Parting the Waters (20 page)

About that time, King himself tasted rejection when the First Baptist Church of Chattanooga passed him over to call another minister. This fulfilled King's premonition that his tryout had not gone well, but he could not figure out whether he had been too young, too intellectual, too political, or perhaps tainted by some obscure grudge traceable to his father or even his grandfather. Almost nothing was too paranoid or petty to influence pulpit selection committees, which preachers regarded as dangerous, fascinating mistresses. After consultations with his adviser, Melvin Watson, King moved cautiously toward Dexter, advising Nesbitt by phone that he was willing to preach a second trial sermon and to meet with the full board of deacons, if the church so desired, but that he was still considering other alternatives. In the ensuing negotiations by phone, Nesbitt made a bold move to pressure King for an early decision: he would break with church precedent by dispensing with further trials, and he offered a salary of $4,200 a year. In church parlance, this worked out to $100 for each first (or communion) Sunday of the month and about $75 for all other Sundays, and it would make King—straight out of school—the highest-paid Negro minister in Montgomery.

Nesbitt's offer put King in a strong position to bargain for anything except delay. On April 14, 1954, he wrote a letter to Nesbitt accepting the call. “However,” he added, “I find it necessary to predicate my acceptance upon the following considerations.” He asked that the parsonage be put into good living order, that the church pay for his commutation between Boston and Montgomery until he completed research for his Ph.D. dissertation at the end of that summer, and that the church understand his expectation of salary increases “as the Church progresses.” King's approach was businesslike, but he probably did not drive as hard a bargain as Dexter would have allowed. After a quick meeting with the selection committee on April 18, Nesbitt accepted his terms in full. The church had ended one of the longest pulpit vacancies in its history.

King underwent a complete physical examination at Boston's Lahey Clinic. Dr. Rosemary Murphy measured him at 5'6 1/2”, 166 1/2 pounds, pulse 70, normal and strong in all respects. He was fit and confident, which was fortunate because he needed all his strength to overcome objections to Dexter on the part of his wife and father. Segregated, backward Alabama was among the last places Coretta wanted to live, as she had spent her entire life struggling to get away. In Boston, while King negotiated with Nesbitt, the New England Conservatory presented her as one of the soloists in the premiere of Cuban composer Amadeo Roldan's “Motivos de Son,” with orchestra. She sang regularly in the choir of a white Presbyterian church. In Montgomery, she knew, both these distinctions lay beyond the realm of dreams, and therefore she lobbied strenuously to get her husband to choose a position in the North more in keeping with their attainments. Although King tried to reassure her that the Dexter position would be temporary, she forced him to invoke what he called his authority as head of the household. King's idea of the wife's role in a marriage was traditional, much like his father's, and he reminded his wife that he had made this clear before she accepted his marriage proposal. Even so, Coretta did not resign herself to Montgomery for months after she was physically there.

Reverend King, still wounded because his son was rejecting his natural succession at Ebenezer, tried to strike fear in him. The notorious barons of Dexter would trample him, he warned; nothing but danger, humiliation, and career disaster lay ahead in Montgomery. To this, King responded with more than his usual mixture of filibuster, charm, and stubbornness. Dexter was his first test, and he would master that church the way Reverend King had mastered Ebenezer. “
I'm
going to be pastor,” he told his wife and his father, “and I'm going to run that church.”

 

King began his career at the age of twenty-five, in the year that witnessed the invention of the TV dinner and the microchip, the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, and the closing of the immigration center on New York's Ellis Island. The first news films of a hydrogen bomb test showed shirtless American engineers smoking pipes and wearing pith helmets as they adjusted the rigging for a blast far out in the Pacific Ocean. At a ceremony for the official insertion of the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, President Eisenhower commented that the American form of government makes no sense without a “deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is.” This statement annoyed liberal and conservative intellectuals alike, but the general public seemed to approve. A Gallup poll showed that 94 percent of Americans believed in God, 68 percent in an afterlife.

On May 17-two weeks after King's first sermon as pastor-designate of Dexter—Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down the Court's decision in the
Brown
case, without advance notice. News hunger on the matter was so intense that the Associated Press issued a flash bulletin at 12:52
P.M.
noting simply that Warren was issuing the opinion, another at 1:12
P.M.
saying that he “had not read far enough into the court's opinion” for reporters to discern its conclusion, and a final bulletin at 1:20 declaring that the Court had struck down school segregation as unconstitutional by a vote of 8—0.

The earth shook, and then again it did not. There were no street celebrations in Negro communities. At Spelman College in Atlanta, sophomore Barbara Johns continued her longstanding silence about her role in the case, sensing muted apprehension among her fellow students. They seemed to worry that the great vindication might mean the extinction of schools like Spelman. The day after Warren's announcement, President Eisenhower informed the District of Columbia that he wanted the nation's capital to set an example of compliance with the law by desegregating in advance of specific court orders. James Reston of
The New York Times
attacked the
Brown
decision as a venture into sociology, saying that “the Court insisted on equality of the mind and heart rather than on equal school facilities.” Southern politicians first announced that they would obey the Court and then changed their minds.

Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's chief of staff, was preoccupied with political images, wanting to make sure that the Democrats could not blame Republicans for the decision by pointing to Ike's appointment of Warren. Experts in various fields were unsure of themselves, largely because the gap between the two races was so wide as to preclude vision, or even imagination, across it. Ironically, Americans seemed surer of what they wanted foreigners to think of the
Brown
decision than of what they thought themselves. The Voice of America immediately translated Warren's opinion into thirty-four languages to broadcast the good news overseas, but some domestic media outlets fell silent. Universal Newsreels never mentioned the most important Supreme Court decision of the century. It was too controversial.

Ten days before the
Brown
decision, the French command at Dien Bien Phu had surrendered, causing an extraordinary wave of emotion across the United States. Its focus was a young French nurse who had been stranded amid the battle as the lone woman within the doomed garrison. After the victorious Vietnamese rebels—still commonly called “natives” or “Reds” in news dispatches—released her to French-held Hanoi, no one was more surprised than Geneviève, daughter of the Viscountess Oger de Galard Terraube, to discover that she had become a rallying symbol in the West. The story of the fresh-faced French nurse had everything—heroics, war, sex, purity, noble birth, political and ethnic symbolism. When she arrived in New York two months later,
The New York Times
hailed her on page one as the “Angel of Dienbienphu,” and a quarter-million New Yorkers turned out for a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. Still somewhat dumbfounded by it all, the reluctant heroine proceeded to Washington, where she received the Medal of Freedom from President Eisenhower. She became the first foreign citizen invited to address a joint session of Congress since General Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution.

King was preparing to move to Montgomery. From Fort Valley State, a small Negro college in Georgia, Walter McCall wrote to complain of a record-breaking heat wave that was drying up lakes and rivers all across the South. The drought seemed to compound a touch of self-pity in McCall, who told King that “all things seem to be going your way.” “I thought that you had forgotten the Ole Boy,” he added, before turning to the main subject on his mind, which was “the lady angle.” McCall announced that he intended to marry a young woman from South Carolina, and asked King to serve as his best man. But McCall was a restless man, as King and his friends well knew, and two sentences later he was describing for King his “other chick” from North Carolina. “She works in N.C. and holds residence in Albany, Ga.,” he wrote. “Doc., really she is beautiful, but she does not have what this girl has. I hate to break off from her, but I am ready to be married, so I am not willing to continue playing the field.”

McCall turned to the painful matter of the woman he had refused to marry and the child he refused to support. He had sent the woman fifty dollars to help with the child, which turned out to be a mistake because it gave her “a ray of hope” for marriage. “She has already worried the very daylight out of me by long distance phone calls and a host of letters,” McCall fretted. “So, instead of continuing that support, I have cut it off already. Never do I expect to help in any fashion. Man, [she] will harass me to death if I give her the least o' consideration. Hate to take that attitude, but I think I am wise in so doing.” He closed with a bare “hello to Coretta,” who was too formal for his taste.

The letter itself was pure McCall—exposed, hot and cold, sentimental and also hard as porcelain, vexed by the nature of women. King knew well that the wedding announcement was far from definitive. In a letter to McCall ten weeks later, he would inquire discreetly about “the marriage situation.” By then he was living in Montgomery and preaching at Dexter. His chief purpose in writing McCall—as in writing almost everyone else he knew—was to seek help in the campaign to take his new church by storm.

 

On September 5, 1954, when King rose to the Dexter pulpit for the first time as resident pastor, he held in his hand a surprise document: “Recommendations to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the Fiscal Year 1954-1955.” He announced to the congregation that he was going to distribute copies of his recommendations for their prayerful consideration, to be acted upon at a subsequent business meeting. After the worship service, members took their copies and saw from the very first sentence that the boyish-looking young man in the pulpit did not intend to become another victim of the church fathers. “When a minister is called to the pastorate of a church,” King declared, “the main presupposition is that he is vested with a degree of authority.” From there, he proclaimed himself on the single theme of authority in a ringing preface worthy of Moses, Augustine, or Luther.

Had it stood alone, King's preface would have sounded defensively audacious. Most probably, he could have gotten the congregation to adopt it as a resolution, but the church powers on whom he served notice would have bided their time and in the long run the resolution would have had little effect. King did not take that chance. He followed his preface with thirty-four specific recommendations toward a complete financial and organizational mobilization of the church. The first one he borrowed directly from Reverend King's invigoration of Ebenezer in 1932: all church members shall belong to one of twelve clubs, according to the month of their birth. “Each club shall be asked to make a special contribution to the church on the last Sunday of the month for which it is named,” wrote King. “Also, on the Church Anniversary each club shall be asked to contribute at least one hundred dollars ($100.00).” Next, he proposed that the church begin a “four year renovation and expansion program.” He named specific goals, from a new carpet and “electric cold water fountain” for 1955 to an entire new religious education building for 1959.