Growing Up King Read Free Page B

Carolina coast, or in the black belt of south-central Alabama, where my mother’s parents
     lived, or other places South and North. “Negroes” in Atlanta were not as anxious as they were in other places, where people
     were trying to gain access, rights, a crust of life, because they didn’t have anything to lose, they were trying to get a
     little something. In Atlanta, “Negroes” already had a little something; in some cases they had nice somethings. This made
     it more impressive to me, later, to realize that my father, in spite of his privileged position, would take up the civil rights
     struggle, battle against the system of segregation. Because he really would have had it made, relatively, in old Atlanta.
     Could’ve gone with the flow, succeeded Granddaddy as pastor at Ebenezer, conducted weddings, funerals, encouraged generosity
     from the Ebenezer flock, attended National Baptist conventions, risen to be an H.N.I.C.—Head Negro In Charge of what little
     we had, and we had a nice if not an idyllic life.
    I don’t know how it was in Daddy’s mind. I’ve been asked many times, as have many if not most other black people, “What do
     you want?” I can’t answer for him. He was, if nothing else, a man of his own conscience. The ’60s were idyllic to me. How
     they were for him, I don’t know. He could’ve limited his battles to Ebenezer, local politics, as my grandfather did. But he
     didn’t; wasn’t that kind of a man. Greatness was thrust upon him, and for some internal reason or external destiny, he did
     not turn away. Because he was the man that he was, I was born six weeks premature.
    My mother was traumatized during her pregnancy with me. All of us were born and raised in struggle. In January of 1956, Yoki
     was ten weeks old and they were living in Montgomery when a bomb was set off at their house. My father spoke of having an
     epiphany at the kitchen table in this same house a few days before that. The bombings—the one at my parents’ house was not
     the only one— were owed to the violence of vigilante whites, poor whites, after the bus boycott led by the Montgomery Improvement
     Association, for which my father served as president. He held some of the smaller meetings at his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church;
     Uncle Ralph’s—Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s—First Baptist Church held larger mass meetings. My father had talked about being “paralyzed
     with fear” during this time.
    But at the kitchen table in the house in Montgomery, he had an epiphany; he said all the fear left him, and he gave himself
     and his Cause over to the hand and grace of God.
    It wasn’t until this bombing in Montgomery on January 30, 1956, that it dawned on him: it wasn’t just him but also his family
     who were involved in this Cause. Yet only he had the epiphany.
    In April of 1960, after having dinner, my parents were returning the southern writer Lillian Smith to Emory University Hospital,
     in DeKalb County, where she was getting cancer treatments. After dropping her at the dorm they were stopped by police. My
     father was a black man; a white woman had been in the car. My father was recognized by the DeKalb County police and arrested
     because he had not changed his driver’s license from an Alabama license to a Georgia license in the three months since they
     left Montgomery. Daddy answered the summons, was fined $25 for “driving without a proper permit,” given a suspended twelve-month
     sentence by Judge Oscar Mitchell, and released on probation. This occurred at the time of the Greensboro, North Carolina,
     lunch-counter student sit-ins to protest segregated public facilities, on the heels of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott
     sparked by the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Shortly after this event, sometime in June, my mother discovered she was pregnant
     with me.
    These were heady, dangerous days. But my father, pleased my mother was pregnant for the third time, was undeterred by his
     arrest. My