King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

Genesis 37:19–21

They built their revolution on Christian love, on nonviolence, and on faith in humankind.

This book tells the story of the man who, in a career that spanned a mere thirteen years, brought the nation closer than it had ever been to reckoning with the reality of having treated people as property and secondary citizens.

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 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.

those closest to King saw his flaws all along and understood that his power grew from his ability to grapple with contradiction, to wrestle with doubt just as his biblical heroes did. “Great men … have not been boasters and buffoons,” wrote Emerson, “but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”

As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” The white backlash to Black people’s gains was immediate—and vicious.

Supporters viewed the Jim Crow laws as a system of controls, like dams and dikes, designed to preserve the natural order as they perceived it. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court gave legal sanction to segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, creating a standard of “separate but equal” that was anything but equal.

Jim King—born the year before the abolition of chattel slavery—personified the crushing frustrations of Black life in the South.

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.

Martin Luther King Jr., Delia’s grandson, would often remark on the role Christianity played in the lives of the enslaved and indentured. The land they farmed was not their own. The crops they planted and sowed were not their own. Their bodies were not entirely their own. But their souls, he said, would never belong to a plantation owner, a landlord, a hooded Klansman, a prison warden, a sheriff, a senator, or anybody else; their souls would always be free.

Jim’s age and the ages of his parents—listed as Nathan and Malinda Branham—match the ages of King’s ancestors, suggesting perhaps that the family chose to drop the Branham name, which was a vestige of enslavement, and become Kings in freedom.

In the early twentieth century, Georgia was home to 334,000 Black Baptists, more than any other state. Black churches needed preachers—even young, inexperienced, unschooled preachers such as the Reverend Michael King. 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.

Between 1885 and 1930, more than four thousand Black people were lynched as part of the enforcement of racial segregation and subordination.

For Williams, theology and social action were like voices in the choir, better together than apart.

The courtship continued even when Alberta moved to Virginia for eighteen months to pursue a teaching certificate. She urged Michael to continue his education and tutored him in some of the subjects he’d missed as a child. She was the more educated of the two, and she had the deeper background in the church.

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.

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

At the age of six we both entered school—separate schools of course.” Even then, in late afternoons and on weekends, M.L. sought out his friend. He later struggled to understand why their friendship faded. That’s when the white boy told M.L. that it wasn’t just the start of school that had caused the separation; it was the color of M.L.’s skin. The boy was no longer permitted to play with Black children.

M.L. described this as a formative experience. He would remember and recount it several times over the rest of his life. He revised a few of the details with repetition, but the aching pain of lost friendship compounded by his new knowledge of racism never changed.

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.

Years later, Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest friends and associates would speculate about the effect of those beatings. “I think Martin was a much more fearful man than he appeared,” said Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist and pacifist who was one of King’s closest advisers. King had no trouble confronting racist white sheriffs, Rustin said, but he could not bear conflict with older civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins or Whitney Young, or even, sometimes, with the members of his own organization. “Now I think all this sprang from the fact that his father had so brutalized him as a kid,” Rustin said. He longed for his father’s approval, and yet he also yearned to assert himself and explore his great talents. The conflict would shape his life.

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.

Little M.L. said, ‘I’m not a nigger,’ and stopped delivering that man a paper. He then lost his paper route.” The incident may have marked M.L.’s first overt protest of racism.

As Daddy King surely knew, Black activists had a long history of protesting racism in Hollywood. Many community leaders in Atlanta encouraged Black men and women to sit out the festivities, seeing no reason in this case to romanticize slavery.

Reverend King’s decision to bring the Ebenezer choir to the premiere rankled many of his peers.

Daddy King was more than a preacher. He preached emphatically about sin, but when parishioners got into scrapes with the law, they knew they could count on their pastor to bail them out of jail. Reverend King also made sure the church provided food for the hungry, clothes for the poor, and day care for the children of working men and women.

Alberta served as the church’s unofficial executive director. She kept the schedules. She organized meetings.

In his annual message to Congress in January 1941, Roosevelt made his case for more concrete support of America’s allies in the war abroad, saying the fight was not to save Europe but to save the four freedoms that people everywhere had a right to possess: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Activists pointed out that many Black people in America were routinely denied those freedoms.

He also struck a conciliatory tone in 1941 when he presided over a meeting of the joint committee of “white and colored” ministerial councils, as The Atlanta Constitution put it, saying in his opening remarks: “The racial condition … will never be settled right until a more friendly contact is made among the ministers of both races.”

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.

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.

Like an earthquake, World War II had shaken and destabilized the nation’s racial system. After Black men had fought and died to save democracy and freedom, the hypocrisy of their treatment became more difficult for some white people to ignore, especially as Black people organized to do something about it. The key to the organizers’ success, Myrdal said, would be finding allies among those newly awoken white Americans.

King chose to major in sociology. His adviser was a sociology professor named Walter Chivers, who had conducted research on lynchings in the South and who taught students that money lay at the root of racism.

Mays told students they had the power to fight racism in ways that God would show them in good time. He made clear he would be deeply disappointed if his students failed to achieve distinction and do something to solve the world’s problems.

Even in later years, he made little mention of extracurricular reading, art, or popular culture.

During his second year at Morehouse, “King came to the conclusion that he should be a minister,” McCall said. The decision stemmed from his growing comprehension of the role a preacher could play in the community, as well as the influence of his father.

For many Negroes, religion has probably provided a safety valve against insanity or rebellion. But there’s a danger in this emotionalism, too. It can become as empty a form as any other.

In an exam in one of Kelsey’s classes, King showed a keen understanding of the Bible and its historical context, writing words that would one day apply to himself: “It is obvious that prophets address themselves to the conditions existing in their time. Prophecy is a moral, not a magical thing.”

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.

Fosdick, a white man, was referred to as a pulpit psychologist. He chose not to wallow in talk of sin and punishment; instead, he spoke of hope, of the promise of the future, of God’s purpose for all men. He used his wide appeal, as he put it, “to harness the great dynamics of the Gospel to contemporary tasks,” much the way Benjamin Mays did.

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.

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.”

The highlight of the summer, “for both M.L. and myself,” said Dobbs, was listening to a sermon by the Reverend Vernon Johns at Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta. Johns was a radical minister who treated racism as a social evil held in God’s contempt.

M.L. told her that Daddy King was a frequent womanizer. Dobbs had already heard the rumors. M.L. said he was worried that he would someday wind up like his father, unable to resist the temptation of adultery.

Prior to his arrival, the school had had only two Black students. But in King’s class, ten of the sixteen students were Black, their admissions part of an attempt to offset declining enrollment.

Keighton stressed the three p’s of oratory: proving, painting, and persuading. He taught structure, too. The “ladder sermon” built one argument atop another. The “jewel sermon” considered one idea from multiple perspectives. The “skyrocket sermon” began with a bang followed by a cascade of smaller ideas.

Above all, King said, the preaching ministry was a dual process. “On the one hand I must attempt to change the soul of the individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other hand I must attempt to change the societies so that the individual soul will have a change.”

He also strongly suggested that he and his friends had chosen Mary’s Café to test the state’s integration laws. “They refused to serve us,” King said. “It was a painful experience because we decided to sit in.” McCall described it as King’s “first civil rights struggle.” It also marked one of his earliest lessons in the limits of northern liberalism.

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.