Word: atlantae
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Across the South-in Atlanta, Mobile, Birmingham, Tallahassee, Miami, New Orleans-Negro leaders look toward Montgomery, Ala., the cradle of the Confederacy, for advice and counsel on how to gain the desegregation that the U.S. Supreme Court has guaranteed them. The man whose word they seek is not a judge, or a lawyer, or a political strategist or a flaming orator. He is a scholarly, 28-year-old Negro Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation's remarkable leaders...
Even King's name is meaningful: he was baptized Michael Luther King, son of the Rev. Michael Luther King Sr., then and now pastor of Atlanta's big (4,000 members) Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was six when King Sr. decided to take on, for himself and his son, the full name of the Protestant reformer. Says young King: "Both father and I have fought all our lives for reform, and perhaps we've earned our right to the name...
Perched on a bluff overlooking Atlanta's business district, the two-story yellow brick King home was a happy one, where Christianity was a way of life. Each day began and ended with family prayer. Martin was required to learn Scriptural verse for recitation at evening meals. He went to Sunday school, morning and evening services. He was taught to hold Old Testament respect for the law, but it was the New Testament's gentleness that came to have everyday application in his life...
...shabby, overcrowded Negro schools in Atlanta were no match for the keen, probing ("I like to get in over my head, then bother people with questions") mind of Martin King; he leapfrogged through high school in two years, was ready at 15 for Atlanta's Morehouse College, one of the South's Negro colleges. At Morehouse, King worked with the city's Intercollegiate Council, an integrated group, and learned a valuable lesson. "I was ready to resent all the white race," he says. "As I got to see more of white people, my resentment was softened...
...alone. The Kings moved most of their furniture into back rooms, leaving the living room virtually bare. King briefly considered arming himself, but decided against it ("As the leader of a nonviolent movement, I'd look pretty bad carrying a gun"). Coretta King took their infant daughter to Atlanta, but soon returned. "When I'm away from this," she says, "I get depressed. I feel completely helpless...