As a boy, Martin Luther King Jr. suffered those cumulative experiences in
discrimination that demoralize and outrage human dignity. He still recalls the
curtains that were used on the dining cars of trains to separate white from
black. "I was very young when I had my first experience in sitting behind the
curtain," he says. "I felt just as if a curtain had come down across my whole
life. The insult of it I will never forget." On another occasion, he and his
schoolteacher were riding a bus from Macon to Atlanta when the driver ordered
them to give up their seats to white passengers. "When we didn't move right
away, the driver started cursing us out and calling us black sons of bitches. I
decided not to move at all, but my teacher pointed out that we must obey the
law. So we got up and stood in the aisle the whole 90 miles to Atlanta. It was
a night I'll never forget. I don't think I have ever been so deeply angry in my
life."
Ideals & Technique. Raised in the warmth of a tightly knit family,
King developed from his earliest years a raw-nerved sensitivity that bordered
on self-destruction. Twice, before he was 13, he tried to commit suicide. Once
his brother, "A.D.," accidentally knocked his grandmother unconscious when he
slid down a banister. Martin thought she was dead, and in despair ran to a
second-floor window and jumped out--only to land unhurt. He did the same thing,
with the same result, on the day his grandmother died.
A bright student, he skipped through high school and at 15 entered
Atlanta's Negro Morehouse College. His father wanted him to study for the
ministry. King himself thought he wanted medicine or the law. "I had doubts
that religion was intellectually respectable. I revolted against the
emotionalism of Negro religion, the shouting and the stamping. I didn't
understand it and it embarrassed me." At Morehouse, King searched for "some
intellectual basis for a social philosophy." He read and reread Thoreau's
essay, "Civil Disobedience," concluded that the ministry was the only framework
in which he could properly position his growing ideas on social protest.
At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., King built the
underpinnings of his philosophy. Hegel and Kant impressed him, but a lecture on
Gandhi transported him, sent him foraging insatiably into Gandhi's books. "From
my background," he says, "I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi
I learned my operational technique."
Montgomery. The first big test of King's philosophy--or of his operating
technique--came in 1955, after he had married a talented young soprano named
Coretta Scott and accepted the pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Ala.
On Dec. 1 of that year, a seamstress named Rosa Parks boarded a Montgomery
bus and took a seat. As the bus continued along its route, picking up more
passengers, the Negroes aboard rose on the driver's orders to give their seats
to white people. When the driver told Mrs. Parks to get up, she refused. "I
don't really know why I wouldn't move," she said later. "There was no plot or
plan at all. I was just tired from shopping. My feet hurt." She was arrested
and fined $10.
For some reason, that small incident triggered the frustrations of
Montgomery's Negroes, who for years had bent subserviently beneath the
prejudices of the white community. Within hours, the Negroes were embarked upon
a bus boycott that was more than 99% effective, almost ruined Montgomery's bus
line. The boycott committee soon became the Montgomery Improvement Association,
with Martin Luther King Jr. as president. His leadership was more inspirational
than administrative; he is, as an observer says, "more at home with a
conception than he is with the details of its application." King's home was
bombed, and when his enraged people seemed ready to take to the streets in a
riot of protest, he controlled them with is calm preaching of nonviolence. King
became world famous and in less than a year the Supreme Court upheld an earlier
order forbidding Jim Crow seating in Alabama buses.
