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Martin Luther King,
Jr.
Copyright © All rights reserved
By Ken Chapman, Ph.D.
Ken Chapman & Associates, Inc.
At the age of twenty-six, Martin Luther King took up the leadership role that
would fill the rest of his life. He furthered the stubborn determination of
black Americans to break down the limits of a racist society. His strategy of
nonviolent protest brought passage of far-reaching federal legislation that
undermined Southern efforts to enforce segregation through local laws. His
vision of a just and equal society where race would be transcended defied the
imagination of many Americans.
Michael King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in the Atlanta
home of his maternal grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams. He was the second
child and the first son of Michael King, Sr., and Alberta Christine Williams
King. Michael Jr., had an older sister, Willie Christine, and a younger
brother, Alfred Daniel Williams. The father, and later the son, adopted the
name Martin Luther after the religious figure that founded the Lutheran
denomination and was the leader of the Protestant Reformation.
Michael King, Sr., came to Atlanta in 1918. He had known the hard
life of a sharecropper in a poor farming county. His father, James Albert
King, was not a religious man. He was an alcoholic and he abused his wife,
Delia Lindsay King. In the fall of 1926, Michael, Sr., married Alberta
Williams after a courtship of some eight years. The newlyweds moved into A.
D. Williams’ home. When Williams died in 1931, Michael King, Sr., followed
his father-in-law’s steps as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. King too
became a very successful minister.
The King children grew up in a caring and loving environment. As
King, Jr., said in An Autobiography of Religious Development, an essay
written for a class at Crosier Seminary when he was twenty-three, “It was
quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a
family where love was central and where loving relationships were
ever-present.
King, Sr., was inclined to be a severe disciplinarian, but his
wife’s firm gentleness, which was by no means permissive, generally carried
the day. The parents could not, of course, shield the young boy from racism.
King, Sr., did not endure racism meekly. In showing open impatience with
segregation and its efforts, and in discouraging the development of a sense of
class superiority in his children, King, Sr., influenced his son profoundly.
King, Jr., entered public school when he was five. On May 1,
1936, King joined his father’s church, being baptized two days later. His
conversion was not dramatic — he simply followed his sister when she went
forward. A period of questioning religion began with adolescence and lasted
through his early college years. He felt uncomfortable with overly emotional
religion and this discomfort led him to decide against entering the ministry.
Jennie Williams, King, Jr.’s grandmother, died of a heart attack
on May 18, 1941, during a Woman’s Day program at Ebenezer Baptist Church. The
death was traumatic for her grandson especially since it happened while he was
watching a parade, despite his parent’s prohibitions. Distraught, he wept on
and off for days and had difficulty sleeping.
King studied in the public schools of Atlanta, spent time at the
Atlanta Laboratory School until it closed in 1942, and then entered public
high school in the tenth grade, skipping a grade. After completing his junior
year at Booker T. Washington High School, he entered Morehouse College in the
fall of 1944 at the age of fifteen. Since the war had taken away most young
men, Morehouse, a men’s college, turned to young entrants in desperation.
The five foot, seven-inch King loved to socialize and dance. He
was an indifferent student who completed Morehouse with a grade point average
of 2.48 on a 4.0 point scale. At first, King was determined not to become a
minister and he majored in sociology. Under the influence of his junior year
Bible class, however, he renewed his faith. Although he did not return to a
literal belief in scripture, King began to envision a career in the ministry.
In the fall of his senior year, he told his father of his decision. King,
Jr., preached his trial sermon at Ebenezer with great success. On February
25, 1948, he was ordained and became associate pastor at Ebenezer.
King decided to attend Crosier Theological Seminary in Chester,
Pennsylvania, a very liberal school. King rose to the challenges of Crosier,
earning the respect of both his professors and classmates. In addition to
becoming the valedictorian of his class in 1951, he was also elected student
body president, won a prize as outstanding student, and earned a fellowship
for graduate study.
During this time, King also rebelled against his father’s
conservatism and now made no secret about drinking beer, smoking, and playing
pool. During his last year at Crosier, King began to read the Calcutta
Classic Reinhold Niebehr. Niebehr in his challenge to liberal theology and
thus to King’s own ideas at the time, became the single most important
influence in King’s intellectual development, far surpassing his later
interest in Mahatma Gandhi. After being accepted for doctoral study at Yale
University, Boston University, and Edinburgh, Scotland, he enrolled in
graduate school at Boston University in the fall of 1951.
As King pursued his graduate studies, he also sought a wife.
Early in 1952, he met Coretta Scott, an aspiring singer. She was the daughter
of Obie and Bernice Scott, born in Hiburgen, Alabama, on April 27, 1927.
Growing up on her father’s farm, she learned to work hard before attending
Antioch College. King’s parents opposed the marriage at first, but King
prevailed and the marriage took place in June, 1953. Martin and Coretta had
four children — Yolanda, born November 17, 1955; Martin Luther, III, born
October 23, 1957, Dexter, born January 30, 1961; and Bernice Albertime, born
March 28, 1963.
In September, 1954, while still working on his dissertation, King
became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
King completed his Ph.D. dissertation comparing the religious views of Paul
Tilleck and Henry Nelson Wieman and was awarded the degree in June, 1955.
On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her
seat on a Montgomery bus, setting off a chain of events that catapulted King
to world fame. Several groups within Montgomery’s black community decided to
take action against segregated seating on the city buses. The National
Association for Advancement of Colored People, the Women’s Political Council,
the Baptist Minister’s Conference, and the cities’ African Methodist Episcopal
Zionist Ministers united with the community to organize a boycott. After a
successful beginning of the boycott on Monday, the Montgomery Improvement
Association came into being that afternoon and King’s accepted the
presidency.
His oratory at that evening’s mass meeting aroused the crowd’s
enthusiasm and the boycott continued. It took three hundred, eight-one days
of struggle to bring the boycott to a successful conclusion. As the
Improvement Association leader, King became the focus of white hatred. On the
afternoon of January 26, King was arrested for the first time, spending some
time in jail. About midnight, he was awakened by a hate phone call. As he
sat thinking of the dangers to his family, he had his first profound religious
experience. As he writes in Stride for Freedom, “At that moment, I
experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.
It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying
‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth, and God will be at your side
forever.’”
On January 30, the King home was bombed. The bombing inspired the
Montgomery Improvement Association to file a federal suit directly attacking
the laws establishing bus segregation. In the second half of February, the
white establishment decided to arrest nearly one hundred blacks for violating
Alabama’s anti-boycott law. These arrests focused national attention on
Montgomery. King was arrested, tried, and convicted on March 22. The
following weekend, he gave his first speech in the North.
In April, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down laws requiring bus
segregation. Montgomery’s mayor refused to yield. After long, legal
procedures, the Supreme Court’s order to end bus segregation was served in
Montgomery on Thursday, December 20, 1956. Despite jeopardized jobs,
intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan, police harassment, and bombings, success of
the boycott became apparent when King and several allies boarded a public bus
in front of King’s home on December 21, 1956.
King was in Atlanta when five bombs went off at parsonages and
churches in Montgomery in the early morning hours of January 10, 1957. On
this date, a two-day meeting was scheduled to begin in Ebenezer Baptist Church
to lay out plans to create an organization to maintain the momentum of the
movement for change throughout the South.
King returned to Montgomery to inspect the bomb damage and King
was present for only the final hours of the meeting. In a follow-up meeting
in New Orleans on February 14, the group adopted the name, Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) and elected King as president. King made his
first trip abroad to attend the independent ceremonies in Ghana on March 5,
1958. In June, King received the NAACP’s Spingard Medal for his leadership.
King and his organization became increasingly estranged from the
NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, who feared the effect of another mass black organization
on the NAACP’s branches in the South and also disapproved of the SCLC’s call
for direct action. Nonetheless, King pressed forward with the SCLC’s plans
for a voter registration drive beginning in 1958. In need of a capable
organizer at the Atlanta office, the SCLC’s first choice was Bayard Rustin.
He was a very effective worker, but also vulnerable to smears dealing with his
homosexuality. Rustin found a role at SCLC in a less visible position. Ila
Baker came to Atlanta to take Rustin’s place and shoulder much of the initial
burden of organizational work for the SCLC. In spite of her efforts, the 1958
Lincoln Day launch of the voter registration failed to attract much attention
and the SCLC seemed on the verge of disappearing.
As King was writing his book on the Montgomery boycott, Stride
toward Freedom, he benefited from the very frank criticism of white New
York lawyer, Stanley Levinson, who became one of King’s most trusted
advisors. Levinson was also a key factor in the FBI’s later surveillance of
King. There were allegations of a connection between Levinson and the
Communist Party that formed one of the legal bases for wire taps of King’s
telephone communication. FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover ordered these wiretaps as
well as surveillance of King, of King’s advisors outside the SCLC, and their
relationships to communism and homosexuality. J. Edgar Hoover hoped to use
the information to discredit King and his organization.
In June 1958, King joined A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and
Nashville Urban League Leader, Lester B. Granger, in an unsatisfactory meeting
with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In September, King was again arrested in
Montgomery as he tried to enter a court room. King decided to serve his
fourteen-day sentence for refusing to obey an officer, rather than pay the
fourteen-dollar fine, but the very racist police commissioner paid the fine to
avoid the publicity that King would have garnered by staying in jail.
After the police incident, while at a book signing, King was
critically stabbed by a deranged African American woman. King spent some time
convalescing. In early February, 1959, he, his wife, and his biographer,
Lawrence D. Reddick embarked on a busy, thirty-day trip to India sponsored by
the Gandhi Memorial Trust.
Through much of the year, SCLC floundered in the face of
organizational and financial problems, aggravated by the lack of a clear goal
beyond voter registration. On November 29, 1959, King announced his
resignation from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to move to Atlanta to take on
fulltime responsibilities at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Student activism provided the spark that gave new life to the
civil rights movement. On February 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical University demanded service at a Woolworth’s lunch
counter in Greensboro and continued to sit after their demands were refused.
The sit-ins spread rapidly across the South. The first contact between the
students and the SCLC occurred on February 16, 1960, as King delivered a
well-received speech at a meeting held in Durham to coordinate more sit-ins.
As soon as King returned to Atlanta, he discovered he was under indictment for
perjury on his Alabama state tax forms. The on-going legal procedures would
be a matter of great concern to King until an all-white jury returned a
verdict of not guilty on May 28 after a three-day trial.
Ila Baker, who realized she could not continue her active
leadership role with the SCLC much longer, arranged a meeting of student
leaders at Shaw University beginning on April 15. King had the votes to
establish the student movement as a branch of the SCLC, but did not wish to
alienate Baker who aimed at an independent organization. Thus the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] came into existence. Nonetheless, as
the sit-ins continued, the adult leaders continued to quarrel. In particular,
Roy Wilkins of the NAACP was still very unhappy. Rustin offered to resign
from SCLC and King accepted. Ila Baker also left with bitter feelings on both
sides.
On October 2, 1960, King reluctantly joined a renewal of sit-ins
at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta. King was arrested and spent his first
night ever in jail. A compromised freed all participants except King who was
held as being in violation of the terms of probation of an earlier traffic
ticket. Sentenced to a four-month term in prison, he was taken to the state
prison at Reedsville, Georgia. Presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy,
called Coretta Scott King to express sympathy and King was released after
eight days in jail on March 10, 1961. In spite of his private reservations,
King spoke in favor of a compromise desegregation plan in Atlanta and won the
support of the student organizers who previously had precipitously labeled the
plan a sell-out.
On May 4, the Congress on Racial Equality launched the freedom
rides inaugurating a new phase in the struggle. On May 14 in Anniston,
Alabama, the freedom riders encountered violent resistance. After further
major trouble in Birmingham, they arrived in Montgomery on May 20 to be beaten
by a white mob. At a Montgomery rally on May 21, King called for a
large-scale nonviolent campaign against segregation in Alabama. A white mob
surrounded the church where the rally took place and the participants could
not leave until about six o’clock the following morning.
King continued a heavy speaking schedule, bringing in sizable
amounts of money to finance SCLC operations. In August, SCLC joined SNCC, the
NAACP, the National Urban League, and CORE in establishing the Voter Education
Program. Over the next years, considerable frictions surfaced between the
Voter Education Program and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference over
the SCLC’s handling of money and its lack-luster efforts in some areas. The
leading organization of black Baptists attacked King at this time. Under its
leader, Joseph Jackson, the National Baptist Convention, opposed the sit-ins.
In August, Jackson held back an attempt by younger ministers to replace him,
and he denounced King in very strong terms. This dispute eventually led
King’s supporters to form a rival organization, Progressive Baptist
Convention. At the same time, King was involved in a dispute with the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee over funding. The students felt SCLC owed
SNCC part of the funds King’s organization raised.
In November, 1961, SNCC’s attempt to establish a voter
registration drive in Albany, Georgia, became a major learning experience.
King made his first personal effort in December. In August, 1962, he gave up
the attempt to break down segregation there. The police chief of Albany
discerned that the real threat to segregation came from the use of violence
which would provoke federal intervention. He broke the momentum of the
protest.
In December, the bombing of a Birmingham church drew King’s
attention to that city. Not only did Fred Shuttlesworth at the Alabama
Christian Movement for Human Rights appear so well established as to reduce
the possibility of friction between various black factions, Birmingham’s
Public Safety Commissioner, Bull Conner, was an ideal opponent. A staunch
segregationist with a hot temper and little judgment, Conner was sure to make
hasty mistakes and resort to violence. The campaign got off to a shaky start,
but Conner, now a lame duck but clinging to office, helped immensely by
unleashing police dogs to attack marchers. In a series of meetings, King was
able to bring local black leaders to his support. He had belatedly discovered
that Shuttlesworth was distrusted by many.
An intense discussion of strategy with his co-workers ensued. If
King did not get himself arrested, he would soon be making the same kind of
retreat that had happened in Albany. If he did, he risked being cut off from
the movement at a crucial juncture. After thirty minutes of solitary prayer,
King announced his decision to court arrest. King passed a difficult first
night in solitary confinement, but over the next few days, events began to
justify his decision. National support grew and contributions for his bail
flowed in. Harry Belafonte, for example, managed to raise fifty-thousand
dollars. President Kennedy again made the gesture of telephoning his sympathy
to Coretta Scott King.
Before he was released from jail, nine days after his arrest, King
read an open letter signed by eight white clergymen who denounced
demonstrations. King set down a twenty-page response called “Letter from a
Birmingham jail.” This document became the most quoted and influential of
King’s writings. To keep the demonstrations going, James Bubble now recruited
school children who began to march on May 2. Six hundred people went to jail
that day. In a few days, Bull Conner turned fire hoses as well as dogs on the
demonstrators. On May 10, after pressure from the White House, white
businesses made some concessions to black demands. Since King found it
increasingly difficult to restrain his followers from violence, he accepted
the rather weak concessions and declared victory.
In the wake of the Birmingham demonstrations, King now turned his
attention to a march on Washington as a way of keeping up pressure for federal
civil rights legislation. There were long and difficult negotiations between
all parties concerned before the August event came into being. On August 28,
1963, King won his gamble for a massive non-violent protest in the nation’s
capital. Events in the country seemed to be outpacing non-violence. The
peaceful demonstration drew some two hundred thousand blacks and whites to the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial. And King delivered his most famous public
address, the “I Have a Dream” speech.
As King kept up a hectic schedule of engagements and speeches, the
FBI increased its surveillance of him. The strain on his family life was so
great that he and Coretta had a telephone quarrel duly recorded by the FBI.
The problems in SCLC continued. Staff frictions made it difficult to settle
on plans for future direct action. On July 2, 1964, the movement celebrated a
victory as President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the new Civil Right Act. Still
problems were mounting. A white backlash grew in the North and South and the
Ku Klux Klan indulged in increased violence in the South.
By October of 1964, as a result of extreme fatigue,
King entered a hospital in Atlanta. It was at the hospital he learned he had
received the Nobel Peace Pride for 1964. He was thirty-five years old.
Earlier that year, King became the first black American to be named Time
Magazine’s “Man of the Year.” Journalists and politicians from around the
world turned to King for his views on a wide range of issues. However, as
King stated in his Nobel acceptance speech, he remained committed to the
“twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America engaged in a
creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice.”
In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, SCLC was determined
to target obstacles to voting, and Selma, Alabama, seemed to be the right
place to begin. SCLC dramatized its point on national television on May 7,
1965, in an attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, but was brutally
stopped by the police. President Johnson then asked Congress for a voting
rights bill which was passed in August. This was also the month that revealed
the depth of black frustration outside the South. A civil disturbance in the
Watts section of Los Angeles lasted six days and cost thirty-four lives,
ushering in a period of several years of endemic urban unrest.
It was not clear how SCLC and King could move from their civil
rights work in the South to addressing the economic problems of poverty in the
North and elsewhere. In 1966, King undertook a campaign to end slums in
Chicago. After nine months, the campaign ended in failure. King discovered
the liberal consensus on race relations stopped short of fundamental economic
change. In addition, President Johnson’s preoccupation with the war in
Vietnam undermined government attention to internal thorns.
King took a stance against American involvement in Vietnam. His
position in the civil rights movement was under challenged and the whole
movement fell apart. Thus, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began to
repudiate him in June, 1966, as members adopted the slogan, “Black Power,”
while rejecting their allies and colleagues for the use of violence. The
following year, 1967, became history’s worst for urban unrest.
In October, King announced plans for a new initiative in 1968 —
the poor people’s campaign. King wanted to recruit poor men and women from
urban and rural areas of all races and backgrounds and lead them in a campaign
for economic rights. In an attempt to raise money for the campaign, King
accepted an invitation to speak in support of Memphis Sanitation Workers on
March 18, 1968. A mishandled demonstration on March 28 collapsed in
disorder. King planned a new, better organized demonstration and gave a very
moving address to an audience of five hundred at Memphis Baptist Temple on
April 3. He spoke of and accepted the possibility of his own death — a
recurring theme in his speeches. The following evening, shortly after
five-thirty p.m., King was shot and killed on the balcony outside his motel
room.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination led to disturbances in
well over one hundred cities. Before the violence subsided on April 11, there
were forty-six deaths [mostly African American] thirty-five thousand injuries
and twenty thousand people jailed. On April 9, King’s funeral was held at the
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In addition to the eight hundred people
crowded into the sanctuary, a crowd of sixty to seventy thousand stood in the
streets. He was buried in South View Cemetery near his grandmother. On his
crypt were carved the words he often used — Free at Last, Free at Last,
Thank God Almighty, I’m Free at Last.
After much effort, in 1986 Martin Luther King’s birthday became a
national holiday. While alive, King became the symbol of hope for African
Americans and for America as a whole that brotherhood and sisterhood could be
attained. The quintessential black leader, King’s legacy reminds one of how
far America has come and how far it still has to go.
For more information about Ken Chapman
and Associates’ Leadership Development Programs, contact Ken Chapman at
205.366.0265 or email Ken at
kchapman@leaderscode.com.
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