The.American.Word.

In 1954, about 100,000 people lived in Montgomery, Alabama. Boston was home to more than 800,000. Philadelphia, more than two million. New York City, about eight million.

That year, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fiancée Coretta Scott looked back to the South from their temporary homes in Boston. They also looked to Philadelphia and to New York, where King was engaged to preach as a visiting minister during the months he was seeking his first pulpit. His graduate work was almost complete, and his profile was a sharp one among the small number of university-educated African-American ministers looking to make their mark.
King was a product of Atlanta, where his father was a notable minister and senior member of the city’s African American establishment. Certainly King had felt the racism of the American South first-hand, but Atlanta was a city he understood, and a city where, moving mostly within the black community as he grew up, he had the advantages of a known and respected family entrenched in the largely self-contained, prosperous black middle class.

Coretta Scott was born in a different South – – not the big city South, not the South of black ministers in new cars and black businessmen with money to spend. She was born in the small town of Heiberger, Alabama, and knew the brutalities of the deep and local South. Her family owned land, but lived a modest life and depended on the good will of white people whose economic interests often ran counter to the Scott family’s well being. Her father was a dirt farmer, but he also ran a trucking business, and made enough money for Coretta Scott to contemplate attending college in the North. She graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (on full scholarship) and facing her likely career as a teacher, she chose instead the unlikely life of a professional singer and went to study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met Martin Luther King.

They were married on the Scott family farm as King was considering the options before him: go North to a pulpit; seek a college teaching job; or take a pulpit in the South. In the South there would be many options for a talented Northern-educated African American preacher. But, outside of Atlanta, the South would be a different world. And for Coretta Scott King, there would be no professional life in music; simply none. Her consolation, as she raised her children in the world of Jim Crow which she knew well – – and had, she thought, abandoned for good when she went North – – would be singing in church.

Upon his first visit to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Montgomery, Alabama church that turned out to be King’s first pulpit, he found a church organ in disrepair. “We had a letter yesterday from the St. Louis company,” the Dexter Avenue church clerk wrote to King as he was negotiating his employment agreement, “indicating that a man will be coming in from Atlanta on Monday to dismantle the old instrument,” a hopeful sign that a new church organ would eventually arrive. He found the parsonage bare of furniture (the first of his three conditions for taking the job was “That the parsonage will be completely furnished”). And he found a church with plenty of need for a preacher – – perhaps too much. On his second visit to meet with the pulpit committee as a finalist for the job, King was told “there is also a possibility that we may wish to have you baptize about five candidates either at the morning hour or at an evening service which we could plan.”

And a friend who knew the church encouraged him to take the job with this left-handed praise of the congregation: “Take it from me, that is a Great Church, Mike. Much honor will go to the man who gets it. Frankly, I have fallen in love with those people. Don’t let anybody tell you that that church is such a hell raiser!”

No doubt Coretta was warmly received as the new preacher’s wife, but her life in Montgomery would be far from the freedoms of North, far from the musical stage, and far from the independence of her few years in Boston. She would be going to a church with a bad organ, in a town with a rough racist reputation, to a home with no furniture, to live in the shadow of her husband the minister, as well as the shadow of her husband’s notable Southern church family. “Wonder if Alberta would not like to come down with you,” wrote the church clerk to King as he planned to travel down from Boston to deliver a guest sermon. The clerk was speaking of Alberta King, Martin Luther King’s mother. “Tell her we would be very happy to have her if she could make it. Let me know when to expect you and whether or not your wife will accompany you.” Someone else, apparently, would have to tell Coretta that the leaders of Dexter Avenue would be very happy to have her if she could make it.

King describes his decision to go South in his book Stride Towards Freedom: Coretta, he wrote, “was hesitant about returning south. We discussed the all-important question of raising children in the bonds of segregation. We reviewed our own growth in the South, and the many advantages that we had been deprived of as a result of segregation. The question of my wife’s musical career came up. She was certain that a Northern city would afford a greater opportunity for continued study than any city in the deep South. For several days we talked and thought and prayed over each of these matters. Finally we agreed that, in spite of the disadvantages and inevitable sacrifices, our greatest service could be rendered in our native South. We came to the conclusion that we had something of a moral obligation to return-at least for a few years.”

The King couple did more than return South – – they went local. They went to a city small enough that America was in some ways a distant place. They went to a town of 100,000 where white men who killed black men or raped white women did not go to jail. Where black men in jail were taken out to prison farms to stand in shackles and work the soil while white sheriff’s deputies stood over them with shotguns. Where, as a matter of law, white people and black people could not sit together on public busses, or eat together at local restaurants, or drink from the same public water fountains. Where the rights of black people were unacknowledged by the local agents of the law, and where, beyond the local, there was little law to be found. King’s words in Stride Toward Freedom about the decision to go South and to go local might sound a bit glib or self-congratulatory, but without a doubt Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King were giving up a great deal in moving from Boston to Montgomery.

Coretta was giving up her prospects as a professional musician, and accepting the obscurity of, at best, a church choir. And both were giving up the sense of public space that many citizens feel in big cities, the sense of being at the center of American culture, and accepting in its place the obscurity of places other Americans don’t know about, and for the most part don’t care about. They were going from a brightly lit life to a place with more shadows than light for educated young African American people. By going local, they were going far from their homes in Boston and far from King’s family home of Atlanta, with the hope of doing some good.