Introduction

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta about noon on Tuesday, 15 January 1929. The difficult delivery occurred in the second-floor master bedroom of the Auburn Avenue home his parents shared with his maternal grandparents. From the moment of his birth, King's extended family connected him to African-American religious traditions. His grandparents A. D. Williams and Jennie Celeste Williams had transformed nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church from a struggling congregation in the 1890s into one of black Atlanta's most prominent institutions. Martin Luther King, Sr., would succeed his father-in-law as Ebenezer's pastor, and Alberta Williams King would follow her mother as a powerful presence in Ebenezer's affairs. Immersed in religion at home and in church, King, Jr., acquired skills and contacts that would serve him well once he accepted his calling as a minister. He saw his father and grandfather as appealing role models who combined pastoring with social activism. Although King's theological curiosity and public ministry would take him far from his Auburn Avenue origins, his basic identity remained rooted in Baptist church religious traditions that were intertwined with his family's history.

King, Jr.'s family ties to the Baptist church extended back to the slave era. His great-grandfather, Willis Williams, described as "an old slavery time preacher" and an "exhorter," entered the Baptist church during the period of religious and moral fervor that swept the nation in the decades before the Civil War.¹ In 1846, when Willis joined Shiloh Baptist Church in the Penfield district of Greene County, Georgia (seventy miles east of Atlanta), its congregation numbered fifty white and twenty-eight black members;² his owner, William N. Williams, joined later. ³

Although subordinate to whites in church governance, blacks actively participated in church affairs and served on church committees. In August 1848, members of such a committee investigated charges of theft against Willis. After listening to the committee's report the church expelled him, but two months later the church minutes reported that "Willis, servant to Bro. W. N. Williams, came forward and made himself confession of his guilt and said that the Lord had forgiven him for his error. He was therefore unanimously received into fellowship with us."⁴

Extant records provide no documentation of Willis's ministry, but he probably helped recruit some of the slaves who joined the church during a major revival in 1855. Between April and December of that year, nearly a hundred blacks, more than one-tenth of the slaves in the Penfield district, joined the congregation. Among them was a fifteen-year-old named Lucrecia (or Creecy) Daniel. Shiloh's minutes report that she "related an experience and was received" into church membership in April 1855.⁵ She and Willis were married in the late 1850s or early 1860s, and she bore him five children--including Adam Daniel (A. D.), who celebrated 2 January 1863, the day after the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation, as his birthday.⁶

The family left Shiloh Baptist Church when it, like other southern congregations, divided along racial lines at the end of the Civil War. At war's end, Shiloh's 77 white members were outnumbered by 144 black members, but in the following years all the black members left. Willis Williams and his family may have joined other black members of Shiloh in organizing a large black-controlled Baptist church in Penfield. ⁷

A. D.'s desire to follow his father's calling was evident even as a child, when "it was his greatest pleasure to preach the funeral of snakes, cats, dogs, horses or any thing that died. The children of the community would call him to preach the funeral and they would have a big shout."⁸ Although he was unable to attend school for only three weeks because of the demands of sharecropping, the seven-year-old A. D. reportedly "attracted the people for miles around with his ability to count."⁹

A. D. Williams spent his childhood on the Williams plantation. After the death of his father in 1874, A. D. and his family moved from the Williams plantation to nearby Scull Shoals, a rural community on the Oconee River. ¹⁰ Several years later, in the early 1880s, A. D. and his family joined Bethabara Baptist Church in northern Greene County. With the help of his pastor, the Reverend Parker Poullain, A.D. worked through a blueback speller and the first, second, and third readers. Williams underwent a conversion experience that confirmed his religious commitment. Poullain baptized A. D. in August 1884, and later tutored him in preparation for a preaching career. Finally, in April 1888, Williams earned his license to preach.¹¹

The number of black Baptist churches, many of which were affiliated with Georgia's Missionary Baptist Convention, increased rapidly during the 1870s and 1880s, but general economic conditions in Greene County's Oconee River Valley declined during the latter decade. Surrounding farmlands were much less profitable than in the past, and many blacks migrated from the area.¹² During the late 1880s and early 1890s, A. D. Williams tried to make a living as an itinerant preacher, while supplementing his income with other work.¹³ An injury in a sawmill accident left him with only the nub of a thumb. Seeking better opportunities elsewhere, A. D. Williams joined the black exodus from Greene County. In January 1893 he left for Atlanta.¹⁴

Arriving in Atlanta "with one dime and a five dollar gold piece" during the unusually cold winter of 1893, Williams used the gold piece to secure treatment for a sore throat.15 At the end of the summer, after working in a machine shop, he accepted invitations to preach at Springfield Baptist Church in Atlanta and a Baptist church in nearby Kennesaw, Georgia.¹⁶ Finally, on 14 March 1894, Williams was called to the pastorate of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church. One of many small Baptist congregations in the city, Ebenezer had recently lost its founding pastor, the Reverend John Andrew Parker, who had organized the church eight years earlier.¹⁷ Williams took over a church with only thirteen members and "no church house at all"--a challenging situation in which he quickly demonstrated his leadership abilities, adding some sixty-five members to the church his first year. His attempt in 1896 to leave for another pastorate was "frustrated by the providence of God"; yet at Ebenezer he was "an overwhelming success." Ebenezer, his biographer recounted, "continued to grow in strength and popularity and so did he."¹⁸

Williams supplemented his income by serving as minister of other congregations in the Atlanta area before deciding to focus his energies on building Ebenezer.19 Recognizing that his long-term success as an urban minister required that he overcome academic shortcomings, Williams also enrolled at Atlanta Baptist College, taking both the elementary English and the ministers' courses of study. In May 1898 Williams received his certificate from the ministerial program.²⁰

During the 1890s Williams also met his future wife, Jennie Celeste Parks. Born in Atlanta in April 1873, Jennie Parks was one of thirteen children. Her father, William Parks, supported his family through work as a carpenter. At age fifteen, Jennie Parks began taking classes at Spelman Seminary, becoming, according to one account, "one of Spelman's lovely girls"; her graces included "culture, unfeigned modesty, and [a] devotion to home life.²¹ Parks left Spelman in 1892, however, without graduating. Married to A. D. Williams on 29 October 1899, she was a deeply pious woman who always kept a Bible nearby and was "a model wife for a minister." On 13 September 1903, she gave birth at home to their only surviving child, Alberta Christine Williams, the mother of Martin Luther King, Jr.²² During the early years of the century, the family lived in several houses in the Auburn Avenue area, which was then home to both whites and blacks.²³

Like many other contemporary black ministers from similar backgrounds, Williams built his congregation by means of forceful preaching that addressed the everyday concerns of poor and working-class residents. Despite his deficiencies "from a technical educational point of view," a biographer later insisted that Williams's "experience and profound thought and his intensive practical ways in expounding the gospel, places him easily with the leading preachers of his day and generation."24 In 1900 the Ebenezer congregation purchased a building at Bell and Gilmore streets that formerly housed the white Fifth Baptist Church, and there they remained for thirteen years. Thanks to Williams's efforts, the congregation experienced steady growth, attracting ninety-one new members in 1903 for a total membership of four hundred at year's end. Nevertheless, Ebenezer was still overshadowed by the much larger Big Bethel AME and Wheat Street Baptist churches on Auburn Avenue.²⁵

In addition to building his own congregation, Williams participated in the establishment of new regional and national Baptist institutions. In September 1895, Williams joined two thousand other delegates and visitors at Friendship Baptist Church to organize the National Baptist Convention, the largest black organization in the United States. By 1904 Williams was president of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers' Union, chairman of both the executive board and the finance committee of the General State Baptist Convention, and a member of the Convention's educational board and its Baptist Young Peoples' Union and Sunday School board.²⁶

Black-white relations in Atlanta were undergoing major changes during the early years of the twentieth century. Booker T. Washington's historic address delivered at Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895 had signaled the beginning of a period of rapid economic growth and intensified racial restrictions. Black migrants sought to participate in the city's economic growth, and by 1900 black Atlantans constituted nearly 40 percent of the city's population. In 1900, some black residents departed from Washington's accommodationist strategy by launching an unsuccessful streetcar boycott to protest new regulations requiring segregation on all public transportation. In the same year, the Georgia Democratic Party adopted rules that barred the participation of blacks in the party's primary.²⁷

Williams, along with other black religious leaders, were pioneering advocates of a distinctive African-American version of the social gospel, endorsing a strategy that combined elements of Washington's emphasis on black business development and W. E. B. Du Bois's call for civil rights activism. In mid-February 1906, A. D. Williams joined five hundred black Georgians in organizing the Georgia Equal Rights League to protest the white primary system. They elected William Jefferson White as president and AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and CME Bishop R. S. Williams as vice presidents. White urged the delegates to recognize the importance of both black economic development and civil protest. Turner, one of the most prominent black religious leaders of the period, was outspoken advocate of racial pride and a caustic critic of prevailing racial policies. "To the Negro . . . the American flag is a dirty and contemptible rag," he cried. "Hell is an improvement upon the United States when the Negro is involved."²⁸ The convention's address to the public protested lynching, peonage, the convict lease system, inequitable treatment in the courts, inferior segregated public transportation, unequal distribution of funds for public education, and exclusion of black men from the electorate, juries, and the state militia. A. D. Williams and Turner signed the address along with sixteen other leaders, including Atlanta University professor W. E. B. DuBois; Atlanta Baptist College president-elect John Hope; J. Max Barber, editor of The Voice of the Negro; and Peter James Bryant, pastor of Wheat Street Baptist Church.²⁹

Soon after this gathering, in September 1906, African-American advancement efforts received a serious setback when Atlanta experienced a major race riot. Newspaper reports and rumors of black assaults on white women had already inflamed the fears of whites. When white gangs assaulted isolated African Americans, they met little opposition from police. Larger mobs of whites, numbering in the thousands, then attacked and looted black businesses on Auburn Avenue. Rioters derailed trolley cars and beat to death blacks who happened to be on the streets. Commerce in the city almost ceased for three days as many Atlantans remained in their homes. After five days of violence, the city resumed a sullen peace. Official accounts listed one white and twenty-six black deaths and more than 150 blacks seriously wounded. The riot destroyed the illusion that Atlanta was a New South paradigm of racial harmony and reinforced the trend toward increased residential segregation in the Auburn Avenue neighborhood, which now became the center of African-American economic and social life in Atlanta.³⁰

Williams and other black Atlanta residents faced new racial barriers in the years after the riot, but Auburn Avenue businesses thrived during the following two decades as the black community turned inward, supporting its own institutions. Although Williams continued to oppose racial discrimination, he benefitted from the new realities of white flight from and black movement into the Auburn Avenue area. Several years after the riot, Williams purchased the two-story Queen Anne-style building on Auburn Avenue in which King, Jr. would be born.³¹ An Odd Fellow, Williams also served on the order's Industrial Commission, which planned to develop Odd Fellow City, an African-American community near Elberton, Georgia. He joined Bishop Turner in a controversial business venture, the Silver Queen Mining Company, which sold stock in a silver mine in Mexico. Benjamin Davis, editor of the black newspaper the Atlanta Independent, criticized the venture as "a fake, pure and simple" and offered space in the newspaper to Turner and Williams "to explain their connection with this fraudulent scheme" to the "many thousands of poor Negroes that are being defrauded throughout the state." ³² Turner responded that stock was sold "to colored people only" because the corporation was a "colored organization" and "a stepping stone to teach our people how to do business, and put some money in their pockets." He said he had visited the mine with two reputable mining engineers. "The reports from these two gentlemen were good," he concluded, "and there is no fake about the Company, but a straight, fair, square proposition." ³³ Although Turner's response did not satisfy Davis, the reputations of the two preacher-entrepreneurs suffered no permanent damage because of the controversy.

Williams continued to involve himself in business ventures that capitalized on and enhanced his success as Ebenezer's pastor. By the beginning of 1913 the growing congregation had 750 members and was planning further expansion. In January the church purchased a lot on the corner of Auburn Avenue and Jackson Street. Six months later it announced plans to raise $25,000 for a new church building, which would include an auditorium and gallery seating 1,250 people. "Few Churches in the city have made strides more rapidly," conceded the Independent, "nor have contributed more to the moral and intellectual growth of the city. Dr. Williams is an earnest, conscientious and well-informed minister whose influence in the city is acknowledged and appreciated."³⁴ In March 1914, Ebenezer celebrated the beginning of Williams's third decade as its pastor by breaking ground for the new building. While the basement was under construction, the congregation worshipped in a hall above a storefront on Edgewood Avenue. That spring, many of the older children of the church, including ten-year-old Alberta Williams, were converted in a ten-day revival, baptized in a borrowed pool at Wheat Street Baptist Church, and formally admitted to church membership. When the basement was capped with a roof in the late spring of 1914, "there was a great march" as worshippers entered the basement to hold services for the first time. Ebenezer's building was finally completed in 1922.³⁵

As he consolidated his institutional base at Ebenezer, A. D. Williams continued to expand his regional influence. In the fall of 1913 he was elected moderator of the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association.³⁶ He played a role in power struggles among Baptist leaders, including a dispute within the National Baptist Convention over ownership of the National Baptist Publishing House.³⁷ He also served as treasurer of Atlanta's YMCA campaign and of the Georgia State Baptist Convention, where he had fiduciary responsibility for a new youth reformatory established by the convention in Macon, Georgia. A year after Atlanta Baptist College was renamed Morehouse College (in honor of a white executive of the American Baptist Home Mission Society), Williams became chairman of the finance committee of the Morehouse College Alumni Association; that same year, the college honored him with a Doctor of Divinity degree.³⁸

Early in 1917, A. D. Williams became involved in an effort, initiated by Atlanta University graduate Walter White, to organize a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).³⁹ After the branch was chartered, he and other NAACP members, along with members of the Neighborhood Union, a black women's group, launched a prolonged campaign to improve conditions in black schools. The catalyst was the plan by the Board of Education to close seventh-grade classes in its black schools in order to pay for a new junior high school for white students. A committee, which included branch president Harry H. Pace, Lugenia Burns Hope of the Neighborhood Union, and her husband, Morehouse president John Hope, presented a petition protesting the plan to the all-white school board. A. D. Williams represented the black Baptist ministerial alliance at the meeting with the board. "You, with fifty schools, most of them ample, efficient and comfortable, for the education of your children," said the petitioners, "can square neither your conscience with your God nor your conduct with your oaths, and behold Negro children in fourteen unsanitary, dilapidated, unventilated school rooms, with double sessions in half of the grades, no industrial facilities, no preparation for high schools and no high schools for the blacks." In the end, the school board acceded to the petitioners' plea to reinstate the seventh grade for blacks.⁴⁰

The issue of black schools spurred membership in the new NAACP branch, which climbed to four hundred by the end of March. Yet subsequent petitions to the school board--for better school buildings, a commercial and industrial junior high, a high school for black students, and the elimination of double sessions in all public schools--met with no success. Thereafter, wartime mobilization and rebuilding after a devastating fire in May 1917 caused popular commitment to the NAACP to wane.⁴¹ By June 1918, membership had declined to forty-nine due to Walter White's departure for the NAACP's New York office and the resignation of the branch president. The enervated branch appealed to Atlanta's Baptist and Methodist ministerial associations for support. In response, A. D. Williams agreed to serve as branch president and was formally elected on 9 July.⁴²

Williams--described in one account as "a forceful and impressive speaker, a good organizer and leader, a man of vision and brilliant imagination, which he sometimes finds it necessary to curb"--experienced initial success as an NAACP leader.⁴³ A month after his election, he announced an ambitious drive to attract five thousand new members. The Atlanta Independent illustrated its confidence in Williams's ability to revive the organization with a front page cartoon depicting a black gladiator, whose shield was the NAACP, slaying the hydra-headed monster of the grandfather clause, lynching, peonage, and segregation. The branch did grow: to 1,400 members within five months. During his tenure, the newly invigorated NAACP spearheaded a major effort to register black voters in anticipation of a local referendum on school taxes and bond issues for public works that would allocate a disproportionate share of the funds raised went to white institutions. The 2,500 black Atlantans who paid the poll tax and overcame other obstacles to become registered voters were able to defeat the education measures in the nonpartisan referendum.⁴⁴ When local authorities put the issues to a vote again in April 1919, Atlanta's NAACP submitted a petition to the mayor and the board of education outlining the inadequate conditions in black schools and stating the group's terms for supporting the bond issues and tax increase. Again black Atlantans, not convinced by official promises, helped to defeat the measures.⁴⁵

In June 1919, A. D. Williams led an Atlanta delegation to the NAACP national convention in Cleveland. In a speech there, Williams told how black voters had rejected the referenda in Atlanta and attributed the rapid increase in black voter registration to the work of women. "We got our women organized and put the women in different districts and we had meetings weekly," Williams explained. "There is one gentleman [who] said we couldn't get members by having meetings; we got a number that way. . . . Night after night people came forward and paid their dollar. That was done largely because the women were allowed to make speeches. They made such speeches you would be surprised." Williams ended by extending an invitation from the governor of Georgia, the mayor of Atlanta, and the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce to hold the organization's 1920 convention in that city, still notorious as the site of the 1906 riot. "Somebody says it is not time to go down to Atlanta now, but it is, you are due there," Williams asserted.⁴⁶ After some hesitation, the NAACP voted to make Atlanta the site of its first national convention in the South.⁴⁷

By May 1920, however, when the NAACP convened at Auburn Avenue's Big Bethel AME Church, Williams had been forced to step down as branch president. The preceding year some NAACP members had moved to boycott the white press in favor of black newspapers such as the Atlanta Independent. Williams opposed the move. In retaliation, the editor of the Independent, Benjamin Davis, lashed out, attacking Williams in scurrilous cartoons and editorials and charging him with "suppression of speech, arbitrary ruling, despotism in the chair," and other misuses of authority.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, Williams served on the local host committee for the NAACP conference, an event that enhanced the city's reputation for racial tolerance. "Atlanta treated us royally," NAACP leader Mary White Ovington recalled, "and there were white men . . . who attended our sessions every evening. The press gave us unusually fine publicity, featuring on its front page our demands for unsegregated traveling accommodations and for the vote."⁴⁹

Williams remained active in racial advancement efforts, achieving another victory in the school bond election of March 1921. With the addition of women to the electorate, black voter registration more than doubled in two years. This rise in representation, combined with the results of the 1919 balloting, convinced white leaders to make firm commitments to the black community. The bond issues now passed overwhelmingly in a record turnout. Several million dollars were earmarked to build eighteen new schools, including four black elementary schools and Atlanta's first public secondary school for black students. Martin Luther King, Jr., would receive most of his public education in two of the new schools, David T. Howard Elementary School and Booker T. Washington High School.⁵⁰

In the fall of 1922, the Atlanta Independent endorsed Williams for the newly vacant post of president of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia. "Dr. Williams may not be the most learned philosopher among our preachers, the best scholar or the deepest theologian, but he is easily the best businessman, and that is what the state Baptist convention needs at its head," editor Benjamin Davis argued.⁵¹ That November, however, Williams lost the election.⁵² Even so, by then his institutional ties reached broadly and deeply throughout Atlanta's black community. Williams was on the executive board of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia, chaired its Mission Board, and served as a trustee of its Central City College in Macon. He had also served the Baptist community as president of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers Union and moderator of the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association for seven years, as Georgia's representative on the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention for a dozen years, and as floor leader of Georgia's delegation for six years.⁵³ In the last of these roles, he had attended the tumultuous National Baptist Convention held in St. Louis in December 1922, where he participated in the unsuccessful effort to elect Peter James Bryant of Atlanta's Wheat Street Baptist Church to succeed the convention's first president, Elias Camp Morris. In the end, the Reverend Lacey Kirk Williams of Chicago's Olivet Baptist Church won the election, after a two-month campaign marked by "bitter feelings" and "the ugliest things ever said by one preacher about another"⁵⁴

A. D. Williams regained some of his earlier prominence as a civil rights leader in February 1924, when he was reelected as president of the moribund Atlanta NAACP branch. Despite earlier criticisms, the Atlanta Independent reported Williams's return in hopeful terms: "It was the ballot that gave Atlanta Negroes modern . . . schoolhouses and facilities; and it was the inspiration that the race received from the local branch under the leadership of Dr. A. D. Williams that put the fight in their bones."⁵⁵ Williams's program for the revitalization of the branch called for drives to increase membership to two thousand and to register ten thousand black voters; he also advocated passage of bond issues for more and better schools, boycotts of office buildings where black people were barred from elevators, and improved park and recreational facilities for the black community. Williams and other NAACP leaders aggressively promoted branch membership and voter registration and eventually won additional funding for Atlanta's beleagured black public schools.⁵⁶

In the meantime, Williams was unable to prevent a decline in Ebenezer's membership, from nine hundred in 1918 to three hundred by 1924. ⁵⁷ As he entered the seventh decade of his life and his fourth decade as pastor of Ebenezer, he faced strong competition from younger ministers. Some members, too, may have left to join the northern migration. Although Williams himself had thought of moving during the years after World War I, by the mid-1920s he realized that his future, for better or worse, was at Ebenezer. By then he had met Michael King, the man who would become his son-in-law and reinvigorate his pastorate.

* * * * *

In March 1924, shortly after A. D. Williams celebrated his thirtieth anniversary as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Alberta returned to Atlanta after completing a two-year teaching program at Hampton. Her engagement to Michael King was announced at Ebenezer's Sunday services. Because the school board did not allow married women in classrooms, Alberta Williams taught only briefly in Rockdale County and at Atlanta's W. H. Crogman Elementary School before her marriage.⁷⁴ Meanwhile King served as pastor of several churches in nearby College Park, while studying at Bryant Preparatory School. Shortly after the engagement, his mother died, prompting his father to request his return to help on the farm. Instead of complying, he followed the urging of Alberta Williams and her father to finish at Bryant and to seek admission to Morehouse College.⁷⁵ Despite being twice refused admission owing to poor test scores, King, backed by influential alumnus A. D. Williams, appealed his case to President John Hope and Dean Samuel Howard Archer. He was finally admitted as a beginning student at the Morehouse School of Religion in the fall of 1926.⁷⁶

Like Williams, King studied in Morehouse's three-year minister's degree program, headed by Dr. Charles Hubert. Although he found the work difficult, he received encouragement from Hubert, who offered helpful criticisms of sermons King prepared. He recalled failing an introductory course in English twice and only receiving a passing grade on his third attempt in summer school. To study for a biology course, he relied on the help of classmate Melvin H. Watson, the son of a longtime clerk at Ebenezer Baptist Church. His closest friend was Sandy Ray of Texas, a fellow seminarian. "We shared an awe of city life, of cars, of the mysteries of college scholarship, and, most of all, of our callings to the ministry," King recalled.⁷⁷

On Thanksgiving Day 1926, the Reverend Michael Luther King and Alberta Christine Williams were married at Ebenezer. Atlanta's most prominent black Baptist ministers--Bryant of Wheat Street, E. R. Carter of Friendship, and James M. Nabrit of Mt. Olive--performed the ceremony. When the newlyweds moved into an upstairs bedroom of the Williams's house on Auburn Avenue, many people assumed that King would succeed his father-in-law at Ebenezer. Williams encouraged him to consider the possibility, but King initially resisted. He was already serving two congregations at College Park and East Point, and he was still learning the ministry. If he was to be Williams's successor, he wanted to merit the position, not inherit it.⁷⁸

According to King's recollections, A. D. Williams inspired him in many ways. Both men preached a social-gospel Christianity that combined a belief in personal salvation with the need to apply the teachings of Jesus to the daily problems of their black congregations. Both also avoided an overreliance on emotional oratory, which sometimes was meant to disguise lack of content. King later noted his high regard for Williams's sermons. "[He] could preach with force and power. Some of the things I started off to do as a preacher he corrected . . . He turned me around and put me on the right road."79

The family of M. L. and Alberta Williams grew rapidly. On 11 September 1927, the first child was born to the Kings and named Willie Christine for her grandfather and for her mother. M. L. King, Jr., the first son and grandson in the extended family, was born next on 15 January 1929. A second son--named Alfred Daniel Williams, after his grandfather-arrived on 30 July 1930, a month after King, Sr., received his bachelor's degree in theology.⁸⁰

The black community into which King, Jr., was born had changed substantially during his grandfather's forty years in Atlanta. The city's population had grown from 65,500 people in 1890 to 270,500 in 1930, while the percentage of blacks in the city had declined from 43 to 33 percent. Because of legal and social restrictions, Atlanta's blacks were now heavily concentrated in the "Sweet Auburn" district and in southwest Atlanta near Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University. ⁸¹ In 1928, just as Benjamin Davis's Independent was foundering, W. A. Scott launched the Atlanta World. The new paper flourished, becoming the Atlanta Daily World in 1932, the first black-owned daily newspaper in the country. At the same time, older black leaders like A. D. Williams were gradually being replaced by a new generation of ministers that included King, Sr., who was, by then, president of the Atlanta Sunday School and Baptist Young Peoples Union convention and moderator of the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association.

A. D. Williams died on 21 March 1931. The massed choirs of Ebenezer, Liberty, Traveler's Rest, and Wheat Street Baptist churches sang at his funeral, "a huge and emotional ceremony," as King, Sr., recalled.⁸² The sixteen eulogies included offerings by Benjamin Davis; W. A. Fountain and J. S. Flipper, bishops of the AME church; John Hope, president of Atlanta University and Morehouse; Florence M. Read, president of Spelman; Dr. Will Alexander of the Commission on Inter-racial Cooperation; and Dr. James M. Nabrit of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia. Letters, resolutions, and telegrams of condolence and tribute came from across the country. The Georgia Baptist's obituary was effusive: "`A. D.' was a sign post among his neighbors, and a mighty oak in the Baptist forest of the nation," it said. "Born in the country and with limited literary preparation, his wealth of native ability, tact and application made him a man among men and a force to be reckoned with in local, state, and national economic and ecclesiastical councils. He was a preacher of unusual power, an appealing experimentalist, a persuasive evangelist, and a convincing doctrinarian."⁸³

* * * * *

As a child, King, Jr., was constantly reminded of the depth of his family's roots in Ebenezer Church and Atlanta's black community. Although his father's increasingly impressive accomplishments would in time overshadow those of his grandfather, Williams's influence at Ebenezer remained strong even after his death. King, Sr., did not leave Traveler's Rest to succeed his father-in-law until the fall of 1931, by which time he had sufficiently overcome his feeling of unpreparedness in assuming the post. It took several years, however, before he gained the full trust and support of Ebenezer's deacons--years in which he provided remarkably effective leadership and restored the church to financial security.⁸⁴

Beyond his grandfather's legacy, the forces shaping King, Jr.'s emerging personality were the stable influences of family, church, and community. King remembered his childhood as one of harmony. In an autobiographical statement written in early adulthood, King, Jr., depicted a happy childhood spent "in a very congenial home situation," with parents who "always lived together very intimately." He could "hardly remember a time that they ever argued (My father happens to be the kind who just [won't] argue), or had any great fall out."⁸⁵

Hidden from view were his parents' negotiations regarding their differing notions on discipline. His father believed strict discipline was sometimes necessary to prepare his offspring for the often cruel society they would enter. "To prepare a child for a world where death and violence are always near drains a lot of energy from the soul," King, Sr., later explained. "Inside you, there is always a fist balled up to protect them. And a constant sense of the hard line between maintaining self-respect and getting along with the enemy all around you."⁸⁶

As a father, King, Sr., found it difficult to control his temper and to soften the sharper edges of personality that had enabled him to survive the hardships of his early life. "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."⁸⁷ L. D. Reddick, an acquaintance of the King family, described the household as "father-centered," a place where King, Sr.'s word, "considerate and benevolent as he tried to make it, was final."⁸⁸ The elder King's own recollections, however, suggest that his paternal desires were neither unbending nor always obeyed. Although he believed that the "switch was usually quicker and more persuasive" in disciplining his boys (Christine was "exceptionally well-behaved"), he increasingly deferred to his wife's less stern but effective approaches to child rearing, recognizing that her gentleness and empathy did not result in permissiveness--"they couldn't get up early enough in the morning to fool her." King, Sr., later acknowledged that his wife "insisted . . . 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." His own difficult relationship with his embittered, violence-prone father prepared him to accept the possibility that only his wife could "investigate and soothe" his oldest son's "sensitivities." "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."⁸⁹ King, Jr., would later describe "Mother Dear" as being "behind the scene setting forth those motherly cares, the lack of which leaves a missing link in life."⁹⁰

Protected and loved by concerned, confident, and accommodating parents, the King children also benefited from the presence in their household of Jennie Celeste Williams. As First Lady of Ebenezer, Williams was involved in most aspects of church governance, heading the Missionary Society for many years. She represented the church in local Baptist organizations and in the Woman's Convention, an auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention. Known as "Mama" to her grandchildren, she was especially protective of her first grandson and "could never bear to see him cry." Referring to her as "saintly," King, Jr., acknowledged her considerable impact on his childhood. "She was very dear to each of us, but especially to me," he later wrote. "I sometimes think that I was [her] favorite grandchild. I can remember very vividly how she spent many evenings telling us interesting stories."⁹¹

Beyond the family home, the King children spent most of their time at Ebenezer church. As King, Jr., later explained, "the church has always been a second home for me." Nearly all his initial friendships developed there. "My best friends were in Sunday School, and it was the Sunday School that helped me to build the capacity for getting along with people." ⁹² Even King, Jr.'s earliest letters to his parents, written between the ages of eleven and fifteen, convey an intimate knowledge of Baptist church life, including such details as congregational governance, ward meetings, church finances, and social events.

In addition to observing his father's leadership role, King, Jr.'s church activities also brought him into close association with his mother, who was Ebenezer's organist and choir director. As in other African American Baptist churches, the music and singing at Ebenezer played a major role in attracting and holding members. King, Sr. believed that "religious ideas and ideals have been shaped as much by gospel songs as by gospel sermons." ⁹³ Alberta King's musical talent caused her to be in demand at various Baptist gatherings in Georgia and even in meetings of the National Baptist Convention. In 1937, before graduating from Morris Brown College, Alberta Brown initiated a series of annual musicales featuring the church's choirs. Ebenezer's choirs also performed at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of Gone With The Wind. By the early 1940s the annual concerts were attracting overflowing crowds. From the age of four, King Jr., often performed with his mother at Ebenezer and at other churches and religious gatherings, singing such songs as "I Want to be More and More Like Jesus" with his mother providing accompaniment.94 His father recalled his son's appreciation for chrch "ceremonies and ritual,the passionate love of Baptist music.95

The King children observed their father's increasingly evident achievements as a minister. Faced with mortgage foreclosure on Ebenezer in the years after A. D. Williams's death, King, Sr., reinvigorated the church through successful membership and fundraising drives and was able to pay off the note within four years. The family's living standard also improved. Indeed, King, Sr., later stated, "the deacons took great pride in knowing that young Reverend King was the best-paid Negro minister in the city."⁹⁶ In 1934, his finances were such that he could attend the World Baptist Alliance in Berlin. Traveling by ocean liner to France, King and ten other ministers journeyed by train from Paris to Rome, then by boat to Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. The tour was highlighted by visits to historic sites in Palestine and the Holy Land. "In Jerusalem, when I saw with my own eyes the places where Jesus had lived and taught, a life spent in the ministry seemed to me even more compelling," King recalled. Upon arrival in Berlin--where they noted many ominous signs of the rise of Adolf Hitler--the group joined thousands of Baptist clergymen from around the world. King's return to Atlanta in August 1934 was front-page news in the Atlanta Daily World.⁹⁷ The increasing prominence and relative affluence of Ebenezer's pastor was also reflected by the now-final transformation of his name: from Michael King to Michael Luther King to Martin Luther King (although close friends and relatives continued to refer to him and his son as Mike or M. L.).⁹⁸

Despite the senior King's relative wealth, the family did not join the migration to the more prestigious neighborhoods that were being settled by middle-class blacks. King's anti-elitist attitudes were cultivated by his parents who discouraged him from developing feelings of class superiority. The King children often heard the story of A. D. Williams's stern rebuke of a parishioner who had corrected his grammar: "I done give a hundred dollars but the gentleman who corrected me has given nothing." ⁹⁹ King Jr., worked a variety of jobs - delivering the Atlanta Journal from age eight and holding manual labor positions as a teenager. He connected the "anti capitalistic feelings" he had developed by late adolescence with his childhood observations of "the numerous people standing in bread lines" during the Depression.100

At about age six, King, Jr., had an experience that profoundly affected his attitudes toward white people. When a white playmate he had known for three years entered Atlanta's segregated school system, the friend's father told his son that he could no longer play with King. "I never will forget what a great shock this was to me," King, Jr., later recalled. He remembered discussing the matter with his parents over dinner and realizing for the first time "the existence of a race problem." King's parents told him of the "tragedies" of racism and recounted "some of the insults they themselves had confronted on account of it. I was greatly shocked, and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person." Although his parents told him that he "should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty as a Christian to love him," he was not satisfied. "The question arose in my mind, how could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends?"¹⁰¹

King, Jr.'s schooling officially began at the end of January 1935. A year earlier he had tried to join his sister in the first grade of Yonge Street Elementary School; the attempt to enter school early was apparently foiled, however, when a teacher overheard him talking about his last birthday party. After a half-year as a first grader, though, he was promoted to the second grade anyway. In the fall of 1936, he entered the third grade at David T. Howard Elementary School, where he remained through the sixth grade.¹⁰² He then entered the Laboratory High School of Atlanta University, an experimental, progressive private school that appealed to black residents seeking alternatives to Atlanta's crowded public schools. He completed two years there -- earning generally good grades except for a failing grade in social studies -- before the school was closed.¹⁰³

During King's childhood and teenage years, he became increasingly aware of his father's vocal opposition to segregation. The elder King not only engaged in individual acts of dissent, such as riding the "whites only" City Hall elevator to reach the voter registrar's office, and participating in protest movements for civil rights, but also was a leader of organizations such as the Atlanta Civic and Political League and the NAACP. In 1939, he proposed, to the opposition of more cautious clergy and lay leaders, a massive voter registration drive to be initiated by a march to City Hall. At an Ebenezer rally of more than a thousand activists, King referred to his own past and urged black people toward greater militancy. "I ain't gonna plow no more mules," he shouted. "I'll never step off the road again to let white folks pass. I am going to move forward toward freedom, and I'm hoping everybody here today is going right along with me!" ¹⁰⁴ A year later King, Sr., braved racist threats when he became chair of the Committee on the Equalization of Teachers' Salaries, organized to protest discriminatory policies that paid higher salaries to white teachers than to blacks with equivalent qualifications and experience. With NAACP legal help, the movement resulted in significant gains.

Although too young to understand fully his father's activism, King, Jr., later wrote that he and his siblings wondered how their father avoided being physically attacked during the "tension-packed atmosphere" of their childhood years. Dinner discussions in the King household often touched on political matters as King, Sr., expressed his views about "the ridiculous nature of segregation in the South." Fearing that they might endure humiliating treatment, King forbade his children to attend segregated theaters. King, Jr., later remembered witnessing his father standing up to a policeman who stopped the elder King for a traffic violation and referred to him as a "boy." According to King, Jr., his indignant father responded by pointing to his son and asserting, "This is a boy. I'm a man, and until you call me one, I will not listen to you." The shocked policeman "wrote the ticket up nervously, and left the scene as quickly as possible."¹⁰⁵

On another occasion during the time of the voting rights campaign, King, Jr., again witnessed his father's determination not to accept racial discrimination. His father asked for a pair of shoes at a downtown store. When the white clerk told the two that they must go to the back of the store for service, King, Sr., refused and left the store. Years later, King, Jr., recalled the incident: "I still remember walking down the street beside him as he muttered, `I don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.'"¹⁰⁶

King, Sr.'s activism shaped his son's understanding of the ministry and presaged King, Jr.'s own career. Along with other "progressive" black Baptist preachers, the elder King stressed the need for an educated, politically active ministry. In 1942 he spearheaded an effort in the National Baptist Convention to pressure President Franklin Roosevelt to eliminate racial discrimination on trains. In an earlier speech expressing his views on "the true mission of the Church" King, Sr., told his fellow clergymen that the church must

King, Jr.'s, recollections suggest that he entered his teenage years with enormous admiration for his father's social commitment and with a sense of religion as a constant source of support. On the traumatic occasion of his grandmother's death on 18 May 1941, he accepted his parents' spiritual guidance. King learned about the fatal heart attack of Jennie Celeste Williams while attending a parade without his parents' permission. Grieved by the death of his beloved "Mama" and remorseful about his transgression, King initially reacted by jumping from a second-floor window of his home. While neither King nor his father later mentioned a suicide attempt in their autobiographical statements, the elder King's account confirms the distress and guilt his son felt: "He cried off and on for several days afterward, and was unable to sleep at night." King, Sr., explained that death "was a part of life that was difficult to get used to" and that God had "His own plan and His own way, and we cannot change or interfere with the time He chooses to call any of us back to Him."¹⁰⁸ King, Jr., later described his grandmother's death as a major formative experience of his youth: "It was after this incident for the first time that I talked at any length on the doctrine of immortality. My parents attempted to explain it to me and I was assured that somehow my grandmother still lived."¹⁰⁹

Despite his acceptance of many of his parents' religious beliefs, King was uncomfortable with the fervent emotionalism he sometimes observed in church. In an autobiographical sketch King wrote while a graduate student at Crozer Theological Seminary, he remembered the lack of "dynamic conviction" that had accompanied his decision to join the church, made when a guest evangelist led a revival at Ebenezer. He admitted that he "had never given this matter a thought" and joined only when his sister took the step: "after seeing her join I decided that I would not let her get ahead of me, so I was the next." That King so vividly remembered this childhood event, which culminated in his baptism, may explain his later discomfort withemotional "conversion" experiences. "Conversion for me was never an abrupt something," he explained after recounting his baptism. "I have never experienced the so called 'crisis moment.' Religion has just been something that I grew up in. Conversion for me has been the gradual intaking of the noble ideals set forth in my family and my environment, and I must admit that this intaking has been largely unconscious."¹¹⁰

King's religious doubts occurred just as many aspects of his life were changing. Following the death of his grandmother, the family moved from the house on Auburn to a larger yellow brick house three blocks away at 193 Boulevard, thus fulfilling a childhood ambition of King, Sr., to own such a home. Enjoying the benefits of his family's affluence, King, Jr., became active in the social life of middle-class Atlanta. He could not remain isolated, however, from southern racism. After delivering the Atlanta Journal for five years, he was denied the job of manager of a deposit station. As one account put it, "such a top post, even in Negro neighborhoods was reserved for white men. It involved handling money and coming into the downtown office where the cashiers and clerks were mostly young white women."¹¹¹

Another change in King's life resulted from the closure of the Atlanta Laboratory School in 1942. Skipping the ninth grade, the thirteen-year-old started tenth grade at the public Booker T. Washington High. During his second year at the school he won a preliminary public speaking contest, which allowed him to participate in a state oratorical contest sponsored by the black Elks in Dublin, Georgia. On the way home from the competition, King and other black students were cursed by the bus driver when they refused to give up their seats to white passengers. They reluctantly complied with his directive only when their speech teacher warned them against becoming involved in a potentially dangerous incident. More than two decades later, King recalled his feelings as he stood during that ride to Atlanta: "It was the angriest I have ever been in my life."¹¹²

King's speech from the contest, "The Negro and the Constitution," was published in the 1944 high school annual. The text reflected King's early political views. "We cannot have an enlightened democracy with one great group living in ignorance," he insisted. Neither could the nation be healthy with "one tenth of the people ill-nourished, sick, harboring germs of disease," or "orderly and sound with one group so ground down and thwarted that it is almost forced into unsocial attitudes and crime." King warned: "We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flaunt the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule. We cannot come to full prosperity with one great group so ill-delayed that it cannot buy goods. So as we gird ourselves to defend democracy from foreign attack, let us see to it that increasingly at home we give fair play and free opportunity for all people."¹¹³

Following completion of the eleventh grade at Washington High, King had an opportunity to begin college education a year early. Because enrollment at Morehouse College, the alma mater of both King, Sr., and A. D. Williams, had declined because of the wartime draft, president Benjamin E. Mays allowed promising high school juniors to fill out the entering class of 1944. Although King's grades at Washington were not strong, he demonstrated his capacity for college work in a special admissions test. Before beginning at Morehouse, however, King left for his first extended stay away from home, joining about one hundred other students working on a tobacco farm near Simsbury, Connecticut. Established during the World War I period by John Hope and supervised since the 1930s by Morehouse mathematics professor Claude B. Dansby, the summer work program allowed students to earn and save money to pay college expenses.

The letters King wrote home from Connecticut reveal a fifteen-year-old who was both a child responding to his parent's wishes and a teenager relishing this departure from the world of his childhood. Most startling for King was his first exposure to racial attitudes outside the segregated South. Writing to his father, he commented on things he "never [anticipated] to see." Upon traveling north from Washington, D. C., he observed "no discrimination at all." Whites were "very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to." A letter to his mother referred to his attendance at a church service in Simsbury: "Negroes and whites go [to] the same church." After a weekend trip into Hartford, he told his mother about the lack of discrimination in public places. Having eaten at one of Hartford's "finest" restaurants, he commented, "I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere."¹¹⁴ These experiences in the North increased King's already strong resentment of racial segregation.¹¹⁵

While in Connecticut King participated in various religious activities, including singing in a boy's choir that appeared on a local radio program and leading student religious meetings on Sunday evenings. Despite the doubts of his high school years, King's religious commitment became stronger as he demonstrated his preaching abilities. He informed his mother: "As head of the religious Dept. I have to take charge of the Sunday service I have to speak from any text I want to."¹¹⁶ Four years later he referred to the summer of 1944 as a crucial period in his religious evolution, a time when he "felt an inescapable urge to serve society . . . a sense of responsibility which I could not escape."¹¹⁷

In September 1944, King returned to Atlanta to begin his studies at Morehouse College. While the buildings that constituted the small campus had not changed much since the days when his father had been a student, the goals and standing of the college had. Since Mays had become president in 1940, Morehouse had begun to reverse the decline that began during John Hope's final years. Under this new leadership, the college regained its earlier vitality. Not only did Mays -- the first Morehouse president with an earned doctoral degree -- instill a belief in its students that "Morehouse men" were distinctive in their talent and commitment to racial uplift, but he also worked hard to improve the quality of the faculty, increasing salaries and encouraging professors to pursue doctorates.¹¹⁸

Mays was also an innovative, politically-engaged scholar. His first book, The Negro's God, published in 1938, was a pioneering study of African-American Christianity, and reflected Mays's enthusiasm for prophetic, social-gospel religious teachings. A trip to India increased his appreciation of the philosophy of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had given the Indian masses "a new conception of courage." Mays asserted that "when an oppressed race ceases to be afraid, it is free."¹¹⁹ He often criticized American Christian institutions for not challenging segregation.¹²⁰ Believing that black colleges should be "experiment stations in democratic living," Mays also challenged Morehouse students to struggle against segregation rather than accommodate themselves to it.¹²¹ Noting the difficulty many students encountered in developing "a critical but secure religious position" to replace the orthodox religious views of their precollege years, he argued that black colleges should seek to inform students about the importance of the church in African-American life. Students needed "contact with people who demonstrate in their person the fact that religion counts," Mays argued, adding that "a religion which ignores social problems will in time be doomed." Religion must "give direction to life--a direction that is neither communistic nor fascistic--not even the direction of a capitalistic individualism."¹²²

Mays inspired a generation of Morehouse students who gathered for his Tuesday morning lectures, in which he stressed intellectual excellence, religious piety, and commitment to racial advancement. He later recalled King as an eager listener, often responding to his lectures by debating certain points. These contacts led to a "real friendship which was strengthened by visits to his home and by fairly frequent chats."¹²³ King later described Mays as "one of the great influences in my life." ¹²⁴

King's enthusiasm for Mays's teaching developed only gradually. There is little evidence that King exhibited a serious interest in his studies during most of his stay at Morehouse. Younger than most of the other 204 students in his class and uncertain about his career plans, King initially paid more attention to his social life than to his classwork. Although he lived with his parents and did not join a fraternity, King was socially active. Not only was he president of the sociology club and a member of the debating team, student council, glee club, and minister's union, but he also joined the Morehouse chapters of the NAACP and the YMCA, and played on the Butler Street Y basketball team.¹²⁵

Among King's first acquaintances at the college was another Morehouse freshman, Walter R. McCall, a preministerial student five years older than King who would soon become King's best friend. McCall recalled that King was an "ordinary student" during this period: "I don't think [King] took his studies very seriously, but seriously enough to get by." King "loved the lighter side of life," even when it meant disobeying his father's injunctions against sinful behavior. "Many times [his father] opposed our dancing and things like that," McCall remembered, "but he would slip off anyway and go. Many times he and I as well as his sister and some more girls would congregate at his house while his Daddy was at church and we'd put on a party."¹²⁶

Documentary evidence regarding King's studies at Morehouse is scanty, making his intellectual development there difficult to trace. Later accounts suggest, however, that he benefited from Morehouse's liberal arts curriculum and from the personal attention of the school's faculty. During his first year, for example, he received the valuable help of Professor Gladstone Lewis Chandler in preparing for the John L. Webb oratorical competition, in which he won second prize in 1946 and 1948.¹²⁷

During King's second year, he took his first course with sociologist Walter Richard Chivers, an outspoken critic of segregation, who became King's advisor when he chose sociology as his major. Chivers wrote several articles during the 1940s about racial discrimination and the role of black leaders in the struggle against oppression. He praised social reformers, such as Harlem's militant minister, Adam Clayton Powell, but offered caustic criticism of cautious "talented tenth Negro leaders." Although his discussions of working-class issues were clearly influenced by Marx, Chivers did not openly advocate socialism, and he rejected communism as akin to totalitarian fascism.¹²⁸ His emphasis on the economic roots of racism certainly contributed to King's increasingly anticapitalist sentiments. As classmate Lerone Bennett, Jr., later recalled, King saw Chivers's notion that "that money was the root not only of evil but also of race" confirmed when he took a summer job and observed that blacks were paid less than whites performing the same tasks.¹²⁹

King's growing awareness of social and political issues is evident in the few writings that survive from his undergraduate years. In a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution written the summer before his junior year, for example, he reacted to a series of racially motivated murders in Georgia. King summarized black goals: "We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens: The right to earn a living at work for which we are fitted by training and ability; equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar public services; the right to vote; equality before the law; some of the same courtesy and good manners that we ourselves bring to all human relations."¹³⁰ Invited during his junior year to write an article for the February 1947 Founders' Day issue of the school paper, the Maroon Tiger, King used the opportunity to warn students about their "misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the `brethren' think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end." To save men from "the morass of propaganda" was "one of the chief aims of education," according to King. "The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically."¹³¹ Another essay, written at the end of his junior year, addressed the topic "Economic Basis for Cultural Conflict" and appeared in a departmental journal Chivers helped produce.¹³²

During his junior year, King's evolving sociopolitical views merged with the new understanding of Christian theology he gained from religion professor George D. Kelsey, a theologian widely known and respected for his annual Institute for the Training and Improvement of Baptist Ministers. While King, Sr., described Kelsey as a teacher who "saw the pulpit as a place both for drama, in the old-fashioned, country Baptist sense, and for the articulation of philosophies that address the problems of society," the younger King was attracted to his professor's tough-minded approach to theological issues. Kelsey (who gave King his only A at Morehouse) stressed the implications of the Christian gospel for social and racial reform while also insisting that the Kingdom of God could "never be realized fully within history" because the sinful nature of man "distorts and imposes confusion even on his highest ideas."¹³³ Kelsey's writings of the 1940s evinced a personal struggle to reconcile the Protestant notion of individual salvation with the realization that religious individualism often encourages pessimism about progressive social reform.¹³⁴ He also provided some of the intellectual resources King needed to resolve the conflict between the religious traditions of his youth and the secular ideas he had learned in college. As King later commented, that conflict continued until he took Kelsey's course and realized "that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape."¹³⁵

The influence of Chivers and Kelsey was evident in an essay entitled "Ritual" that King probably wrote during his senior year. Reflecting his self-conscious straddling of the line between his social science training and his religious vocation, King acknowledged that, although as a pretheological student he would be expected "to defend certain aspects of sacred ritual, therefore becoming unscientific," his aim was "to be as unbiased and scientific as possible."¹³⁶

While King's enthusiasm for Kelsey's critical approach to biblical studies set him apart from his father's scriptural literalism, it also enabled him to think more seriously about an idea he had previously rejected: entering the ministry. King, Sr., had always wanted both sons to become ministers and eventually, perhaps, to serve as pastors for Ebenezer, but he also recognized the wisdom of his wife's entreaties that their children be allowed to make their own career choices. He later expressed the hope that his sons could make use of his connections among Baptists--"family ties, school and fraternal relationships, the so-called hometown connections that kept phones ringing and letters moving in consideration of help requested and granted, favors offered and accepted. The world is too tough for anyone to think of challenging it alone." ¹³⁷ Yet A. D. and M. L. were unwilling to conform to paternal expectations: A. D. dropped out of Morehouse before deciding on a ministerial career, and King, Jr., spent his first three years at Morehouse planning to become a lawyer, or perhaps a physician, but certainly not a minister like his father.

King, Jr.'s reluctance to become a minister stemmed largely from his rejection of religious practices that appealed to emotions rather than to the intellect. His persistent questioning of literal interpretations of biblical texts evolved during his Morehouse years into criticism of traditional Baptist teachings. He later wrote that his college days were "very exciting ones," especially the first two years when "the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body."¹³⁸ Although his break with orthodoxy may have strengthened his determination not to become a minister, it also opened him to liberalism as a potentially acceptable religious orientation. King wrote later that the circumstances of his call to the ministry were unusual, for even though he had experienced a sense of calling, he continued to waver about his career choice during his first three years at Morehouse. He recalled wondering "whether [the church] could serve as a vehicle to modern thinking. I wondered whether religion, with its emotionalism in Negro churches, could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying."¹³⁹

King was probably leaning toward the ministry by the end of his junior year, but making a final decision was nevertheless difficult. On the one hand, he could not ignore his father's hopes and his friends' expectations. His fellow students who heard him speak at campus events admired his oratorical skills; as one classmate recalled, "he knew almost intuitively how to move an audience."¹⁴⁰ On the other hand, he continued to deprecate the emotionalism the associated with Baptist preaching. While remaining skeptical of his father's doctrinal conservatism, King saw his father as a model. He would later explain that King, Sr.'s influence "had a great deal to do with my going in the ministry."¹⁴¹ Perhaps even more influential than his father, Mays and Kelsey were also crucial role models. "Both were ministers, both deeply religious, and yet both were learned men, aware of all the trends of modern thinking," King Jr. later explained. "I could see in their lives the ideal of what I wanted a minister to be." ¹⁴² His decision was, in short, a summation of King's earlier experiences and influences.

It came neither by some miraculous vision nor by some blinding light experience on the road of life. Moreover, it was a response to an inner urge that gradually came upon me. This urge expressed itself in a desire to serve God and humanity, and the feeling that my talent and my commitment could best be expressed through the ministry. . . . During my senior year in college I finally decided to accept the challenge to enter the ministry. I came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become.¹⁴³

King told close friends at Morehouse of his intention to become a minister, but he probably continued to debate the idea during the summer. Returning with other students to the Connecticut tobacco farm where he had worked in 1944, King once again led weekly religious gatherings. While there, he telephoned his mother to tell her of his decision. Upon his return to Atlanta at summer's end, he discussed his plans with other family members before finally telling his father. "I finally decided to accept the challenge to enter the ministry," King recalled. "I came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become."¹⁴⁴ That autumn, King Jr., delivered a trial sermon at Ebenezer, attracting a large and appreciative audience. "M.L. has found himself," King, Sr., later recalled. "I could only thank God, pretty regularly, for letting me stay around long enough to be there." ¹⁴⁵ Immediately after the sermon, the Ebenezer congregation liscensed him to preach, and he joined the church as associate pastor to his father. During his final year at Morehouse, he preached occasionally at Ebenezer before being ordained as a minister in February 1948.

After King decided to become a minister and to pursue graduate studies at a seminary, he became more serious and focused during his final year at Morehouse. In addition to Kelsey and Mays, Samuel W. Williams provided King with another example of an academically trained, socially committed minister. A leader of the People's Progressive Party in Georgia, Williams supported the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace.¹⁴⁶ King took an introductory philosophy course from Williams, who also preached at local churches. During his senior year, King's commitment to social change was strengthened when he joined the Intercollegiate Council, an interracial student group that met monthly at Emory University to discuss various issues. Despite opposition from his father, King participated in these meetings. The encounters with white students helped King overcome the antiwhite feelings he had felt since childhood.¹⁴⁷

As he approached the end of his undergraduate years, King applied to several northern, theologically liberal seminaries, including Crozer Theological Seminary. His father, who already admired his son's qualities as a preacher ("His voice, his delivery, the structure and design of his sermons all set him apart from anyone I'd ever heard in my life"), was disappointed that King, Jr., would not become co-pastor at Ebenezer, but reluctantly agreed to support his son's education. King, Sr., feared his son might not return to the segregated South, but he also recognized that King, Jr., would be able to "broaden his knowledge tremendously" at a northern seminary.¹⁴⁸ He secured letters from his father and several family friends, but the comments of those who knew King well were restrained in their assessments of his intellectual ability, often focusing instead on King's family background and social skills. Morehouse religion professor Lucius M. Tobin, who had not taught King, could report only that he came from "a fine family" and was "a little above average in scholarship." Mays similarly recommended King, along with another student, but conceded that King was "not brilliant," only a person capable of "B work" or, "with good competition," perhaps "even better." George D. Kelsey described King's Morehouse record as "short of what may be called `good'" but contended that King was an underachiever who had come "to realize the value of scholarship late in his college career." Brailsford R. Brazeal similarly saw evidence of academic growth and sought to explain King's average grades by referring to his "comparatively weak high school background." Even King, Sr.'s positive letter was vague, referring to the fact that King was only fifteen when he entered college and was "above his age in thought."¹⁴⁹

When he began his seminary studies in the fall of 1948, nineteen-year-old King was younger than most of his Crozer classmates. He probably realized that he would have to become more diligent in his studies if he were to succeed at the small Baptist institution in Chester, Pennsylvania, a small town southwest of Phi