Growing Up King (3 page)

I don’t know how it was in Daddy’s mind. I’ve been asked many times, as have many if not most other black people, “What do
you want?” I can’t answer for him. He was, if nothing else, a man of his own conscience. The ’60s were idyllic to me. How
they were for him, I don’t know. He could’ve limited his battles to Ebenezer, local politics, as my grandfather did. But he
didn’t; wasn’t that kind of a man. Greatness was thrust upon him, and for some internal reason or external destiny, he did
not turn away. Because he was the man that he was, I was born six weeks premature.

My mother was traumatized during her pregnancy with me. All of us were born and raised in struggle. In January of 1956, Yoki
was ten weeks old and they were living in Montgomery when a bomb was set off at their house. My father spoke of having an
epiphany at the kitchen table in this same house a few days before that. The bombings—the one at my parents’ house was not
the only one— were owed to the violence of vigilante whites, poor whites, after the bus boycott led by the Montgomery Improvement
Association, for which my father served as president. He held some of the smaller meetings at his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church;
Uncle Ralph’s—Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s—First Baptist Church held larger mass meetings. My father had talked about being “paralyzed
with fear” during this time.

But at the kitchen table in the house in Montgomery, he had an epiphany; he said all the fear left him, and he gave himself
and his Cause over to the hand and grace of God.

It wasn’t until this bombing in Montgomery on January 30, 1956, that it dawned on him: it wasn’t just him but also his family
who were involved in this Cause. Yet only he had the epiphany.

In April of 1960, after having dinner, my parents were returning the southern writer Lillian Smith to Emory University Hospital,
in DeKalb County, where she was getting cancer treatments. After dropping her at the dorm they were stopped by police. My
father was a black man; a white woman had been in the car. My father was recognized by the DeKalb County police and arrested
because he had not changed his driver’s license from an Alabama license to a Georgia license in the three months since they
left Montgomery. Daddy answered the summons, was fined $25 for “driving without a proper permit,” given a suspended twelve-month
sentence by Judge Oscar Mitchell, and released on probation. This occurred at the time of the Greensboro, North Carolina,
lunch-counter student sit-ins to protest segregated public facilities, on the heels of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott
sparked by the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Shortly after this event, sometime in June, my mother discovered she was pregnant
with me.

These were heady, dangerous days. But my father, pleased my mother was pregnant for the third time, was undeterred by his
arrest. My mother did her usual thing and exploded in size; she was one of those women whose entire body, not just the belly,
became larger when she got pregnant. By October, she was five months gone, and showing like nine.

This was when my father agreed to be a part of a lunch-counter demonstration at Rich’s department store, protesting segregated
eating facilities—the only time he joined any such local demonstration in his hometown of Atlanta. He did it against his father’s
wishes, to support idealistic student leaders like Lonnie C. King, Marian Wright, now Marian Wright Edelman, and John Porter.
They’d ask for service at a snack bar at the downtown Rich’s, which, like most department stores in southern cities, “welcomed”
black patrons through a back entrance to come spend their money as long as they didn’t use rest rooms, drink from water fountains
marked “Whites,” try on hats, or get refreshments.

My father was first to be arrested, then the students; tactically, they didn’t accept a $500 bond from Judge James Webb. Dad
was carted off to Fulton County Jail along with seventy-five “lawbreakers,” mostly student leaders from the Atlanta University
Center. They would agree to be released only if the charges against them, based on unjust Jim Crow laws, were dropped. After
reaching a settlement with the affected parties the students were released on their own recognizance.

People say that’s when Senator John F. Kennedy got involved, but actually that’s when my father’s friends and admirers got
moving. One of them worked for the Kennedy-for-president campaign. His name was Harris Wofford. He started calling around—Atlanta
mayor Bill Hartsfield, a local lawyer named Morris Abram, anybody he could call that might be able to help. Mr. Wofford had
great admiration for my father and Mohandas Gandhi. He was a learned, sensitive man who had gone to Howard University Law
School after graduating from Yale.

Mayor Hartsfield was about to broker a deal to let the students and our father go anyway. But Daddy was kept in jail. Monday
morning, a DeKalb County deputy sheriff came, put him in manacles and leg irons, and took him from jail in Fulton County to
DeKalb County—which in those days was going from the dragon’s back into its mouth. Murders of civil rights workers by rogue
law enforcement officers and other vigilantes were routine occurrences; such deaths had been common for the hundred years
since the Civil War. DeKalb County was a Klan stronghold. My distressed mother, with me floating in her belly, went to the
hearing at the DeKalb County courthouse with Granddaddy and my Aunt Christine. Members of the faculty at Morehouse College
and AU Center students went as well.

Judge Oscar Mitchell found my father guilty of violating his probation over the misdemeanor involving the “invalid driver’s
license,” then sentenced him to four months’ hard labor at Reidsville State Prison, which was isolated far downstate. There
was pandemonium in the courtroom. Immersed in this was Mother, me in her amniotic sac, feeling each twitch and strain, feeding
off her moods.

Yoki was four, Marty was about three, but they weren’t there. Mother was shocked when Judge Mitchell announced the sentence;
my father’s sister, Aunt Christine, broke into tears. So did Mother, and she wasn’t given to crying. Staid male professors
fell prostrate and wept.

Mother said she felt helpless and out of control and desperate despite the fact my father’s family was with her. They were
not inside her. I was. She was emotional, weepy; Daddy had not seen her like this, and said so. “You have to be strong now,
Corrie,” he said. Mayor Hartsfield, in Atlanta and Fulton County, backed off from Judge Mitchell’s sentence, saying it “didn’t
happen in Atlanta.” Hartsfield was mayor when the chamber of commerce came up with the slogan that billed Atlanta as “The
City Too Busy to Hate.” At the time, Georgia wasn’t too busy.

Governor Ernest Vandiver crowed about Daddy’s dilemma.

Phone lines buzzed. My father’s friends—like Stanley Levison, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Jackie Robinson, and a horde
of less famous but equally concerned folk whose common denominator was being American and feeling for my father—they all made
calls or had aides-de-camp making calls to see what could be done for Dad. Of these, Harris Wofford was best positioned to
effect change, being connected to the 1960 Kennedy presidential campaign. He spoke to Sargent Shriver of JFK’s staff. Shriver
balked— the first law of political campaigns is to say anything but do nothing. In the end, Wofford convinced Shriver at least
to run it by Senator Kennedy, presidential candidate, that maybe he should call the wife of Martin Luther King and offer her
comfort. The woman was pregnant, alone. There was all sorts of palavering first. But, cutting through all the political intrigue,
JFK wound up calling Mother on impulse, against advice and all political logic, not because it might get him votes. In that
climate, it might easily have cost him votes; his advisers were not shy about pointing it out. But JFK called my mother anyway,
because Harris Wofford had the right phone number to give Sargent Shriver; it flashed in JFK’s mind that calling Mother was
the decent thing to do. I believe that was his motivation, and also why things turned out well for him in the election. You
get back what you put out. My mother was at home, preparing to go see Morris Abram, a Jewish lawyer who was a family friend.
At this point, Robert F. Kennedy, head of JFK’s presidential campaign, probably wouldn’t have had JFK call Mother for all
the tea in China.

The phone rang anyway. My mother spoke with Senator Kennedy; he said he knew it must be hard, he knew she was expecting; if
there was anything he could do feel free to call. Mother said she’d appreciate anything he could do to get my father out of
prison. Meanwhile, Bobby, JFK’s campaign manager and soon to be attorney general, called Judge Mitchell to see why my father
couldn’t get bail on a misdemeanor. What the hell was going on? Bobby wanted to know.

Who knows what went through Judge Mitchell’s mind, but Daddy was released, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) chartered a plane to bring him home from Reidsville. My Grandaddy King said at a mass meeting after my father was released
that if he had a suitcase full of votes, he’d take them and put them at Senator Kennedy’s feet in the election just a week
away. We can thank a cop harassing my father and Judge Mitchell as much as the Kennedys: the long and short of it was that
JFK’s political intervention on my father’s behalf during the final days of his campaign was a decisive factor in his election
as president of the United States in 1960. Senator Kennedy won by the equivalent of one vote per precinct nationwide, and
his campaign wisely made what hay it could in “Negro” precincts.

After the election, the Kings were seen as an influential family, even a royal family, in the well-lit backdrop of the Civil
Rights Movement, except our imperial conditioning was different. Where the Kennedys or the British royals were given latitude
and a very long leash, the Kings were seen as these pious moral exemplars— a difficult posture for human beings to maintain.

I was born six weeks premature in January of 1961. Only my mother can know what she went through, mother of two at the time,
pregnant with a third, dependent on Daddy, worried about his safety, whether something would happen to him because they had
whisked him off in the middle of the night to Reidsville. They could as well have been taking him to Hell. He could have easily
not even made it to that prison—could have wound up bloated in an earthen dam. It was known to happen. It seems incredible,
but those were the harsh realities of the times. So, my mother was in a nervous state for the entire time she was pregnant
with me. Everything I’ve read or heard of since implies that the emotional state of the parents, particularly the mother,
is transmitted to the fetus. I felt what she went through. My mother thinks it had a bearing in shaping me, may have forced
me out sooner, the urgency of the times.

My paternal grandfather also made his mark on me. He made his mark on all of us, on the whole city of Atlanta, long after
he, as Mike King, at age sixteen, had hopped a freight from Stockbridge, Georgia, Henry County, south by southeast of Atlanta,
back in the day. Later he argued with his father in order to stay in Atlanta at Bryant Preparatory School, where he was learning
how to read and write. Neither of his parents could read or write. When his father, James, went to Atlanta and demanded Mike
come back to the farm, because they couldn’t make it without his labor, Mike declined. He’d stay on at the school and go about
ministering the Baptist way in nearby East Point. Mike King had been born in 1899, to Delia Lindsay and James Albert King,
whose father was a white Irishman. He courted and married Alberta Williams, the daughter of the well-known and respected Rev.
A. D. Williams; was determined and felt the call to be a Baptist preacher.

Martin seemed a more appropriate name for such a calling, so he adopted it; such given-name changing was a fairly common practice
among this generation of young black men making or trying to make a transition from fields to halls of learning. In his twenties,
Granddaddy went to Morehouse, graduated, eventually inheriting the wind at Ebenezer from his father-in-law. He remained country
strong. Two words best describe him: no-nonsense. Eventually he was overshadowed by the legacy of his son.

Daddy was not just charismatic away from home. His personal magnetism had nothing to do with the Civil Rights Movement on
the level I’m talking about. I’d watch him when he wasn’t looking, in different states of activity or repose. He insisted
we have family time to discuss what was going on, and why he had to be away.

Him sitting at the dining room table with us was a good time for conversation. Sometimes his mind wandered and he seemed lost
in thought, absently eating green onions. My father liked stalks of green onions with sweet, white, bulbous roots. They sat
in a plate in water, like celery; before a meal he’d pick and eat them like fruit, especially before meals containing turnip
or collard greens. He would say he was laying down a bed of straw before the cows and pigs—the rest of the meal—came home.
This was ancestral. His father’s family was from rural Georgia, my mother’s family from rural Alabama. You can see a plate
of green onions in photos of tarpaper shacks in the black belt of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia; they were staples of
the sharecropper’s diet.

I can still see him walking down the hallway at home in his slippers. He had a burgundy-colored satin-like robe he always
wore to breakfast. Whenever he wore his robe, I was happy, because it meant he wasn’t going anywhere for a while. That meant
I could watch him or, if not that, simply be reassured he was there if needed. Every time I was in his presence, I felt deep
compassion from him. Many times he felt like a playmate, like somebody who was Dad in terms of compassion and sensitivity,
but was not so removed, because he enjoyed playing too, and could relate to a child’s problems. We had fun playing softball.
He’d pitch. If I swung and missed he’d be disappointed. “Aw, Dexter,” he’d say, lobbing in another underhand toss.

When he’d come back from a trip, we’d hide from him, trembling with excitement; he’d find us, have us jump off the refrigerator
top into his arms. He called it the Kissing Game. We’d take turns, starting with the eldest. Yoki would be first; she’d jump
off into his arms, completely trusting that he’d catch her, and we would follow, and then he’d say, “Where’s your kissing
spot?” Hers was a corner of her mouth. Martin would have his spot—the forehead. Then I had my spot—the temple. Bernice had
her spot— a corner of her mouth. We’d jump into his arms, take our turns; there were four of us, he divided his time equally—what
little time he had left. He tried his best. The only one who may have felt he didn’t was Yoki. Yoki and my father had a special
bond, but he gave us all our specialness. More than just having a spot on his face to kiss, he had an intimate spot in his
heart for everybody; we felt it, it made us feel special. He knew how to relate on our level. The memorable thing is that
he knew how to relate to us. He was a universal communicator, even to his children, and he knew how to embrace you in a way
where you felt a part of some greater plan.