rapidly among the children and grandchildren of enslaved people. Young men and women with ambition left the South to escape the blatant and often violent discrimination.

Atlanta was also at the heart of an increasingly well-organized national campaign of resistance to segregation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909 and focused on using litigation to attack the Jim Crow regime, had a strong branch in Atlanta. Its leaders included John Hope, president of Atlanta University; Harry Pace, an executive at the Standard Life Insurance Company; Benjamin J. Davis, editor of The Atlanta Independent; and Adam Daniel Williams, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

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.”

W. E. B. Du Bois described the job of a Black preacher as “a leader, a politician, an orator, ‘boss,’ an intriguer, an idealist.”

“Every black child in the South has an experience of racism that shafts his soul,” wrote James Farmer, the civil rights activist, who was nine years older than Martin Luther King Jr. and had his own such story. “For the lucky, it is like a bolt of lightning, striking one to his knees. For the others, a gradual dying, a sliver of meanness working its way to the heart.” As W. E. B. Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis has written, the truth of such stories may lie as much in their moral validity as in their factual accuracy. When he told the story of his shattered boyhood friendship, Martin Luther King Jr. never mentioned the white boy’s name or said what became of him. That wasn’t his point. His point was to show that children were not born racist. He also sought to describe how skin colors had been accorded unequal values in American society, how those values shaped the lives of Black and white Americans, how those values in turn shaped the nation, and how his dawning awareness forged his inner strength just as his father’s had been forged and had compelled him to escape from Stockbridge.

In addition to his good fortune to have grown up on Auburn Avenue, M.L. was fortunate to have grown up in a loving household with educated parents in a stable marriage. Young M.L. knew he was loved, and not only by his parents but also by his maternal grandmother, Jennie Williams, who lived with the family and was known as “Mama” to the children. No matter how busy they got, the King children were expected home for dinner. Alberta and Jennie did the cooking in the kitchen at the back of the home’s first floor. Though their workspace was small, they produced great quantities of food, always more than enough to feed the family, as guests were frequent. The Kings took great pleasure in fried chicken, chitterlings, macaroni and cheese, glazed ham, smothered pork chops, corn on the cob, black-eyed peas, collard greens, cakes, pies, cobblers, and bread pudding. For a family not long removed from poverty, every meal was a celebration, and a reminder of God’s blessings. The Kings even had their own backyard garden.

Louis E. Lomax, a friend of M.L., said men like Daddy King were “so strong and hard driving” that they tended to “confuse their own desires with God’s will,” and, as a result, their children lived with unbearable pressure and unrealistic expectations. Whatever Daddy King’s motivation, it became clear that his middle child preferred absorbing punishment to delivering it, especially if ordered to hit his sister. When M.L. was spanked, he would never let his father see him cry. But neither would the son confront his father or fight back.

Nationwide, 90 percent Black families endured poverty at some point during the Depression (compared with less than 50 percent of all white families). Hunger, homelessness, and a frightening sense of helplessness crept across the country. Droughts worsened the crisis. Racism worsened it even more. The Depression offered a painful reminder that Black Americans had not achieved anything approaching equality since the Civil War. Half of all Black Americans remained illiterate as of 1915, and three quarters lived as impoverished sharecroppers or tenants. The number of Black craftsmen had actually declined since slavery had ended. New Deal programs designed to help people in poverty were limited in their effect because they were often run in the South by white officials uninterested in Black people or unwilling to help them.

Given that he had grown up in a fundamentalist Black church, M.L. may have felt, simply, that he was doing what was expected of him. “From this it seems quite clear I joined the church not out of dynamic conviction,” he said, “but out of a childhood desire to keep up with my sister.”

Martin Luther King Jr. grew up believing in a God of redemption, a God of judgment, a God of grace and miracles, a personal God who believed that Black people mattered no matter what racist white people and government regulations said. He grew up in an urban church that blended prayer with calls to action. He grew up understanding that racism was not merely wrong but evil, corrosive of the soul. He grew up hearing shouted sermons and soaring songs that moved audiences to tears and ecstasy, sermons and songs that called for freedom on earth as well as in heaven.

In the 1930s, three out of every four Black workers in the South toiled as domestics or farmhands. But young M. L. King saw Black people everywhere asserting themselves in bold new ways. In Atlanta, the owner of an Auburn Avenue gas station, John Harden, took over the city’s leading Black baseball team, the Atlanta Black Crackers, and briefly made it a winner in the late 1930s. In Germany, Jesse Owens won gold and glory for the United States in the 1936 Olympics. Joe Louis captured boxing’s heavyweight crown the following year. In 1939, Marian Anderson sang before a crowd of seventy-five thousand at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Never mind that the Black Crackers could not test their skills against white professional baseball teams. Never mind that Jesse Owens returned to the United States as a second-class citizen with few opportunities to reap the rewards for his fame. Never mind that Joe Louis was ordered by his white managers never to boast about defeating white opponents and never to be seen in the company of white women. Never mind that Marian Anderson couldn’t spend the night in many of the capital’s best hotels or dine in its finest restaurants after her groundbreaking performance. M. L. King Jr. would find opportunities that Owens, Louis, and Anderson hadn’t had, in part because those people and countless others, including his parents, had cut a path for him.

But others were angry, unafraid, and ready to act. Scattered sit-ins occurred around the country in the 1930s, the action inspired in part by union organizers who had seized factories to fight for better working conditions. Communist organizers in America took up the fight for racial justice. Labor unions followed. In January 1941, before the United States joined the fight in World War II, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters called for a march on Washington to demand the right of Black people “to work and fight for our country.” After a series of negotiations, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, barring racial discrimination in defense industries, and Randolph agreed to call off the march. Other protests went on, however, and they were often met with violent reactions. As rallies, sit-ins, and boycotts continued, Roosevelt promised to address one of the protesters’ biggest complaints: that men and women—including Black soldiers—were routinely denied the vote through the imposition of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other forms of disenfranchisement. In 1940, less than 3 percent of Black people in the South were registered to vote, and southern politicians blocked attempts to expand voting rights.

A few months later, the accomplished Black tenor Roland Hayes was jailed in Rome, Georgia, seventy miles from Atlanta, when a shoe-store clerk asked Hayes’s wife to move from her seat near the window to one in the back of the store. When Hayes complained that he and his wife had done nothing wrong, a police officer “gave me all he had on the jaw,” Hayes said, and then handcuffed and arrested him. Two weeks later, in his Sunday sermon at Ebenezer, Reverend King addressed the attack on Hayes. Perhaps it would help if more well-known Black men and women were beaten up, Reverend King said, so that the world might be alerted to their plight.

On August 5, the president of Morehouse, Dr. Benjamin Mays, visited the tobacco farm. The son of a sharecropper, he stood tall and slender, his posture perfect, his silver hair carefully cut and seeming to illuminate his dark, handsome face. Mays had risen impressively through the church and academy, and held a doctorate from the University of Chicago. Morehouse was the most prestigious all-Black, all-male college in the United States, but it had been struggling since the 1929 Wall Street crash. Mays had earned the nickname “Buck Bennie” for his efforts to repair the school’s finances. He insisted students pay their tuition promptly, and he helped them find jobs. But he had done more than shore up the school’s budget. He boosted the school’s academic reputation, too. Before Morehouse, Mays had served as the dean of the Howard University School of Religion, where he worked with two of the most influential African American preachers of the early twentieth century, Mordecai Johnson and Howard Thurman. At Howard, these preachers had created a laboratory where the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel (that religious belief must be put in action to correct society’s flaws) and Mahatma Gandhi’s views on nonviolent resistance would be applied in fighting racial injustice. At Morehouse, Mays set out to empower his students, to produce young men charged with changing the world. To be a Morehouse man, he made clear, was to be a part of a special order and to bear a special...

Segregation militated against and dishonored democracy. But, at the same time, glimmers of hope appeared. Black voter registration in the South, though still heavily contested, was on the rise. In 1944, the same year King went to Connecticut, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy. The book was the most detailed examination of American racism ever compiled by a white man, based on research performed before the United States entered World War II. Nearly 1,500 pages long, the book described what Black Americans knew but couldn’t quantify: the disparities between the races in infant mortality, employment, education, and political representation. Though Negroes made up 10 percent of the American population, Myrdal wrote, they “do not by far have anything approaching a tenth of the things worth having in America.” The Negro people, in Myrdal’s view, were being treated like aliens in their own country. This fundamental unfairness permeated every aspect of American democracy, creating a tragic gap between what it was and what it was supposed to be. Everyone knew it. The only question was how long a nation could go on failing to live up to its own moral code.

But Myrdal suffered a serious blind spot, as he later acknowledged: he largely ignored the structural inequality in the American North and West, failing to anticipate that many liberal white people would find it easy to criticize the South but difficult to accept change in their own communities. King would major in sociology at Morehouse, and he would go on to call out the hypocrisy of northern whites who explained away their own discriminatory systems of housing, education, employment, and law enforcement.

From the moment he arrived at Morehouse, King understood that his great passions—scholarship, religion, public speaking, and the pursuit of racial justice—could coalesce, even if he wasn’t sure how. He knew it because he saw how they came together in Mays. He also knew it because his professors challenged him to think critically and see old issues, including religion, in new ways. “During my student days at Morehouse,” King recalled, “I read Thoreau’s essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ for the first time. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. This was my first intellectual contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.”

Two months after his eighteenth birthday, King made his debut as a journalist, covering Youth Day at Ebenezer church for the Atlanta Daily World. He also submitted an essay to the school newspaper, The Maroon Tiger, that ran under the headline “The Purpose of Education.” In the Tiger essay, he stressed the importance of character and moral development for students, warning that educated men without morals might be the most dangerous men of all. He cited the example of Eugene Talmadge, the Georgia governor who won reelection after declaring the perpetuation of white supremacy the only campaign issue that mattered. “We must remember that intelligence is not enough,” wrote King. “Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education … If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, ‘brethren!’ Be careful, teachers!”

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, ...

Most, if not all, of the audience didn’t know or didn’t care whether King borrowed from another sermon. Many young preachers learned by trying out others’ words. When he’d lifted a speech in high school, King had done it from the most obvious source possible: a book of prizewinning student speeches. Now he’d borrowed from one of the nation’s most popular radio preachers. In later years, when he was confronted on his sourcing, he would speak forthrightly and unashamedly about his influences. King wasn’t concerned with plagiarism; his goal was to move audiences. With that in mind, perhaps he thought it made sense to rely on texts that had already proved popular and sound. In fact, for years to come, King would continue using Fosdick’s sermons, as well as the works of other well-known preachers. As the scholar Keith D. Miller wrote, King grew up in the tradition of preachers who presumed that “words are shared assets, not personal belongings.” King was a voracious reader with a splendid memory. Everything he read became material for his own use. Like a talented jazz musician who integrates patterns and borrows phrases from classical music, pop, and opera, as well as from other jazz musicians, he possessed enough style and skill to make the finished product feel unique.

When Daddy King learned that his son had attended a dance with some of his Morehouse classmates, for example, the senior pastor reminded his assistant pastor that Baptists frowned on dancing. The following Sunday, Daddy King made M.L. stand before the congregation and apologize.

As a Christian, Beshai told King, he grew up feeling like a minority. But years later, Beshai would reflect on whether he’d been completely honest or completely aware of his feelings at the time. He would wonder why he preferred the companionship of white students at Crozer. He would reflect on the universality of racism, of the deep scars of slavery. King was already grappling with such issues at Crozer, but Beshai was not. “He was a very honest man and a modest person,” Beshai said, “and he was already searching for the brotherhood of man and equality, which is also the Christian method. It’s the search for truth.”

King navigated Crozer, in part, by managing what W. E. B. Du Bois called “double-consciousness,” or an ability to look at oneself through the eyes of another. King said he hesitated to eat watermelon because he didn’t wish to feed white stereotypes. White people who knew him at Crozer would sometimes recall him as humorless and soft-spoken, but that was because King chose not to reveal himself, as he explained: I was well aware of the typical white stereotype of the Negro—that he is always late, that he’s loud and always laughing, that he’s dirty and messy—and for a while I was terribly conscious of trying to avoid identification with it. If I was a minute late to class, I was almost morbidly conscious of it and sure that everyone else noticed it. Rather than be thought of as always laughing, I’m afraid I was grimly serious for a time. I had a tendency to overdress, to keep my room spotless, my shoes perfectly shined and my clothes immaculately pressed.

King admired the older preacher’s rhyming, rhythmic phrases, and he doodled similar phrases of his own in his notebooks. He absorbed the lessons of white professors who encouraged him to preach with calm, cool intellect, but he never forgot the audiences to whom he’d one day be preaching, and he never forgot that the Gospel could be used for social change. King told Barbour the revolution would have to be a nonviolent one if the minority were to have a chance of success. “Just a matter of arithmetic,” he said.

King’s genius in later years would be his ability to deliver messages that inspired Black and white listeners alike, messages that made racial justice sound like an imperative for all, messages that crossed lines of theology and geography, that suggested both sides needed to act if the racial divide were ever to be erased without violence. He knew from his childhood in Atlanta and from the stories told by his parents and grandparents that America was the product of Black and white culture, the product of the conflict and mixture of different people. Crozer helped him find the right words and the right tone so that he could one day explain his diagnosis clearly and passionately to audiences of every race.

He experienced a crisis of confidence, he said, while reading Nietzsche, who described Christianity’s call for universal love as a sign of weakness. King wondered for a time if Christ’s instruction “Love your enemies” (Luke 6:27) really had enough power to resolve conflicts among nations or racial groups.

King’s beliefs became more nuanced as he studied the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, in classes taught by Smith. Niebuhr argued that man’s sinfulness would inevitably interfere with attempts to form a more just society. Christian love alone would not change the world, not so long as political and economic systems created vast inequalities among God’s children. Nations and privileged groups within those nations would preserve the status quo, by force if necessary.

As the United States fought the Cold War with the Soviet Union, seeking to gain political and military influence around the world, American leaders sought to present themselves as the champions of global freedom. But the country’s treatment of its Black population undercut that position. When the finance minister of Ghana visited the United States and tried to order orange juice at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Delaware, he was told that Black customers were not welcome. “Racial discrimination in the United States remains a source of constant embarrassment to this Government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations,” wrote Dean Acheson, the secretary of state in the Truman administration, as part of a brief filed in Brown v. Board of Education, “and it jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.”

There were more encouraging signs. The Tuskegee Institute announced that it would no longer publish its annual statistics on lynching. Acts of lynching occurred so seldom, the institute reported, that statistics no longer revealed much about the state of race relations. Bombings and threats of violence continued to terrorize Black people, especially in the South, but the experts at Tuskegee believed they would learn more by evaluating employment, income, education, and political participation.

“Treading the tight-rope of Jim Crow from birth to death, from almost our first knowledge of life to our last conscious thought … is a major mental acrobatic feat,” wrote Rosa Parks, then an NAACP secretary and a seamstress in Montgomery, in a notebook she kept in the 1950s. “It takes a noble soul to plumb this line. There is always a line of some kind—color line, hanging rope, tight rope. To me, it seems that we are puppets on string in the white man’s hands … and we perform to their satisfaction or suffer the consequence if we get out of line.”

1. Negro bus passengers should be seated from back to front, whites from front to rear. There should be no signs or lines of separation, and no one should ever be asked by a driver to give up his or her seat. The riders would remain separated, but they would do so without orders from the bus driver. 2. Negroes would be accorded the same courtesy as white passengers with no name-calling or insulting treatment such as being forced to board from the rear door. 3. Negro bus drivers would be hired to drive on predominantly Negro routes.

On this night, King found a new voice. He discovered or sensed that his purpose was not to instruct or educate; his purpose was to prophesize. With a booming voice and strident words, he marked the path for himself and for a movement. He reminded the people that their advantage was in their moral superiority. They would not burn crosses or pull white people from their homes. They would protest peacefully, as their Christian faith instructed. They meant to reform American democracy, not overthrow it.

And we are not wrong… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

“During the bus boycott I was tested by fire,” Coretta would recall years later, “and I came to understand that I was not a breakable figurine.”

King replied: “Prayer has been used very effectively in our movement.” Despite evidence of “man’s inhumanity to man,” he wrote, “I am convinced that God lives.” Those who stand with God, he continued, “stand in the glow of the world’s bright tomorrows.”

In Lomax’s view, King almost certainly would have quit his job at Dexter Avenue church for a college job after a few years had he not been thrust into a position of leadership. But now he had made a commitment to the movement.

Activists led workshops on avoiding conflict with white antagonists. If cursed, do not curse back, they taught. If struck, do not retaliate. If fired upon, do not return fire. One need not like one’s white neighbor, the instructors taught, but one must love him. “What Dr. King delivered to Blacks there, far more important than whether they got to ride on the bus, was the absence of fear,” Rustin said.

Years later, Abernathy said that he and King had no intention of turning the Montgomery fight into a national one, but three important factors compelled them to think bigger. First, they hadn’t been lynched, “a fact that never ceased to impress us.” Second, supporters from around the country kept showing up in Montgomery to help. Third, they found themselves to be the star and co-star of a worldwide news story. King was something new, something exciting, possibly dangerous.

Even many white southerners found the young preacher difficult to dismiss. “King has been working on the guilty conscience of the South,” said a liberal white Baptist minister in Raleigh, North Carolina. “If he can bring us to contrition, this is our hope.”

Years later, Thurgood Marshall would say that the NAACP deserved more credit for its role in ending Montgomery’s system of segregated busing, telling one interviewer that he perceived King and the boycotters as a sideshow. It was true that the city of Montgomery had proved mostly impervious to protest and economic pressure, and that litigation had won the day. But the biggest development in Montgomery was the creation of a new state of mind, a new sense of power, coalesced around King, who described the Montgomery movement as “our twelve months of glorious dignity.”

A month later, when the Supreme Court refused to reconsider its decision, the city of Montgomery finally accepted defeat. After 381 days, the bus boycott was over, and so was the national illusion that Black Americans were willing to abide by the nation’s crushing racial order. National news reporters were not accustomed to covering racial protests that ended in victory. But the legal battle for justice had turned with Brown v. Board of Education. Now, with the bus boycott, the psychological battle had turned, too. The Montgomery experience gave African Americans a new leader and a new strategy for social protest. America’s long-oppressed Black people would no longer wait for justice; they would fight for it. Eleanor Roosevelt called it “one of the most remarkable achievements of people fighting for their rights … without bloodshed … that we have ever witnessed in this country.” Harry Emerson Fosdick, the minister and orator who had inspired King for years, said Montgomery had become “one of the most significant places in the world.”

On February 10, on national television, he declared the arrival of a new American Negro, “a person with a new sense of dignity and destiny with a new self-respect.” The new American Negro possessed courage, he said. The new American Negro refused to pay lip service to the white man. The new American Negro “says in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t like the way he’s being treated” and intends to do something about it. King’s calm tone and conservative attire may have disguised the boldness of his words: “I think it’s better to be aggressive at this point,” he said. “It seems to me that it is both historically and sociologically true that privileged classes do not give up their privileges voluntarily. And they do not give them up without strong resistance.”

On February 18, 1957, Time magazine put King’s image on its cover and declared that the young preacher from Montgomery had “risen from nowhere to become one of the nation’s remarkable leaders of men.” The magazine portrayed King as the perfect activist for a country turned conservative and caught up in a Cold War. He was nonpolitical, nonpartisan, and “no radical,” Time assured its predominantly white readership. Here was a man building a reform movement on the most American of pillars: the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the American dream. King not only inspired Black southerners to imagine new possibilities but also inspired southern white Christians to open their minds, the magazine said. “I know of very few white southern ministers who aren’t troubled [about segregation] and don’t have admiration for King,” one white Baptist minister told the magazine. “They’ve become tortured souls.”

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.

King also took on a monthly column in Ebony magazine called “Advice for Living,” which ran from August 1957 to December 1958. The column offered him the chance to serve as minister to a large and diverse audience, answering readers’ letters and using Christian values and calm reassurance to guide the troubled through difficult times. He expressed opposition to the death penalty; he urged one angry reader to reconsider his notion of what it meant to be a strong Black man and to embrace nonviolence; he warned Black men and women not to give in to a sense of “inferiority and self-hatred” that white racism had imposed on American society; he defended interracial marriage; he called birth control “rationally and morally justifiable”; he urged a Black man who didn’t like Jews to get over his bigotry; he expressed moral opposition to gambling and premarital sex; and he advised a woman with an unfaithful husband to seek counseling but also to consider whether her nagging or inattentiveness had contributed to her husband’s desire to have an affair. In what appears to have been King’s only known writing on the subject of homosexuality, he told a boy that his feelings of attraction to other boys were “culturally acquired,” not innate. King did not condemn the young man’s homosexual feelings, but he did say they presented a “problem,” one that might be overcome with the help of a psychiatrist.

The Black community had relatively little political power, but it had Jackie Robinson, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Richard Wright, Chuck Berry, Harry Belafonte, James Baldwin, and Louis Armstrong, among others, who gained popularity among Black and white audiences and transformed American culture. And now it had a telegenic young preacher, declaring that racism was both unpatriotic and a sin against God, and building a following of his own.

King wrote: “Frankly, I’m worried to death. A man who hits his peak at twenty-seven has a tough job ahead. People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of my hat for the rest of my life.”

One day while writing in a cluttered hotel room in Atlanta, King gave an interview to James Baldwin, the Harlem-born author who had emerged as one of the nation’s most vital writers on race. The stepson of a Baptist minister and a child prodigy who once seemed destined for his own career in the pulpit, Baldwin described King as “not like any preacher I had met before. For one thing, to state it baldly, I liked him … King is immediately and tremendously winning, there is really no other word for it … I wanted to ask him how it felt to be standing where he stood, how he bore it, what complex of miracles had prepared him for it. But such questions can scarcely be asked, they can scarcely be answered.” Baldwin found in King no trace of self-importance, no “hideous piety,” no chauvinism, no tendency to say one thing to whites and another to Blacks.