Parting the Waters (9 page)

From the beginning, Mike King projected his own dreams of prosperity and happiness onto the church as a whole, always speaking of himself as the essential, central leader. He boasted openly of the number of loans he had secured, the number of votes he controlled, the amount of money he had brought into the church building fund, of the advertisers he had found for the local Negro newspaper, the
Daily World
, and of the students he had gotten into Morehouse or Spelman. Few people seemed to resent his manner, partly because it was common to ministers and mostly because he produced. His bluster was the heart of the leadership for which he was loved and respected. If anyone suspected that part of it was compensatory, growing out of his humbler position within his own household, no one made an issue of it. He was simply Mike King—always shaking hands, encouraging and demanding, making himself the center of attention in any room, full of claims for the past and promises for the future. The key to his multiple roles and identities was always Ebenezer church, and King preached to the members as though they were one person: “I want to tell you this morning, Ebenezer. You can do it.”

He could safely say that he rescued Ebenezer Baptist Church from bankruptcy within his first few months as pastor. Membership increased geometrically from two hundred toward a Depression peak of four thousand. His gamble paid off so handsomely that the church made him the highest-paid Negro minister in Atlanta at the end of his first year. His second year at Ebenezer was FDR's first in the White House, and while he might not have made quite as much noise in his world as Roosevelt made in Washington during the Hundred Days, he made considerably more headway in reversing economic calamity. In the spring of 1934—a little more than two years after taking the pulpit at Ebenezer—Mike King asked his membership to send him on a summer-long tour of Europe, Africa, and the Holy Land. It was a trip that the richest of people might have envied in those hard times, and for a Negro sharecropper's son to step right up to such a fantasy so soon after landing his first full-time job, so soon after attaining basic literacy, stretched even the bounds of the American Dream.

Young Mike King was only five years old when his father said goodbye to his church, his three children, his wife, and his mother-in-law and set off to board an ocean liner bound for France. From Paris, Reverend King took a train to Rome, and later crossed the Mediterranean to Tunisia, making his way from there across North Africa to Cairo. After touring Egypt, he crossed the Nile and soon entered the Holy Land. There he visited biblical sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and elsewhere, before catching a ship back to Europe for the week-long Baptist World Alliance meeting in Berlin. This was a fitting end to a glorious trip for King, who took his seat among the delegates from nations scattered around the globe. The Berlin conference bristled with the excitement of past and present history. King and his fellow ministers heard rumors about the fiery new German leader, Adolf Hitler, and they toured historic sites in the land of their religious heritage, where Martin Luther had defied the Catholic Church and where the Anabaptists later had defied Luther.

Reverend King's triumphant homecoming in late August 1934 was announced to Negro Atlanta in a banner headline in the
Daily World
: “Rev. King Is Royally Welcomed on Return from Europe.” The story listed all the speakers who had paid tribute to him at the Ebenezer reception, as well as all the dishes served. This was King's moment, the watershed of his life, and he honored the occasion by changing his name from Michael to Martin, becoming Martin Luther King. For consistency, he also changed the name of his older son to Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

The change of name was one of the most important events in the younger King's early life. For him it would be the mark of great expectations, a statement of identity that honored traditions in both religion and race. Name changes have always been part of religious history, used to announce the existence of a “new person.” Jacob became Israel, Saul of Tarsus became Paul, Simon became Peter, and the first act of every new pope is to choose a special name for his reign. During the civil rights movement the most obtuse white person would be obliged to learn the difference between a nigger and a Negro, later between a Negro and a black person. Subtle arguments took place about the difference between a Negro-American and an American Negro. The ado over name distinctions during the years of acute political crisis may have obscured a pattern that had run deep in the culture through many generations. The collective and individual identity of slavery's descendants never was a settled matter, but fluctuated with circumstances, resulting in frequent shifts of name.

Under slavery, a name was the property of the master and not of the slave, so that a slave's name frequently changed at the auction block and sometimes on the whim of the master. Among the joyous feelings most frequently mentioned by freed or escaped slaves was the freedom to choose a name. A name was no longer incidental. “For it is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world,” Ralph Ellison wrote. After the war, the new publications of the former slaves quickly took up the issue of what to call themselves as a race. The terms “black” and “negro” (the latter traceable to the earliest slave traders, who were Spanish and Portuguese) were widely disparaged because the slavemasters had preferred them, and also because their literal meaning excluded hundreds of thousands of mulattoes, whose color was not black. “Colored” was thought to be more inclusively accurate, but among other drawbacks it failed to distinguish the former slaves from Orientals and Indians. Moreover, the term “colored” implied that whites were not colored, or that coloring was a property added somehow to basic human qualities. Alternatively, some argued for the word “African,” but this only raised a continuing dispute as to whether the term referred to race or the place of origin. By the late nineteenth century, the term “Negro” came to be widely accepted, after newspapers in New Orleans mounted a campaign to capitalize the first letter. (White newspapers were slow to adopt this dignifying practice.
The New York Times
did not begin to capitalize “Negro” until 1950.)

The name question was never settled to everyone's satisfaction. The NAACP adopted the respectable-sounding “colored people” at its founding in 1909, but the next year the first Negro-owned daily newspaper to circulate throughout the nation tossed out all the contending names in favor of its own invention, the word “Race,” which was the semantic equivalent of a placebo. In the Chicago
Defender
, “colored men” became “Race men,” and “Negro achievement” became “Race achievement.” This novel practice was mainly the product of extreme color sensitivity on the part of the
Defender
's founding tycoon, Robert Abbott. Born into slavery and then adopted into a white family after his mother married a German, Abbott hated the word “Negro” and anything associated with the color black—to the point where he refused to wear black, married women white enough to “pass,” and, when greeted by white people at the Chicago Opera, often gave a pathetic mumbo-jumbo reply in the hope that he would be taken for an African diplomat instead of an American. Yet Abbott became a great champion of “the Race.”

The name debate touched the deepest dilemmas of esthetics, values, and identity, sometimes in the most prosaic forms. One method Negroes used to keep whites from calling them by their first names was simply to have none. Moses “Cap” Meredith named his son simply J. H. Meredith. This required some courage, because many whites who asked the boy's name did not like being told that it was “just J.H.,” which deprived them of the diminutive uses of a first name. Not until he enlisted in the Air Force in 1950 did the son bow to regulations and choose names to go with the initials, becoming James Howard Meredith. Only when he became nationally known as the Negro Meredith who applied to the University of Mississippi did lawyers and reporters ferret out the formal names and make them, by the sheer power of fame, the ones Meredith would use.

King acquired his given name Martin in the context of this history. There remains much reticence and confusion as to exactly how and why Reverend King changed the names, as inconsistencies plague the only two accounts released. The first version appeared in L. D. Reddick's excellent 1959 biography of King Jr., which was written with extensive cooperation from the King family.
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According to Reddick, Reverend King's parents disagreed on his name from the time he was born, with the stronger Delia King's choice, Michael, prevailing until she died in 1924. Then King began calling himself Martin, the name his father had always preferred.

Reddick himself recognized the problem with this story, which was to explain why Reverend King named his son Michael Luther King, Jr., in 1929, five years after King himself had switched to Martin. The family answer he recorded was that “Michael” appeared on the birth certificate because of a communications mix-up between the father and the doctor who delivered the baby. Furthermore, Reddick reported, King discovered the error a few days after the birth and made a special trip to the hospital to make sure the first name on the certificate was changed to “Martin.” This was not done, because of still another mix-up at the hospital, Reddick reported, which was not rectified until 1934.

In his own 1980 autobiography, Reverend King recalled that he had continued to use his mother's preferred “Michael” until sometime after his father's death in 1933, when he changed his name and his son's from Michael to Martin in keeping with his father's deathbed wish. This version has the advantage of eliminating the ten-year delay and the hospital mix-ups, but the conflict between the two stories tends to cast doubt on both of them. The import of Reverend King's version is that he changed the name by which he and his son had been known for thirty-five years and five years, respectively, solely on the request of his alcoholic father, with whom his relations had varied between murderous estrangement and chilly civility, and that he did this in spite of his beloved mother's lifelong campaign to call him Michael.

These accounts seem implausible, or incomplete, partly because the particular name chosen evokes the founder of the Protestant faith. One fact that Reddick and King seem to agree on is that the change was formalized in 1934, the year King went to Europe. (Of this there is independent confirmation. King Jr.'s birth certificate remains a family secret, but State Department records indicate that it was filed on April 12, 1934, in the name “Martin Luther King, Jr.” This indicates that King Jr.'s name was recorded officially when he was five years and three months old.) This trip was the culmination of King's stupendous feat of will, by which he had raised himself out of illiteracy into Morehouse, into a prominent marriage, and finally into stunning success at Ebenezer against the tides of the Depression. For Mike King, who had come to Atlanta smelling like a mule, the switch to Martin Luther King caught the feeling of his leap to the stars.

Changing his name meant a lot of trouble for King. On the legal formalities, he had to deal with Atlanta's white bureaucracy. Then he had to tell his friends, his church members, and countless people with whom he did business. There are many indications of ambivalence on his part, resistance on the part of those around him, or both. In 1934, he changed his listing in the Atlanta phone book from the previous “King, Michl L., Rev.” to “King, M. L., Rev.” In 1936, he switched back to “King, Michl L., Rev.” Not until 1937 was he listed as “King, Martin L., Rev.” His listing on the bulletin board of Ebenezer, as well as his signature on letters and legal documents, remained the same, “Rev. M. L. King.” To friends, he and his son remained “Big Mike” and “Little Mike,” or “Reverend King” and “Mike,” or later “Daddy King” and “M.L.” The son never would list himself in the phone book by his formal name.

If Reverend King did intend to make a proud statement with the new name, it is historically fitting that his peers and his son refused to bring it prematurely into common usage. To claim kinship to Martin Luther was characteristically overbearing of the senior King. His son shrank from it, commenting publicly only once, after the Montgomery bus boycott, that “perhaps” he had “earned” his name. Reverend King supplied the wish and the preparation, but it remained for strangers in the world at large to impose Martin Luther King's new name upon him.

 

In Depression Atlanta, roughly two-thirds of all adult Negro males were unemployed, and M.L.'s earliest recorded memories were of the long bread lines that stretched around many a corner in his neighborhood. Less than twenty years later, as a graduate student, he would begin an autobiographical sketch with his impressions of the bread lines, stating that the sight of them contributed to “my present anti-capitalistic feelings.”

He also remembered his intense desire to imitate his older sister, Christine. In 1934, when a guest minister at Ebenezer made a strong pitch for the salvation of young souls, M.L. watched his sister rise to make the first profession of faith. Impulsively, as he later confessed, “I decided that I would not let her get ahead of me, so I was the next.” He wryly observed that he had no idea what was going on during his subsequent baptism. He knew the feeling of being special, and the intense pressure of churchly expectation, long before he had the slightest grasp of religion. His eagerness to keep up with Christine was so strong that he pestered his way into first grade with her that September, a year ahead of schedule. He remained there until the day he gave the teacher a vivid description of his last birthday party, showing five fingers for the five candles that had been on the cake. Thus undone by his own enthusiasm, he was sent home as too young. The next year he managed to skip a grade to catch up with Christine, but she skipped one too, and young M.L. would chase her all the way through high school.