Free All Along by Stephen Drury Smith

Author:Stephen Drury Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Martin Luther King Jr.

March 18, 1964

Atlanta, Georgia

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was already the leading voice for nonviolent social change in the civil rights movement when Robert Penn Warren interviewed him in Atlanta. Warren wrote extensively about the meeting in a chapter of Who Speaks? that concentrated on eight major movement leaders Warren termed “the Big Brass.” He was taken by King’s personal magnetism, grace of movement, and the depth of thought he gave to the questions Warren asked. “The charisma is not the product of publicity,” Warren wrote. “It is real.”

King was born in Atlanta in 1929. His father and grandfather were pastors at the city’s prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church, which King himself would come to lead. He earned degrees from Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University. In 1953, King married Coretta Scott and a year later became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It was there, during a bus boycott by the city’s black residents, that King got deeply involved in the cause that would dominate his life.

By the time Warren met with King, in March of 1964, the minister had been repeatedly arrested in Southern towns and cities for his civil rights activities. He had written his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, been named Time magazine’s Man of the Year, and met with presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Later in 1964 King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Southern demonstrations led by King and others—and the violent white backlash—helped spur Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With momentum from those victories, King pressed the civil rights movement to enlarge its vision. He rallied his forces to protest housing discrimination in Chicago in 1966, but the effort met with limited success. The centrality of King’s leadership in the movement was also being increasingly challenged by other activists, especially younger and more militant organizers.

In 1967, King stepped up his opposition to the war in Vietnam. On April 4, he gave a speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan declaring that the nation’s struggles with racism and poverty were inextricably linked with the war. Critics within the civil rights movement accused King of sacrificing their domestic aims by speaking out against the Vietnam War. King felt he could not do otherwise. Exactly one year to the day after the Riverside speech, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Robert Penn Warren met King at the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization King founded in 1957. King seemed busy and Warren guessed that he was skipping lunch to make time for him. He opened the interview with a question about the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., known to his family and followers as “Daddy King.” The elder King had been pastor at Ebenezer for more than thirty years. His son became his co-pastor in 1960.

Daddy King was a gifted orator and had long been an active, implacable foe of segregation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.