Out of Egypt, Part 2

Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Marshall Frady

(Page 4 of 4)

From those initial humiliations, King later recounted, "I was determined to hate every white person." It was a blank animus not really dispelled until his involvement with several integrated campus groups during his college years. But it all left in him that stilted reserve he would always maintain in public, and especially in the presence of whites-as if careful to present, against the white Southerner's coarse image of blacks that had visited those early outrages on him, an unfaltering comportment of what Matthew Arnold termed "high seriousness."

Partly for the same reason, he developed by his teens a fastidious aversion to the lusty religious style in his father's church-the whoops, the clapping, the sweats, the transports. Soon, though still inescapably weighted with his father's dynastic pastoral expectations-or precisely because of that-he entered into proud adolescent apostasies about the intellectual respectability of his father's fundamentalist religion, scandalizing his Sunday school class once by denying the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus. Eventually, of course, his power to move multitudes would come largely from having grown up in the scriptural dramaturgies and oratorical raptures of those church services at Ebenezer. But at the time, "it embarrassed me," King later admitted. In that distaste lurked perhaps a certain developing preciousness of self-regard. But more, it intimated a revulsion, a wariness about belonging in any way to white Southerners' minstrel caricature of blacks as loud, slovenly, childishly emotional, witless of discipline and dignity. His horror of being captured in that fundamentally annihilating image, effacing all he actually was, accounted not a little for the relentlessly staid public manner, the neat dark suits, the almost lugubrious decorums of deportment he was to assume for the rest of his life.

Still, by the testimony of one friend from those beginning years, "he loved to party, he loved to enjoy life." By the time he entered Atlanta's Morehouse College-having skipped grades to graduate from high school at fifteen-he had become something of a swell, disposed to snazzy sports jackets, flaring-brimmed hats, snappy two-toned shoes, coming by the nickname of "Tweed" for the donnish tweed suits he particularly liked to affect. Just as fancy-despite his short and relatively homely person-was his emerging flair as a romantic cavalier, dazzling young ladies with histrionic flourishes of language about amatory Troys and crossed Rubicons. He and several friends began happily noising themselves about as "the Wreckers," King explaining once with a grin, "We wreck girls." King would usually do the scouting for comely prospects for the rest of them, picking the comeliest for himself.

But in little else did there seem anything particularly remarkable about him during his years at Morehouse, a campus then serving as a kind of gentlemen's finishing academy for the sons of Atlanta's black elect. He proved only a middling student, quiet, self-enclosed, usually lodging himself at the very rear of the classroom. He held vague notions of perhaps escaping his father's ministerial predestination by studying medicine, but with his difficulty with the exactitudes of science, he decided to major in sociology to prepare for a career in law. Beyond that, the only academic intensity he evinced was listening with a transfixed raptness to the weekly addresses of Morehouse president Dr. Benjamin Mays, a nationally prestigious theological scholar. But at the same time, Martin discovered on the Morehouse campus a heady intellectual release from his father's constricting proprieties, with rompingly free discussions about any issue whatsoever, especially the matter of the depredations worked on the black psyche by the South's racist order. And in the course of his sojourn at Morehouse, he happened to encounter for the first time Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience.

Then, the summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, when he was still only eighteen, he surprisingly elected to enter the ministry after all. It was a curiously heatless decision, "not a miraculous or supernatural something," as he later related, but a conclusion that the church still offered the most promising way to answer "an inner urge to serve humanity" that had begun gathering in him by now. He was already feeling the first vague stirrings of that mysterious impulsion, found in all eventual moral-heroic figures, to give oneself over to some larger truth and purpose and meaning, "to something that transcends our immediate lives," so enlarging one's own life to the historic dimensions of that grander reality. And it was probably inevitable that the central importance of the church in the black community, and consequently the special preeminence of the preacher, would sooner or later invite that impatient ambition of his. He managed to contrive for himself an intellectually suitable peace with the Baptist Church by calculating that he would be a "rational" minister, whose sermons would be "a respectable force for ideas, even social protest."

However studiously qualified his son's decision, though, the senior King was elated. He immediately began arranging for Martin to join him as assistant pastor at Ebenezer, setting the Sunday for him to deliver the requisite "trial sermon" before the congregation. Rising behind the pulpit over which his father had familiarly loomed for years, the junior King, short and stumpy, seemed rather a dwindled edition of the formidable figure his father had always presented. But as he began moving into his sermon to the assembled membership, it was as if he were abruptly, uncannily transfigured from the careless boy who had grown up among them, assuming an almost preternatural magnitude of resonant and assured authority with his polysyllabic unfurlings of language and the passion of his message....As it happened, that message had been lifted from a printed sermon by the notable New York liberal clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick-an inclination to casual textual appropriation that was to become an unhappy habit of King's-but no one in the congregation could have known that, and when the young King finished, they all swarmed to their feet in a jubilating ovation.

So did King begin his personal exodus out of his past and the old grim Egypt of the black condition in the South-which was ultimately to carry the rest of his people with him, including even his father.

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

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.