Parting the Waters (12 page)

That same friend concocted the first nickname that stuck to M.L., “Tweedie,” in tribute to his penchant for tweed suits. Young King was something of a dandy—meticulously groomed and fastidious about his clothing. From grade school on, he had a reputation for elaborate, Victorian-style courtship—full of letters, gentlemanly maneuvers, and shameless panegyrics of love poetry. He pursued his finery and big words with such natural panache that he brought no scorn upon himself. Always unassuming, he slipped easily from tweeds to dungarees. His enormous social range meant that “Tweedie” was simply incorporated into the nickname pool of his neighborhood clique, along with “Shag,” “Rooster,” “Sack,” and “Mole.”

World War II quickened the pace of his education. The Atlanta University Laboratory School, which had been created as an experiment to prove that high-quality teachers could turn out Negro graduates every bit as skilled as white ones, folded when the war drained off much of the student body at Atlanta University. As a result, young King had to attend the city's only public high school for Negroes, which was also located on the West Side. His bus rides continued. After tests showed that the Lab School had pushed him ahead of his class at the public school, he entered Booker T. Washington High School in the fall of 1942 as a thirteen-year-old tenth-grader. He was there when the Allies landed in North Africa. By the following spring, Reverend King and his fellow Morehouse trustees faced something much worse than the usual financial crisis. The war was taking a high percentage of the students who might have gone to Morehouse, and not even the superhuman fund-raising efforts of President Mays—already known as “Buck Benny” for his practice of mercilessly hounding Morehouse men for fees and donations—could halt the losses that were pushing the college near bankruptcy. The board chairman suggested that Morehouse close for the duration of the war, but Mays devised an alternative that might allow it to scrape by: the college lowered its standards and its entrance age in order to admit younger freshmen. Later, King stated forthrightly that he was reading on no better than an eighth-grade level when he enrolled that fall, at the age of fifteen.

At about this time, Spelman's President Read finally triumphed in her ten-year guerrilla war against the chairman of the Atlanta University sociology department, Dr. Du Bois. Although she was neither a scholar nor an educator, her informal position as the Rockefeller representative gave her an overriding strength at all the schools, since she was also a Morehouse board member and the treasurer of Atlanta University, signing all its checks. Grumbling Negro faculty members nicknamed her Rockefeller's white “overseer.” Her
coup de grâce
on Du Bois was simple and quiet: his name failed to appear on the faculty payroll list for the fall of 1944. The seventy-six-year-old Du Bois, who had written three books and dozens of scholarly articles since his noisy departure from the NAACP in 1934, came rudely to the end of yet another career. Nearly twenty years of writing and political turmoil still lay ahead of him when Atlanta University set him adrift without notice or ceremony.

 

Earthshaking events—as spectacular as Hiroshima and as subtle as the early research on the birth control pill—generally failed to disturb the self-absorption of King and his peers at Morehouse, where it had become traditional to say that there were only two kinds of students: those at Morehouse and those who wished they were. President Mays, in his weekly address to the student body, harnessed all his authority and eloquence to the task of arousing student interest in the issues of the outside world. By his own admission, he failed. Using one of many sayings that became part of his legend, Mays chided the students regularly for not getting excited about “anything larger than a hamburger.”

Most of the close friends King made at Morehouse were in private rebellion against the ministry. Bob Williams, the tenor soloist who had met King years earlier and was now back at Morehouse after a stint in the Army, came from a family of preachers but was intent on becoming an opera star like his idol, Roland Hayes. Young Samuel Cook—only fifteen, like King—had determined not to follow his father in the pulpit, and Walter McCall was an Army veteran who had preached for money and decided that he hated it. McCall's career plan was to support himself as a part-time minister but channel his considerable idealism toward his goal of becoming a lawyer like Thurgood Marshall, who could help his people. He considered it far easier to make ends meet as a preacher than as a lawyer, and easier to serve humanity as a lawyer than as a preacher. McCall's perception—that idealists must look to the law, breadwinners to the church—would have baffled white students. This stark cultural reversal was part of the natural landscape for Negroes. So was the fact that some two-thirds of Negro college students always had been female, which meant that every male college graduate could expect at least two marriageable women among his peers.
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King entered Morehouse planning to become a doctor, but he soon dropped the idea after deciding that the biological sciences were too cold and mathematical to suit him. Then he, like his friend Walter McCall, set his sights on the law. Dirt poor, McCall toiled in the basement of Groves Hall as the unofficial campus barber, cutting students' hair for a dime. He subjected all his customers to complaints about a host of physical ailments, especially arthritis, and about his financial plight. When King once told him after a haircut that he could not pay his dime right away, McCall became enraged that this privileged, suave, and polished kid professed to have money troubles. The two of them “went to the grass” outside, drawing a crowd, and King prevailed in the wrestling match even though he gave away many pounds and five years to the Army veteran. Having won McCall's respect, King convinced him that his parents really did not give him very much spending money. He soon paid his dime, and the two antagonists became almost inseparable friends, known to everyone as “Mac and Mike.” They were a humorous pair of opposites. The gruff, confrontational McCall seemed possessed of a harder rebellion in what he later called a “revolutionary stage.” He abhorred religious tastes—especially the happy chatter about heaven and the cross—and looked upon religious ideas as a point of departure. When he and King and other members of their small group went to church, they always sat in the balcony and looked down on the proceedings like anthropologists.

King would remember being startled by Morehouse and its reverberations on his own racial identity, when “for the first time in my life, I realized that nobody there was afraid.” This realization is paradoxical in two respects: it contradicts his own memory that Reverend King had always shielded him at home and at Ebenezer from racial cowardice and most racial humiliation; and it is literally untrue. Morehouse students had hardly escaped racial fear, which was a component even of their subordinate relationship to the white Miss Read. Few if any students felt comfortable with whites or challenged Atlanta's segregation laws, and everyday episodes of fear often intruded upon King's dormitory bull sessions. What was new to King at Morehouse was not an absence of fear but a willingness to question the fear that was there.

He had never known such an attitude at home. Reverend King was not disposed to discuss the race issue. On the few occasions when segregation openly challenged his dignity, he had defended himself bravely in episodes destined to become part of the King legend—as when he indignantly walked out of a shoe store after a clerk insisted on serving him and young M.L. in a segregated section. While boasting of his own fearlessness, the elder King had devised a philosophy and a daily routine that avoided precisely that sort of episode, whose emotional charge was always rooted in fear. He made the race issue simple: he was right, segregation was wrong, and the hatefulness of white people was a mystery best left to God. His son had grown up with this attitude, but was startled to find that Morehouse people freely undertook to solve the mystery themselves. King had his first frank discussions about race on the More-house campus. Many of the countless theories about it emanated from the sociology department, whose professors thought of race behavior as a subcategory of all social behavior. They tried to reduce racial fear from a taboo to a branch of knowledge, penetrable by logic. King decided to prepare himself for a legal career by majoring in sociology. Walter Chivers, his adviser and primary teacher in the department, conceived of racism in vaguely Marxist terms as a necessary byproduct of an economic system that benefited whites.

As to religion, much of the pressure King felt was a deepening of the denial that had begun to overcome him when grandmother Williams died three years earlier. He recalled a few years later that his first two years of college pushed him steadily into a “state of scepticism,” during which he regretted his church background. He made it clear that this was extremely painful, but it was also liberating. At Morehouse, he wrote, “the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body.” The More-house atmosphere initiated King to the mixed thrills of freethinking. In his case, the growing pains were compounded by factors personal to him—the unusual bond to his late grandmother, and the convergence of both racial and religious fears in the person of his father, whose attempts to banish them on the strength of his own naked authority seemed alternately fraudulent and all too human. In the cycles of perception, Reverend King appeared now and then as one whose strengths transcended his fundamentalism. He was still the father, who had shown how to run a church and make his way in the world, daring to dispense answers that thousands found serviceable.

These pressures, which introverted King in the classroom and at home, never threatened to paralyze him in the company of his new friends. He and McCall spent a lot of time experimenting with some of the tamer sins against Baptist doctrine, such as dancing and card-playing. They would sneak out of church early to play cards. At Morehouse, King worked hard to develop the accouterments of urbanity. One of his campus models was Professor Gladstone Chandler, who smoked a pipe, wore a smart tweed jacket, and invented ingenious games to help his English composition students learn new polysyllabic words. This was one course in which King was no underachiever, because the flamboyant pedantry of the word games brought him no end of fun. If Professor Chandler called on King with a simple “How are you?” he would reply, “I surmise that my physical equilibrium is organically quiescent.” To friends around the Mac and Mike clique, King was an affable personality resting on a foundation of decency, moving politely but steadily away from the religious straitjacket of his youth toward the Morehouse ideal of the successful, fun-loving gentleman. When Bob Williams, who finished Morehouse at the end of King's second year, heard some time later that his young friend had decided after all to become a preacher, his first reaction was to laugh out loud in disbelief.

 

During the summer of 1946, King quit his job as a laborer at the Atlanta Railway Express Company because the foreman insisted on calling him “nigger.” Whites were using the epithet with greater frequency then, as increased racial hostility was merely one of many new rumblings when the whole world began to adjust to the meaning of the great war. Amid runaway inflation and fears of a return to the Depression, economic warfare broke out into a chaos of general labor strikes, company goon squads, and emergency government programs. The Soviet Union and the United States began to split the globe into two warring camps, each claiming to represent idealism against an empire of evil ambitions. Colonized peoples in Asia and Africa denounced the hypocrisy of the democratic nations that doggedly reasserted sovereignty over them, and in a similar spirit America's Negro soldiers demanded that they be given at home the rights they had fought for overseas. Whites resisted these demands, especially in the South, with a ferocity that put lynchings back into the headlines. Mobs assassinated no fewer than six Negro war veterans in a single three-week period that summer. In Georgia's first multiple lynching since 1918, one of those six veterans died when a group of hooded men pulled him, his wife, and another Negro couple out of a car near Monroe, lined the four of them up in front of a ditch, and fired a barrage that left a reported 180 bullet holes in one of the four corpses. In the aftermath, state investigators in Monroe complained that “the best people in town won't talk about this,” but they and the FBI would compile enough evidence to take before a grand jury, which declined to return an indictment. Local Negroes called in Rev. William Holmes Borders from Atlanta to conduct the funeral.

The story of the Monroe lynching was one of many that the NAACP's Walter White told to President Truman in the Oval Office that September. “My God!” exclaimed Truman. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that.” He promised to do something, and soon thereafter appointed a special commission to recommend legislation dealing with all deprivations of Negro citizenship rights. At a time when Negro leaders had trouble getting themselves into the White House at all, much less getting a delivered promise out of it, Truman's action made him an overnight hero. King's friend Samuel Cook helped organize the first campus chapter of the NAACP, which was soon sponsoring debates on such questions as whether Negroes should protest segregation by refusing to serve in the armed forces. The campus mood changed drastically that fall with the major influx of returning war veterans, who, having seen combat in foreign lands, now mingled with the “babies” Morehouse had recruited in their absence. Cook, though only seventeen, faced the challenge of serving the amalgamated student body as its president, having been elected the previous spring on the strength of his popularity as a football star.