By the late 1940s I was at that point in my own life where a man must begin thinking about how much he will live to see and how much he will be able to do before there is no more time for him to work. In the South of those years, the vision many of us had carried so far, a vision of full equality among Americans, was still more years away from fulfillment than it was comfortable to think about. Unless a major effort was made, the twentieth century would just drift into the twenty-first with the crippling disease of racism still very much an epidemic across this country.
In that frame of mind, I knew I had to reach out to my sons for their help in a matter of the greatest importance. For it was not just I who would need the vigor of a new generation’s commitment to justice, but all of this country. Not only my sons were going to be needed in an ongoing, ever-difficult battle, but the sons of everybody in this nation who wanted to see America grow beyond what it had become. There was no draft for this army. A Civil War that had never really ended would now be fought on several fronts: moral, legal, social, and political. Wherever people worked or lived or went to school, there would be this great combat. The Negro could only struggle, there was no place to surrender to, no place where people could be spiritually alive. If anything was to give, it was going to have to be on the white side, where there was room to budge, and space to change.
I was beginning to feel that by repeating myself over and over on the issues that still affected the lives of Negro Americans, I was sounding like the proverbial broken record. But there could be no thought of stopping. A man grew older all the time, but he could never stop moving forward in his life. There was always so much to do, to learn, and to teach.
One day the two young sons of a local grocery-store owner told M.L. they couldn’t play with him anymore. When he asked why, they said it was because they were white and he wasn’t. This was about the time of the shoe-store incident, when the clerk had asked us to move to the back room in order to be waited on. That was just a store, but this was about friends, little fellows he played ball with, climbed trees with, guys he thought were true friends. Bunch was hardly able to console him. His heart, he said, was broken. How could anybody refuse to be a friend with somebody else because they were not the same color? “Why?” he asked his mother. “Why don’t white people like us, Mother dear?”
Bunch sat and talked with him for hours. He was a curious youngster who really did wonder constantly about this peculiar world he saw all around him.
“Don’t you be impressed by any of this prejudice you see,” she told him. “And never think, son, that there is anything that makes a person better than you are, especially the color of his skin.”
Bunch was very gifted with children. She raised all of ours with great love and respect for their feelings. I, on the other hand, had a temper. My impatience made it very hard for me to sit down with the boys and quietly explain to them the way I wanted things done. With M.L. and A.D., I found that a switch was usually quicker and more persuasive, although I never had to use this form of punishment with Christine. She was the exceptionally well-behaved, serious, and studious member of the trio.
Bunch insisted, though, as the children grew older, that any form of discipline used on them by either of us had to be agreed upon by both parents. This often curbed my temper, but it also helped Bunch to understand the things that made me angry. We talked a lot about the future of the kids, and she was able to understand that even when I got very upset with them, it was only because I wanted them to be strong and able and happy.
When the boys began earning a little money through neighborhood odd jobs, Bunch promoted a very simple plan for them. They were to consider the division into three parts of all the money their jobs or allowances brought them. Bunch called these divisions “the King home’s three S’s”: Spending, Saving, and Sharing. In these and other ways, compared to the modern home environment, we ran a very tight ship. The children got to school on time every morning; they did homework as soon as they reached home in the afternoon, then chores. After supper, they did some studying, then we had prayers.
Bunch had grown up an only child, although her parents had raised other youngsters whose own parents were unable to care for them. She could be strict, in her way, and the kids learned early on that as gentle as their mother was, they couldn’t get up early enough in the morning to fool her, any day of the week. She knew each of her children almost as well as she knew herself. M.L. came along with sensitivities only she could investigate and soothe. Bunch could also point out to me, when I couldn’t see it, how much A.D. sounded like me when I was younger and she’d known me as a stubborn young country fellow trying to make up his own mind about where he was going.
I believed very strongly during this period of my life that to change Atlanta would be to change the entire South. And along with many others, I felt that this change would come more slowly than we wanted, but that counting on the basic human decency of all peoples was the best way to get anything accomplished if it involved fundamental changes in the way folks had lived most of their lives. From those nights in class at the Bryant School, when I’d first heard of government and elections and politicians and constituencies, the thought had remained with me that whatever Negroes accomplished in the South in my lifetime would have something to do with the ballot box. Year by year, I was convinced, we would work on the two fronts that eventually had to get us over: fighting to bring about an end to the white primary, which prevented our exercising a voice in local affairs involving our taxes and the fundamental human rights that were at the foundation of everything we fought for; and working in black communities to see that a maximum number of Negro voters were actually registered and ready to use that franchise to free our lives from the bonds of second- and third-class citizenship.
The ballot was the key. And the battle lines were drawn very clearly. Whites who were able to see the handwriting on the wall were already crying Never! even as our voices in the Negro community were preparing to sing out the new hymn of Now!!
I was active in the Atlanta Voters’ League, a nonpartisan organization about evenly split in membership between Republicans and Democrats from the Negro community. Politically, I had seen value in both parties, and deficiencies as well. So I determined very early in my experience as a voter to support candidates instead of parties. I have in my life voted for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates and been supportive of those candidates without regard to party lines. This was my style in the Voters’ League. Others disagreed. Franklin Roosevelt had impressed a lot of people in moving the country through the crisis of economic collapse and world war. I shared the enthusiasm that millions of Americans displayed for him. But I was also impressed by the support to southern Negro education that had been provided by the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers were Republicans. I didn’t believe in labels, so I found myself relating more and more to the complicated but wondrous American identity with its many variations and backgrounds.
The League was never taken over by any single political ideology. Freedom for all people was our goal, and we knew that in America that was going to mean working with everybody to whom this nation was important. We knew we had to begin a push toward a world where people did not have to live in constant fear because they were poor or the wrong color.
The lie that formed around southern life during this period was pushing us all toward an explosive confrontation over the racial question. Segregation had become an arrangement between whites and Negroes, a plan designed to hide the truth from both groups. Leadership on both sides moved further and further away from the masses of people who were most affected by the philosophy of separatism. Whites had placed the Negro leadership halfway between white complacency and black anger. Instead of working with us, whites wanted us merely to carry messages back to our people, saying that everything was all right in the segregated world, and only the Negroes who had no regard for Atlanta’s or the nation’s future would ever think about making trouble in paradise. But the trouble was already there, and the Negro hadn’t been responsible for creating it in the first place. Now, in reacting against the system that dishonored everyone who lived comfortably within it, we became the troublemakers.
With a new militancy growing every day among black Americans all over the United States, and an increased amount of resistance on the part of whites to the aspirations of our people, the southern situation seemed to drift closer and closer to a chaotic upheaval. The coalition between whites in business and government and Negro leaders in the city, although functioning, was grinding slowly to a halt as far as any real movement toward social change was concerned. And this coalition had once been viewed as the true hope for the better life our city should have been able to enjoy.
Among the whites in leadership, I believe William Hartsfield may have been alone in his desire to make Atlanta into one city instead of two. The others just didn’t seem to realize that unity was the only means of maintaining their power and achieving harmony. Dividing people by color was a practice living on borrowed time. White businessmen would often use those of us who’d been successful in the South as proof that separation of the races did really work to the benefit of both whites and blacks. White politicians tried over and over to convince Negro leaders that nothing was to be gained by mixing people together when they were doing just fine in their divided camps. And many Negroes who loved their city and this country tried for years to work out a reasonable solution to the grievances our people shared with us all the time. The more we pushed for a new day, however, the more complacent whites seemed to become, the more satisfied with the old ways. Just their indifference to the suffering of Negroes who weren’t well off or basking in any limelight created a swelling of impatience. Our warnings to Hartsfield and the others that it was increasingly difficult to convince younger people to wait any longer for the rights their Constitution guaranteed them just weren’t being heard. The storm kept brewing.
Very severe differences of opinion split two generations of black Atlanta and most of the other black communities across the United States following the end of the Second World War. Black men serving in the armed forces returned to the South with a world view, having seen Europe and the Far East, and knowing clearly how the lie of racial segregation was being spread all over the earth. They were eager and unafraid. Those of us who were older responded to the South more patiently, perhaps, because we had seen it even worse in earlier times. Our timetables, that of the younger and that of the more experienced, were decidedly different. Blacks established in careers and homes may not have been so enthusiastic about direct action, certainly not at the beginning of the sit-ins and other demonstrations. But folks did change. Some of them lost what they could never recover, but they moved with the times and followed young dynamic leaders along the road toward a new day.
At first things moved slowly. There had always been the impatient and the hot-tempered in the community, but they generally could be calmed down to the point where more reasonable voices prevailed. I had spoken out of turn at meetings of the Voters’ League on one or two occasions. Nothing serious—small differences in viewpoint and approach. But the black coalition had been large enough to contain my rough edges and the smoother, less abrasive style of the famed Atlanta activist John Wesley Dobbs. Now the entire coalition process was under challenge. The kids no longer believed in anything we stood for, or so the talk was going. They’d lost confidence, and it would soon be too late to mend all the bridges that had been breaking down right in front of us, for so many years.
The battles of the Negro middle class had separated from those of the poor, and the groups seemed to be drifting in different directions within the same struggle for human dignity and constitutional rights.
The matter entered my home in 1950. My daughter, Christine, had been graduated from Spelman and had continued her studies at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City. I was pleased with her determined pursuit of knowledge, although I should have realized it couldn’t just go on forever. She was a somewhat shy young woman who had, of course, confided in her mother that she was interested in the teaching profession, but she had said nothing to me. In this she was much the same as her brothers, who never wanted me to use any influence on their behalf. I spoke often with the mayor, the chief of police, the head of the Atlanta Board of Education; this is what the coalition had always been about—a spirit of communication between leaders on both sides of a racial fence.
The hard part was getting into the general public arena the harmony we were usually able to bring to those meetings. I was able, for instance, to help my daughter to be hired as a teacher in Atlanta—when it had been determined earlier that she would never get such a job. I was still identified in town as the leader of those dangerous radicals from way back in 1936, who’d battled eleven years to equalize teacher salaries, forcing white teachers to live on the same rates of pay blacks worked for. And so Christine was being punished for the “sins” of her father.
I had been busy with the business of the world and had not even noticed Christine’s intense desire to teach. And so I hadn’t seen that the forces locked against her in a most evil way were the same ones mounting the resistance to every part of our struggle. To confront what they had done to my child in getting back at me was to come face-to-face with the tasks of tomorrow. Bunch tried all of one afternoon to calm me down when I discovered what had happened. “Why didn’t she tell me she wanted to teach?” I was shouting around the house. “Because,” Bunch answered, “she believes in merit, King, just as you and I have taught her to believe in it, and she doesn’t want a job just because she happened to be born your daughter. She could spend the rest of her life being told she didn’t have a brain in her head, that she was working only because you pulled some strings. . . .”
Christine had taken two master’s programs following her graduation from Spelman College. When she received her first master’s, she applied for a teaching position with the Atlanta Board of Education. Her request was denied, and she returned to Columbia for a second master’s. She again applied to the Atlanta Board of Education, and again her request was denied. Now, my daughter was so well qualified that the school system should have been begging her to come to work.
I was busy being proud of her and wrestling with the demon South, and I had missed the center of all this. M.L. and his mother often mentioned that Christine had earned one master’s in 1949, and would have another one in a year or so, and wouldn’t it be fine if she stayed right here in town and taught school? Years later they’d remind me of how often I had nodded, “Yes, yes,” and “Sure, sure,” to their conversation, remembering the sound but not always the words.
Finally Christine brought it to me directly. A woman named Miss Bazoline Usher, who was chief supervisor of Negro teachers for the school system, came to our home to share with us information that so disturbed her that she risked losing her job to tell us about it. Christine’s applications were being routinely filed away, never to be seriously considered. She would never teach in Atlanta.
I called the mayor. We talked for a while about raising children, and then we moved over to how he felt about political opponents who took things out on each other’s families. He assured me that nothing like that would be tolerated in his administration. So I told him about my daughter’s job search and her difficulties in being placed in the school system, and I reminded him of the long teacher equalization fight that got so bitter in and out of court over those many years. And the mayor listened quietly. He then told me to expect a call from him within the half hour, and asked if I’d have my daughter on the phone when he called back. Several minutes later, he called to tell an elated Christine that Miss Ira Jarrell, superintendent of the Atlanta schools, would personally be welcoming her to a teaching position at the W. H. Crogman School, in the Pittsburgh section of the city, along with all of her new peers in education who’d be gathering in just a few days to begin a new school term.
Now I realized, in a more personal way than ever before, just how limited this kind of coalition politics had become when so much could be done through a phone call to the mayor, but so little ever came out of meetings between Negro leaders and whites in the power structure when it came to issues affecting everyone in the city. The power of the black sector of the coalition rested more on an ability to get a favor done now and then rather than on any real political clout. Negroes could advise, or even irritate, like a tight shirt collar that rubs the skin sore if it’s worn long enough. But this wouldn’t do. Power—not just favors and good deeds now and then—had to be shared among all people if social change were ever to become a reality in Atlanta. This required mutual respect and a healthy regard for the principles of democracy America told the world we practiced without prejudice toward anyone. Favors were now seen by young black people as more evidence that Atlanta’s more fortunate Negroes had a special deal going with whites that excluded the black masses in favor of a black elite. The poor had to ride segregated buses and trains. Others had fine cars to get around in. The poor had to use substandard public rest rooms, and they were forced to accept inferior school facilities. Others avoided these things, often through private education for their children. Such people could refuse to challenge laws that discriminated against those who could not afford, economically, to get around them. Meanwhile, members of the coalition seemed to be saying more and more that patience was the answer, a dialogue was continuing and would soon produce results.
All that sounded fine and fancy, younger people were beginning to repeat, but what does it accomplish, this coalition? How can grown men sit in a room at City Hall and look across a table at one another, get up later and congratulate each other on doing such good work toward progress, when people couldn’t use the same drinking fountain in a city park if they were different colors?
We were running out of time. The excuses had been used up. People wanted answers that made sense for a country surging through the most technologically advanced period in history, when disease was being conquered, when the machinery in our lives gave us travel and enormous comfort in all our working and social lives. We could speak to people thousands of miles away on the telephone but not a seat away on a city bus. A Negro could feed a white child, virtually live in a white home day by day, and still be considered unfit to be spoken to in a public place. And for the Negro who both aspired to more and achieved it, the emphasis placed on skin color throughout the South changed only slightly on the way up any social ladder black folks could pursue.
The experience with Christine would provide much of the seed of thought for a sermon I regularly delivered in one form or another over the years, built around the premise of “Misplaced Emphasis.” You see, I would tell the Ebenezer congregation, important things can be lost although they are right before you, because of misplaced emphasis. You may think that all the meetings, and the picketing, and the marches are the center of your life . . . only to discover that you have misplaced your emphasis if the very core of the reason that you meet and march and picket and protest is so near you can reach out and touch it easily, not realizing that it was, in fact, so close. You say sometimes that you must look at the larger picture because this is where all the answers are bound to be . . . and you find out that maybe they aren’t there at all, that again you have misplaced your emphasis, and you’ve got to look even closer to yourself to see what is really there. And this same misplaced emphasis occurs (are you listening?) when you think that everything is going well because your car drives so smoothly, and your new suit fits you so well, and those highpriced shoes you bought make your feet feel so good; and you begin to believe that these things, these many luxuries all around, are the really important matters of your life. Then you have misplaced your emphasis again and failed to see truth pulling at your sleeve . . . say it’s tuggin’ at you, wants to get closer. Truth wants to come right up and say, Don’t misplace that emphasis anymore—put it in the right place! And see where the real matter lies. . . .
At Voters’ League meetings I found myself doing more shouting than I’d ever done anywhere before in my life. My voice often came rolling out in the preacher’s cadence to see who else felt we weren’t asking for enough. However we asked for it, we had to push harder, for more, and sooner.
Even as the young people of Atlanta clearly saw us as part of the problem, we began to see their shift in attitude as one that created division constantly. To them, this was the point. You can’t leave us behind, they were saying. We’re your children, we’re in front of you. But if the past is where you want to stay, or have to, then we will leave you there and move on.
Perhaps it was a sign of the impatience that was coming that M.L. decided to skip his final year at Washington High School and enter Morehouse College as a fifteen-year-old freshman. In a way both distant and close to my decision at that age to go off and become rich working on the railroad, my son had decided to reach higher. The risk for millions of people, of course, is that in doing this, their grip fails, they fall back and never quite get going again; yet millions more follow in those footsteps. My pride swelled, though, because M.L.’s confidence simply left no room in our house for uncertainty. He was going to take the step that told him what nothing else could: where he was going. Bunch, though she was enthusiastic, also recognized that my great joy over M.L.’s decision had a lot to do with knowing that by enrolling at Morehouse, he chose to be in Atlanta, near the daily influence of a father who still had no co-pastor at his church. Of course, if a young man couldn’t be convinced in four years . . .