King's father always presented a more imposing figure, in a way, than his eldest son ever would. A strapping, boomingly assertive man, commandingly erect and chesty, Martin Luther King, Sr.-later to be known as "Daddy King"-was the bluffly autocratic preacher at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, who liked to advertise how, at one congregational meeting, he had quelled an obstreperous member by threatening to collapse a chair over his head. Raised a sharecropper's son in south Georgia, called then Mike, he was burly enough at fourteen to grapple his drunken father away from beating his mother. After the ferocious fight that ensued, his mother, fearing that Mike or his father would sooner or later kill the other, made her son flee to Atlanta. Mike King arrived in the alien clamors of that city, as he later allowed, "smelling like a mule," but full of a barging industriousness: belatedly plowing his way through high school classes, he was preaching at two country churches by the time he was twenty.

He had also begun to pay court to the daughter of the minister then at Ebenezer, A. D. Williams, himself a slave preacher's son who had diligently made his way up to become one of the presiding worthies of Atlanta's black community. Alberta was the Williamses' only child, a plain, thick, shy girl, almost twenty, who played the organ at her father's services, and Mike King was the first suitor ever to seriously approach her. After a six-year courtship of the most filigreed formality, they were finally married on Thanksgiving Day of 1926 and lived in the Williamses' commodious Victorian house. In due time, Mike King would also assume Williams's pulpit at Ebenezer.

Sixteen months after the birth of a daughter, their first son was delivered, in their bedroom, on January 15, 1929, and named Michael after his father. Only when "Little Mike" was five would the elder King change both their names to Martin Luther, thereby depositing one of the first heavy loads of expectation, both his own and history's, on the slight shoulders of his eldest boy. Sixteen months after Little Mike's birth, another son was born, named A.D. after Alberta's father and also to become a preacher, but who was to prove for most of his life a flounderingly troubled spirit.

Martin was a small, somewhat tubby child, with a plump face and watchful, darkly glistening "almond-shaped eyes," by one description. Reared under his father's fierce protectiveness in a comfortably middle-class family, amid the extravagant attentions of his father's congregation, he early came by a sense of being at the privileged center of the world around him. Enclosed by a city not unfamiliar with the sulfurs of racist acrimony and violence common to the South at that time, Atlanta's black community yet had, with its complex of universities and flourishing black enterprises, its own order of bourgeois gentility. One of its main thoroughfares, Auburn Avenue, up a rise from which both Ebenezer and the King house were located, was a lively gallery of cafés, lawyers' offices, small businesses, nightspots, that had come to be known as "Sweet Auburn." Within the benign insulations of this world, Martin grew up a singularly favored boy, evidencing an early oversize appetite for both soul food and opera, for strenuous bouts of wrestling and playing "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. Though his schoolwork tended to be somewhat haphazard, with an indifference to spelling and grammar that was to persist for the rest of his life, he had a precociously restless intelligence-and was not unaware of it himself. He notified his mother, after hearing the splendiferous rhetoric of a visiting preacher one Sunday, "Someday I'm going to have me some big words like that." Before too long, he would be startling his teachers by producing such locutions as, to a casual query about how he was doing, "Cogitating with the cosmic universe, I surmise that my physical equilibrium is organically quiescent." He also took to employing this volubility to extricate himself from fights. On the whole, he seemed to revel in the widening discovery of his gifts, his possibilities.

His father, however, was not so impressed with those nimble facilities of his son that he did not regularly administer, for his rowdier impulses, rigorous whippings. A neighbor would later report hearing the senior King, in the middle of one such walloping, whooping to Martin that "he would make something of him even if he had to beat him to death." To be sure, the elder King's wrath fell on both his sons impartially, and Martin's younger brother, A.D., never seemed able, even when a man, to free himself from their father's baleful intimidation. Martin himself would later gamely profess that "whippings must not be so bad, for I received them until I was fifteen." Even when not applied by hand or strap, his father's disciplines could still be fearsome. After catching Martin, in his teens, cavorting with girls at a YMCA dance, the senior King compelled him to perform the mortifying exercise of apologizing personally before Ebenezer's congregation. Yet even as a small boy, Martin seemed to receive all these scourgings with some strange, willed remove of resignation. "He was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him," Daddy King would later allow himself to marvel. "He'd stand there, and the tears would run down, and he'd never cry."

Indeed, his teachers and others soon noted he was frequently given to a withdrawn moodiness. No doubt part of it was that, from his first memories, he had felt himself carrying the oppressive weight of his father's unappealable assumption that he would eventually join him in the pastorship of Ebenezer. But beyond that, if Martin had grown up sensing himself at the blessed center of the world around him, at the same time he seemed to feel at the center of responsibility for what happened in it. He early showed an inordinate compulsion to take on himself great cargoes of guilt-which impelled him, twice before he was thirteen, to bizarre gestures of suicide, both times leaping out of a window over an unbearable grief about his grandmother, whose most cherished grandchild he always knew he was. The second time, having slipped away one Sunday to watch a downtown parade, he instantly supposed that this little delinquency accounted for his grandmother's death by heart attack that afternoon, and he flung himself with sobbing abandon out of the second-floor window of the house.

For a child so excruciatingly serious, while so bountifully gifted and filled with an ambitious eagerness for life, the chill discovery that, despite growing up an auspicious young prince in the black community, he actually belonged to a lesser caste in the larger white order around him-the immemorial trauma for African Americans in the South then-was particularly devastating. When he was six, a white friend of his childhood suddenly vanished into his own school, forbidden to play with him any longer. Once, in a downtown department store, he was slapped by a white matron who shrilled, "The little nigger stepped on my foot." The flashes of proud and unafraid protest he happened to witness in his father at such racial affronts were not lost on him: once, when the senior King was stopped by a traffic policeman who addressed him as "boy," he pointed to Martin on the seat beside him and snapped, "That's a boy. I'm a man." Another time, he stalked out of a store with Martin when a shoe clerk insisted they move to the rear to be served, rumbling, "We'll either buy shoes sitting here or won't buy any shoes at all." In summer jobs at a mattress company and the Railway Express, Martin was depressed by the debasement of black employees, and quit at the Railway Express when a white superintendent kept calling him "nigger." In time, he was to venture with several other students out of Atlanta for a summer of working in the zestily interracial company of a tobacco farm in Connecticut. But that bracing experience only made more insufferable such incidents as, when returning by bus with his teacher from a high school oratorical contest in a south Georgia town, where Martin had delivered to much acclaim a speech titled "The Negro and the Constitution," the bus driver demanded they give up their seats when more white passengers boarded, and the two of them had to stand the ninety miles back to Atlanta-a memory surely lingering in what was to happen some fourteen years later in Montgomery.

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Copyright © 2002 Viking Press, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

Tags: Martin Luther King

About the Author

Marshall Frady (1940-2004) was a veteran journalist who wrote for Newsweek, Harper's, and The New Yorker. He was also a correspondent for Nightline and ABC News. His books include Wallace, a biography ofGeorge Wallace, and Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. More