Martin Luther King Jr.

A King Family Tribute

Angela Farris Watkins, Angela Farris Watkins

• Éditeur: ABRAMS
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781683357421
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Photography

In this "handsome photo-essay... family members across generations and a few close friends remember the man they knew as 'M. L.'" ( Booklist ). Martin Luther King Jr.'s family comes together for the first time to share their reflections and memories of the great civil rights leader in this touching and intimate volume. Included are contributions from his sister (the only surviving member of his immediate family), his children, his in-laws, his nieces and nephews, and even his grandchildren, who, although they never met him, explain what his legacy means to them. Unlike the iconic persona of statues and portraits, the book presents a loving view of the man who used to sneaking naps during holiday meals and playing games with his nieces and nephews. Alongside these tributes are never-before-published family photos of Dr. King, as well as new photographs of the memorial dedicated to him in August 2011 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER 1

BORN FOR THIS

MARTIN LUTHER KING SR.
Father

Martin Luther King Jr. at age six.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born into a family of leaders and change agents who nurtured him in a spirit of love and expected him to continue their legacy of social justice.

When ML was six years old, I took him downtown with me, and we enjoyed a very pleasant ride in the family car. In those days we seldom shopped outside the Negro business community, but on one of the bigger streets near the center of town, ML spotted a pair of shoes in a window and asked me to buy them. Well, he needed a pair, and so we went inside the store where the shoes he liked so much were displayed. A clerk appeared as soon as we stepped past the door and very coldly announced that we should go to the back of the store where he’d help us in just a few minutes. I told him we were quite comfortable in the front of the store, and if he didn’t want to sell us any shoes there, we wouldn’t be buying any.

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.

MARTIN LUTHER KING SR.
Father
(excerpted from Daddy King: An Autobiography, 1980)

Jennie Celeste Williams, maternal grandmother of Martin Luther King Jr.

Rev. Adam Daniel Williams, maternal grandfather of Martin Luther King Jr.

James Albert King, paternal grandfather of Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. visits his father at home, after Martin Sr. broke his leg in a bus accident.

In Martin Luther King Sr.’s office at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, on the occasion of Martin Jr.’s first book release (Stride Toward Freedom). Seated left to right: Martin Jr.; Alberta Williams King; Martin Sr.; Martin Jr.’s sister, Christine; and his brother, Alfred Daniel.

CHAPTER 2

REFLECTIONS
OF A MOTHER’S LOVE

ALBERTA WILLIAMS KING
Mother

Martin Jr. with his mother, Alberta Williams King, in the backyard of his parents’ Northwest Atlanta home.

Letter from Martin Jr. to Alberta Williams King, October 1948.

In October 1948, just after Martin Luther King Jr. entered Crozer Theological Seminary, he wrote to his mother in response to a letter that she had written to him. Their closeness is apparent in the subjects he discusses with her.

Sunday Night

10:30

Dear Mother,

Your letter was received this morning. I often tell the boys around the campus I have the best mother in the world. You will never know how I appreciate the many kind thing[s] you and [D]addy are doing for me. So far I have gotten the money (5 dollars) every week.

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 ...