This was the ridiculous nature of segregation in the South. A grown man could make no sense of it to a very bright six-year-old boy. ML just couldn’t understand why it was all right to buy shoes in the back part of a store and not in the front. Because people come in so many different colors in the Negro community, it was hard for him to figure out how anybody could use the color of a person’s skin to separate him from others.

ML stared at me in the car and asked me to explain the whole thing again. And I said to him that the best way to explain it was to say that I’d never accept the stupidity and cruelty of segregation, not as long as I lived. I was going to be fighting against it in some way or other as long as there was breath in me. I wanted him to understand that. He still looked puzzled. But he nodded his head and told me that if I was against it, he would help me all he could. And I remember smiling and telling him how much I appreciated his support.

He was such a little fellow then, but sitting there next to me in the car, ML seemed so thoughtful and determined on this matter that I felt certain he wouldn’t forget his promise to help.

ML . . . was a great speaker as a young boy, and he sang, too, in a fine, clear voice. His schoolwork, in both the private and public institutions he attended, was always of a high caliber. And he loved church, in a way I could recall in myself: the feeling for ceremonies and ritual, the passionate love of Baptist music.

Perhaps it was a sign of the impatience that was coming that ML decided to skip his final year at Washington High School and enter Morehouse College as a fifteen-year-old freshman. In a way both distant and close to my decision at that age to go offand become rich working on the railroad, my son had decided to reach higher.

Nineteen sixty—a new decade, and another beginning for me. I was happy—ML was coming back to Atlanta. At the end of each phase of education, I had tried to get him to join me in the pulpit at Ebenezer, but ML had always listened politely and patiently to my arguments and said, “No, Dad, not yet.” Now he and Coretta had spent five years at Dexter [Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama]. They had enjoyed a beautiful and fulfilling experience in their first pastorate, and I thanked God for that. ML had successfully led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began as a local issue and drew national, then international attention. It also spawned other bus boycotts in the South, which led a group of clergy in 1957 to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. ML was elected president of SCLC, having no idea that the demands and responsibilities of the organization would increase as quickly as they did.

Now it was a matter of living with him in this commitment. Clearly, the issue was no longer just a bus company in Montgomery. There was bound to be more. And nobody could really predict just how far whites would go to try to stop what was now becoming a mass movement drawing attention from around the world. It was the beginning of many unhappy, anxious hours we would spend, Bunch [Alberta King] and I, waiting for word, hoping that no madman had found a way to ML’s door. But we could only support what he chose to do. Bunch often said that she would never fail to stand with him, though she was not always in agreement with the ways the movement chose to accomplish its work. But she’d grown up in her father’s house, hearing him preach and plan as he sought to bring about the fall of Southern segregation. So, of course, she knew it was useless to try to persuade others to do what ML had now learned he was most capable of doing: providing leadership when it was clearly needed.

His preaching was rich with spirit and power. He could move people with great, rolling thunder in his voice, the words moving smoothly from him and reaching people with the enormous conviction that all speakers who can move masses of human beings bring to the simplest sentence. He was becoming a national leader because it was time for this to happen, and time, of course, for it to happen to Martin Luther King Jr.

As to my wanting some clippings from the newspapers, I must answer yes. I wondered why you hadn’t sent many, especially the Atlanta world.

You stated that my letters aren’t newsy enough. Well I don’t have much news. I never go anywhere much but in these books. Some times the professor comes in class and tells us to read out assignments in Hebrew, and that is really hard.

Do you know the girl I used to date at Spelman (Gloria Royster). She is in school at Temple and I have been to see her twice. Also I met a fine chick in ...