Sleeping Beauties, Part 3

Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir
by Dexter Scott King, Ralph Wiley

(Page 3 of 5)

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 mother did her usual thing and exploded in size; she was one of those women whose entire body, not just the belly, became larger when she got pregnant. By October, she was five months gone, and showing like nine.

This was when my father agreed to be a part of a lunch-counter demonstration at Rich's department store, protesting segregated eating facilities-the only time he joined any such local demonstration in his hometown of Atlanta. He did it against his father's wishes, to support idealistic student leaders like Lonnie C. King, Marian Wright, now Marian Wright Edelman, and John Porter. They'd ask for service at a snack bar at the downtown Rich's, which, like most department stores in southern cities, "welcomed" black patrons through a back entrance to come spend their money as long as they didn't use rest rooms, drink from water fountains marked "Whites," try on hats, or get refreshments.

My father was first to be arrested, then the students; tactically, they didn't accept a $500 bond from Judge James Webb. Dad was carted off to Fulton County Jail along with seventy-five "law-breakers," mostly student leaders from the Atlanta University Center. They would agree to be released only if the charges against them, based on unjust Jim Crow laws, were dropped. After reaching a settlement with the affected parties the students were released on their own recognizance.

People say that's when Senator John F. Kennedy got involved, but actually that's when my father's friends and admirers got moving. One of them worked for the Kennedy-for-president campaign. His name was Harris Wofford. He started calling around-Atlanta mayor Bill Hartsfield, a local lawyer named Morris Abram, anybody he could call that might be able to help. Mr. Wofford had great admiration for my father and Mohandas Gandhi. He was a learned, sensitive man who had gone to Howard University Law School after graduating from Yale.

Mayor Hartsfield was about to broker a deal to let the students and our father go anyway. But Daddy was kept in jail. Monday morning, a DeKalb County deputy sheriff came, put him in manacles and leg irons, and took him from jail in Fulton County to DeKalb County-which in those days was going from the dragon's back into its mouth. Murders of civil rights workers by rogue law enforcement officers and other vigilantes were routine occurrences; such deaths had been common for the hundred years since the Civil War. DeKalb County was a Klan stronghold. My distressed mother, with me floating in her belly, went to the hearing at the DeKalb County courthouse with Granddaddy and my Aunt Christine. Members of the faculty at Morehouse College and AU Center students went as well.

Judge Oscar Mitchell found my father guilty of violating his probation over the misdemeanor involving the "invalid driver's license," then sentenced him to four months' hard labor at Reidsville State Prison, which was isolated far downstate. There was pandemonium in the courtroom. Immersed in this was Mother, me in her amniotic sac, feeling each twitch and strain, feeding off her moods.

Yoki was four, Marty was about three, but they weren't there. Mother was shocked when Judge Mitchell announced the sentence; my father's sister, Aunt Christine, broke into tears. So did Mother, and she wasn't given to crying. Staid male professors fell prostrate and wept.

Mother said she felt helpless and out of control and desperate despite the fact my father's family was with her. They were not inside her. I was. She was emotional, weepy; Daddy had not seen her like this, and said so. "You have to be strong now, Corrie," he said. Mayor Hartsfield, in Atlanta and Fulton County, backed off from Judge Mitchell's sentence, saying it "didn't happen in Atlanta." Hartsfield was mayor when the chamber of commerce came up with the slogan that billed Atlanta as "The City Too Busy to Hate." At the time, Georgia wasn't too busy.

Governor Ernest Vandiver crowed about Daddy's dilemma.

Phone lines buzzed. My father's friends-like Stanley Levison, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Jackie Robinson, and a horde of less famous but equally concerned folk whose common denominator was being American and feeling for my father-they all made calls or had aides-de-camp making calls to see what could be done for Dad. Of these, Harris Wofford was best positioned to effect change, being connected to the 1960 Kennedy presidential campaign. He spoke to Sargent Shriver of JFK's staff. Shriver balked-the first law of political campaigns is to say anything but do nothing. In the end, Wofford convinced Shriver at least to run it by Senator Kennedy, presidential candidate, that maybe he should call the wife of Martin Luther King and offer her comfort. The woman was pregnant, alone. There was all sorts of palavering first. But, cutting through all the political intrigue, JFK wound up calling Mother on impulse, against advice and all political logic, not because it might get him votes. In that climate, it might easily have cost him votes; his advisers were not shy about pointing it out. But JFK called my mother anyway, because Harris Wofford had the right phone number to give Sargent Shriver; it flashed in JFK's mind that calling Mother was the decent thing to do. I believe that was his motivation, and also why things turned out well for him in the election. You get back what you put out. My mother was at home, preparing to go see Morris Abram, a Jewish lawyer who was a family friend. At this point, Robert F. Kennedy, head of JFK's presidential campaign, probably wouldn't have had JFK call Mother for all the tea in China.

The phone rang anyway. My mother spoke with Senator Kennedy; he said he knew it must be hard, he knew she was expecting; if there was anything he could do feel free to call. Mother said she'd appreciate anything he could do to get my father out of prison. Meanwhile, Bobby, JFK's campaign manager and soon to be attorney general, called Judge Mitchell to see why my father couldn't get bail on a misdemeanor. What the hell was going on? Bobby wanted to know.

Who knows what went through Judge Mitchell's mind, but Daddy was released, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) chartered a plane to bring him home from Reidsville. My Grandaddy King said at a mass meeting after my father was released that if he had a suitcase full of votes, he'd take them and put them at Senator Kennedy's feet in the election just a week away. We can thank a cop harassing my father and Judge Mitchell as much as the Kennedys: the long and short of it was that JFK's political intervention on my father's behalf during the final days of his campaign was a decisive factor in his election as president of the United States in 1960. Senator Kennedy won by the equivalent of one vote per precinct nationwide, and his campaign wisely made what hay it could in "Negro" precincts.

After the election, the Kings were seen as an influential family, even a royal family, in the well-lit backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, except our imperial conditioning was different. Where the Kennedys or the British royals were given latitude and a very long leash, the Kings were seen as these pious moral exemplars-a difficult posture for human beings to maintain.

I was born six weeks premature in January of 1961. Only my mother can know what she went through, mother of two at the time, pregnant with a third, dependent on Daddy, worried about his safety, whether something would happen to him because they had whisked him off in the middle of the night to Reidsville. They could as well have been taking him to Hell. He could have easily not even made it to that prison-could have wound up bloated in an earthen dam. It was known to happen. It seems incredible, but those were the harsh realities of the times. So, my mother was in a nervous state for the entire time she was pregnant with me. Everything I've read or heard of since implies that the emotional state of the parents, particularly the mother, is transmitted to the fetus. I felt what she went through. My mother thinks it had a bearing in shaping me, may have forced me out sooner, the urgency of the times.

Copyright © 2003 by Dextor Scott King

About the Author

DEXTER SCOTT KING currently serves as chairman, president, and CEO of The King Center, based in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information on The King Center, please visit its Web site at http://www.thekingcenter.org

RALPH WILEY is one of America's most distinguished African-American writers. A former senior writer at Sports Illustrated and a collaborator on numerous projects, he is the author of Why Black People Tend to Shout and Dark Witness.