Parting the Waters (8 page)

 

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., now managing the family interests in place of his eighty-eight-year-old father, headed the Rockefeller entourage at the dedication of Sisters Chapel at Spelman College on May 19, 1927. This was front-page news even in the white newspapers. In one of his rare speeches, Rockefeller eulogized the Spelman sisters—his mother and his aunt Lucy—whose estates had paid for the chapel and for whom it was named. The tone of the ceremony was proud and festive, though mindful of racial politics. Every effort was made to foster the notion that Negro education was benign, posing no threat to the social or political order. Observers did not fail to note that the many white dignitaries on the program included the son of the chief chaplain to General Robert E. Lee himself. One of only two Negro speakers was a minister who had co-officiated at the marriage of Mike and Alberta King six months earlier.

Rockefeller returned to a Baptist project far larger than the chapel—the construction of Riverside Church in New York. The second generation Rockefeller was shifting his interest to theological disputes that would touch the next generation of Kings. With growing alarm, he watched the pitched battles of the Harry Emerson Fosdick controversy, which paralleled the Scopes trial and shaped the world of theology for several decades to come. Fosdick was a preacher of such stature that the prestigious First Presbyterian Church of New York called him to its pulpit even though he was a Baptist. All had gone well until 1922, when Fosdick preached a sermon titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” In it he defended the efforts by liberal theologians such as Albert Schweitzer to reconcile religious faith with both science and modern historical scholarship. The Christian faith did not require strict adherence to such doctrines as the virgin birth of Jesus, he declared, pointing out that virgin birth was not unique to Christianity or even to religion but was common to many great figures of antiquity—claimed for Pythagoras, Plato, and Augustus Caesar, as well as for Buddha, Lao-tze, Mahavira, and Zoroaster. He also spoke against other elements of doctrine, such as the belief that Jesus' death was “a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice,” theologically necessary as “substitutionary atonement” for the sins of believers.

Fosdick's sermon provoked a nationwide movement to have him tried for heresy by a Presbyterian synod or at least expelled from the First Presbyterian Church. (Young John Foster Dulles represented Fosdick with a legalistic defense, arguing that the Presbyterian Council could not try a Baptist for heresy.) One New York pastor called Fosdick “the Jesse James of the theological world.” By October 1924,
The New York Times
was following developments almost daily, with headlines such as “Jam Fifth Avenue to Hear Dr. Fosdick—Crowds Tie Up Traffic.” When the campaign finally forced Fosdick to leave the church in March 1925, Rockefeller asked the exiled minister whether he would be interested in coming to Park Avenue Baptist, where he taught the men's Bible class. Fosdick, who drew from a well of spiritual and intellectual pride at least as deep as Rockefeller's bank account, was not awed in the slightest. He declined, saying he could not acquiesce in the strict Baptist requirement that all church members be baptized by full immersion. What if that were dropped, Rockefeller persisted. Still no, said Fosdick, because he did not want to be known as the minister of another elite church in the swankiest part of New York. Well, said Rockefeller, what if the church were moved? Now slightly unnerved, Fosdick dodged the question, saying that would be almost incredible, as the Park Avenue church had been completed only three years before at no small cost to Rockefeller. Anyway, said Fosdick, he did not wish to be known as the pastor of the richest man in the United States. “I like your frankness,” Rockefeller said after a brief pause, “but do you think that more people will criticize you on account of my wealth than will criticize me on account of your theology?” Rockefeller's persistence soon acquired a new pastor for the Park Avenue congregation, which met Fosdick's conditions that they abandon their new building on Park Avenue, build a new one nearer the poor neighborhoods of New York, and discard the Baptist label from the church name. Rockefeller bought up a large tract of land on upper Riverside Drive in an intermediate zone, near Harlem but buffered by the campus of Columbia University. He razed the apartment buildings and contributed approximately $4 million toward the construction of the huge Riverside Church, in thirteenth-century Gothic style. On October 5, 1930, more than six thousand people tried to cram their way in to hear Fosdick's first sermon in the new church, where two generations later Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would deliver some of the most important sermons of his life.

 

Young King, who was still in diapers when Riverside Church was built, had been born in his parents' bedroom at the Williams home on January 15, 1929. His father named him Michael Luther King, Jr., but everyone called him “M.L.” or “Little Mike.” He was the middle child of three, sixteen months younger than his sister Christine, and seventeen months older than his brother A.D., who was named for the patriarch, grandfather Williams. The great stock market crash split the interval between the births of M.L. and A.D., bringing on conditions so hard that church members often paid their pastor with food instead of money.

Reverend Williams died suddenly of a heart attack in March 1931. Even in the mourning period that followed the funeral, the members of the family were grounded enough in the practicalities of the church to know that they had come to an important crossroads. The rock of Ebenezer was gone, at a time when the ravages of the Depression had shrunk church membership to about two hundred and reduced contributions more than proportionately to the loss. Seriously delinquent in its mortgage payments, the church faced the certain loss of its home, and possible extinction, unless a new pastor—someone stronger and more respected than the late Reverend Williams, if that were possible—could reverse its fortunes.

These adverse circumstances caused more confusion than usually attends the filling of a pulpit. Both the church and the deceased pastor's family were divided. Most of the deacons wanted to find someone older and more experienced than Mike King, who had pastored only minor-league country churches, but such pastors tended to be ones who already had churches and were clinging to them during this time of extreme adversity. Within the family, Alberta Williams King expressed the strongest opinion. “King,” she said—she would always call her husband by his last name—“I don't want you to go to Ebenezer. I'll never be the First Lady there, but at Traveler's Rest I am the First Lady.” By this she meant that at Ebenezer she could never take the place of her mother. Mrs. Williams wanted her son-in-law to take Ebenezer, for reasons that ran in the opposite direction. Without her husband, she faced the loss of her church role unless the pulpit stayed in the family. Mike King, for his part, tried to straddle the positions of the two Williams women.

After seven months of indecision at Ebenezer, Mrs. Williams finally abandoned the woman's normal church role of offstage persuasion and took the floor. Still the First Lady, she declared that Mike King was destined to succeed her husband as pastor. Her speech swayed the membership, which caused the deacons to reverse themselves and recommend King as the new preacher, and King accepted the call after assuaging the hurt feelings of his wife.

By the time the new pastor assumed his duties at Ebenezer in January 1932, a local bank had prepared a rude introduction for him by putting a court-sanctioned padlock on the church's front door. His first job was to negotiate enough credit to get the padlock removed, so that he could hold services in the hope of raising enough money to make the church solvent. His career was at stake, as was his well-being in the delicate mix of cross-currents within his own family. Seldom if ever was a preacher's nature better suited to the critical challenge of his life. As a preacher, Mike King was everything Vernon Johns was not—practical, organized, plainspoken, and intensely loyal to the things and people at hand. His talents, like the task before him, had little to do with rebellions or with the theological battles over fundamentalism. Instead, they were harmonious with the theme of the most popular religious book of the 1920s,
The Man Nobody Knows
, by advertising executive Bruce Barton, who added the subtitle
Wist ye not that I must be about my father's
BUSINESS
?

King was an earthbound preacher, bursting with energy. At a time when Negro evangelists like Father Divine and Daddy Grace were attracting great crowds on the strength of their ability to feed hungry people, he advanced the notion that Ebenezer must help its people prosper financially as well as spiritually. They must pull together, help each other, and establish the church as a place not only of refuge in a hostile world but as a group of people who were going places. His sermons mixed straightforward Christian fundamentalism with boosterism. If a barber joined Ebenezer, he would urge from the pulpit that the members patronize that barber. If the barber prospered, he would soon be reminded to make it known through his reciprocal contributions to the church.

Well aware that some people belittled him as a man who preached in his father-in-law's church while living in his mother-in-law's house, King risked everything on a message that promised at once to establish his authority and rescue the church's finances: the members would reap great rewards if they pulled together behind him, their leader, on call to his word. Accordingly, he moved swiftly to centralize the control of the church. His first and most radical move was to abolish the independent budgets of the various smaller units at Ebenezer—the Sunday school, the Baptist Training Union, the clubs and auxiliaries. Henceforth, the new pastor decreed, all these scattered fiefdoms would contribute their money to the central treasury of the church. A corollary of King's drastic reorganization was his break with the tradition of anonymous giving. There would be no more collection plates passed at church suppers or club functions, because he believed that the practice of anonymous giving made possible the practice of anonymous nongiving. To insure the greatest measure of control over the contributions of individual members, King established an open record system. Each member's contributions were recorded in the official church ledger, and the ledger was available for inspection at all times. Anonymous donations, though welcome, received no credit in the ledger.

This new system shocked the sensibilities of many church members. There would be no more memberships “on the cheap,” no more “talking big and giving small.” No longer would the church clubs raise and spend money on their own favorite functions while letting the church fend for itself. Now Reverend King had exposed everything. Doubtless his gamble would have been impossible in better times, but King took over Ebenezer just as the Depression was changing from temporary hardship to permanent nightmare. After the shock of exposure, church members realized that the hard times were affecting everyone, not just themselves. The church ledger proved to be a powerful instrument in breaking down the social distances between people, as the members now knew one another as never before. From the pulpit, King praised every mite and every dollar in plain but thunderous sermons, promising that once they had torn down the walls that separated them, they would rebuild the figurative walls of Ebenezer Baptist Church into a mighty structure.

Having seized control of church finances by centralizing the budget, King created a whole new system of clubs—twelve of them, after the months of the year. All church members born in January were members of the January Club, and so on. He looked upon them as something like the twelve tribes of Israel. The clubs elected their own officers, sponsored their own events, and nominated their own entrants for such contests as Prettiest Baby and Best School Achievement. When a member contributed to the church, the amount would be credited not only to his or her individual account but also to the club's total. The clubs made special donations and undertook special projects for the church. King encouraged any competition among them that would benefit Ebenezer.

One of King's shrewdest innovations was based on his observations of the Negro insurance companies on Auburn Avenue, which were being hailed as a national showpiece of Negro capitalism. Most Negroes, not being large property owners, had no need of fire or automobile insurance. Negro insurance companies created their own market by inventing policies tailored to their clientele—small ones, designed to pay for funerals and doctor's bills, occasionally for education. The companies hired armies of sales agents to collect premium payments from poor people in the most practical way: in small amounts, very frequently, often no more than a nickel a week. King recognized that this kind of payment schedule was precisely what a church should strive for in the hard times of the Depression. More creatively, he saw that if an insurance company could go door to door for its money rather than wait for customers to bring it to the office, so could a church. Therefore, King made every effort to recruit insurance salesmen and executives for membership at Ebenezer.

As always, his sales pitch envisioned many kinds of cross-pollenation: the salesmen would find new customers among the Ebenezer membership, while the members could handle their insurance needs within the church. Moreover, the shut-ins and sick people could make their church contributions directly to the insurance salesman on his rounds. A salesman born in March might well visit his fellow March Club members every week, returning with one nickel for Atlanta Life and another for Ebenezer. In yet another dimension, King saw how such an extension program could minister to members in their homes as well as collect from them. The salesmen on their rounds could read Sunday school lessons to the shut-ins and sick people, or, more practically, their wives or other Ebenezer members could come along behind them to read the lessons. Out of this notion grew one of the early church outreach programs.