MARTIN LUTHER KING: 'HE KEPT SO PLAIN'

...We wouldn't stay long...

...More than 2,000 black and white Atlantans crammed the dining room for an elegant dinner and such a mixing and mingling as Atlanta hadn't seen before...

...So, it is a little hard to recognize him in the mournful tributes, the exaltation of his gentleness, the chorus of Amens to his non-violence, and the soothing forgetfulness of his troublesome and persisting direct action, his "creative tension" and civil disobedience, at which most of our society raged and fumed only yesterday...

...King kissed Miss Bullard...

...Constitution publisher Ralph McGill was a sponsor...

...Hundreds of white Atlantans were awed at the splendor of our black bourgeoisie...

...The Christian Church, with the notable exception of the late Catholic Archbishop Paul Hallinan, Episcopal Bishop Randolph Claiborne, and a few lesser clerics, evaded sponsorship of the event, but Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of the Temple was on the committee trying to whomp up a respectable dinner...

...And how is Sissy...

...He Kept So Plain' by MARGARET LONG Atlanta To live in the same town with Martin Luther King, Jr., is to forget the moral grandeur, the constant courage ever aware of danger and death, the love that led his South's and his country's highest feelings, and the lustrous fame that shone around the world...

...He seemed to remember everybody, the camp followers, the fawners, the simple people who loved him, bumptious new youngsters in SCLC, and old enemies when they finally proffered the hand of approval...

...You were grand, Martin," I said, "for all these innocent white folks who never saw the like before...

...For some reason, Mr...

...I'm not ordinarily given to old saws so I feel I can indulge in a strong old saw on the mournful and historic occasion of his assassination when Atlanta joined the nation and the world in outrage, sorrow, and appreciation of the martyred prophet and most tender attentions to the beautiful and bereft Coretta, his widow...

...All this time, our hero "kept his attitude," as we used to say, and suffered the low perils from threatening assassins and bomb-throwers and lofty reproaches from respectable moderates, with his ironic charm and low-keyed humor...

...King was a great preacher, all right...

...So I wish that Dr...

...A uniformed maid, the likes of whom few of us had seen for a good many years, admitted us to the parlor and Mrs...

...We were a very happy party...

...It was hot as hell, but joyful...

...Of course the white overlords and poor whites whom he addressed scarcely heard him...

...King moved his family and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, fresh from the high and hard-won triumph of bus desegregation in Montgomery, to lead an ever-loving black revolution out of Atlanta, the move was recorded from here to New York and Los Angeles, and Calcutta, I reckon, as a portentous development in Negro Southerners' fight for equality...

...King's mother, if I'd been about my mothering business early enough, but then I felt like a naive little girl getting a sharp lesson in the ways of the world and suddenly understanding that we were all too scared of his love, rectitude, disruption, and revolution to permit any of us to speak well of it...

...Tell me," he asked, leaning forward on the arm of a chair where he sat with a Coca-Cola...

...But I doubt if he knew that his home town which had so grudgingly recognized him under the pressure of world-wide adulation, would so mourn him, honor him, and love him at his death...

...He never forgot that the mantle of Moses fell on him hastily and almost haphazardly, that he was chosen among several young ministers to lead the Montgomery bus boycott when Mrs...

...Of course, Dr...

...King, for all the opulence of his old fashioned oratory, kept so plain...

...Of course, I never in my born days presumed to put in my word to Martin Luther King, Jr...

...An historian and author excused himself on another occasion with the exhilarated explanation that he "had a meeting with Andy...

...I've seen him at country mass meetings bringing pride and joy to work-worn, sorrow-lined black faces lifted to his as he proclaimed in that voice like a great, bronze bell: "God loves you...

...Williams, adamant, said, "I'll just have to leave it up to Dr...

...Then Dr...

...King came in with a tray of coffee and fruit cake, and we setded back, rather gala, for more talk with her and him...

...Currently she is teaching journalism at Clark College in the Atlanta University Center...

...And they wanted Dr...

...I recall that the presidents of the Georgia Power Company, the big banks, and other big bosses did not come, but sent high-placed underlings...

...Then the thing got respectable, due to pressures which reached, I've heard, to Robert Woodruff, the king of Coca-Cola, who passed the word around on the advice of Hartsfield, and all of a sudden "power structure" people were clamoring before the humble committee for blocks of tickets and tables...

...We were to have a meeting with Dr...

...He talked about how hard it is to go to jail, how painful to face the spittle, obscenities, and hatred of whites heckling the picket lines, and how much Negroes needed and appreciated white support...

...We Southern friends of Negro leaders sometimes, well, find our noses out of joint when Yankee missionaries come to help us, adulate our heroes, and get drunk with joy over the camaraderie with our Negro greats...

...Rosa Parks, sick and tired and fed up, just sat there and wouldn't move to the back of the bus in 1955...

...We sat on the sofa and the arm chair, and he sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, to face all of us and discourse on the difficulty of the white commitment in that fierce, confused year of 1961, telling them things they knew and which fell comfortingly on their young and eager ears...

...When we left, three hours later, we felt tremulously enlarged and happy...

...The students had, with a Congress on Racial Equality chapter, sat in at dime stores, gone to jail, and picketed segregated places, expecting Negro students of three Negro colleges to turn out in mass demonstrations, which the students had not done, presumably under the frowns of the college administrations...

...A little band of do-gooders determined to honor him and a band of stand-pat "power structure" bosses snorted at the idea...

...If he could just see them for ". . . I heard him at the March on Washington and felt the tremendous waves of love breaking on him from the thousands . . ." twenty minutes," I implored Dora McDonald, his protective executive secretary...

...In our diffident little party were Joe Willingham, scion of an Episcopalian and Baptist cotton mill family, of Macon, Georgia...

...As a columnist for The Atlanta Journal in 1961, she received the Fiorina Lasker Civil Liberties Award...

...Bob Heller, the son of liberal Jews in New York, and my daughter, a descendant of Confederates on one side of the family—all of whose parents approved, fearfully and prayerfully, their espousal of the Negro cause...

...Well, let's see," I fumbled, admitting I was not too cozy with the power structure...

...I kissed Coretta, and Naomi Abernathy told me how nice it was in white Spring Street School for her and Coretta's children...

...And then, when protest won, as it did in those days, they congratulated everybody round and about for orderly progress and even gave Dr...

...They may spit on you, cheat you, jail you, rob you of your rights and manhood, but God loves you and to Him each one of you is as precious as the highest white man exalted to the moun-taintops of power in this land...

...He would write friends at Xavier and Dillard to feel out an invitation...

...I knew I was a preposterous show-off, but I thought Martin was charming and I liked it just fine...

...The professors appealed in vain, and Mr...

...Phillip's, which once turned away Negro kneelers-in, held a memorial service for him and that many other white churches paid him solemn homage...

...Beloved of the humble millions of the earth, hated and feared by lords of his own South and laden with international honors, young Dr...

...Of course, King must have known all the time that when he died or was killed, the President, the Pope, and rulers around the world would grieve and pay tribute...

...I don't reckon you can...

...I read Atlanta papers on the big day, searching for some notice of his arrival here where he was born, where his father is a prominent pastor, and where his grandparents are buried...

...In all the insistent talk now of his gentleness and non-violence, as if he were a milk-fed lamb of white imaginings, I remember his fearless direct action, his booming warnings of a blood-bath to come, and the stern and proper ferocity of his frequent assaults on white lies, adamance, oppressions, and fatuous apathy...

...I daresay I'm old enough to be Dr...

...One quite powerful banker said he "wouldn't eat dinner with that nigger...

...When in 1960 Dr...

...Newspapers and other media urged a respectable showing to honor Atlanta and its prize winner, adroitly managing scarcely ever to mention the dread name...

...I wish he could know that the stately Episcopal Cathedral of St...

...King, a black, strong-faced woman in a mink stole, held quiet court...

...King also had practical and strategic reasons for hoping that those in Atlanta who decree the fate of rich and poor were among the sudden devotees who heard his message, rose to applaud, and clasped hands with Negroes to sing the hymn of the Movement...

...King as a loving moderate, contrasted with the angry black radicals, and to forget for how many years he demanded what his furious critics called "socialistic" responsibility for one another in our country, the "Freedom Budget" of Marshall Plan proportions to begin to mitigate American poverty, and his somber outrage and eloquence in opposing an undeclared war draining money from the aims of "The Great Society...

...I was guilty of a blatant reaction to the proprietary joy of Northern visitors in our black notables, and I must say Dr...

...I heard him at the March on Washington and felt the tremendous waves of love breaking on him from the thousands, before the huge and prolonged roar of adulation seemed to shake the Lincoln Memorial in his glorious "/ have a dream" speech...

...King) rather than disgrace Atlanta...

...In 1961, from a few cordial encounters with Dr...

...King had a point, but that it should not be dramatized so perilously on our proud and peaceful streets...

...Well," intoned Martin in his richest Southern accent, "you know I always take yo word...

...King where I would speak well of the sociologists, but it was a couple of days before it came off—in a dark, grassy yard behind the Morris Brown College gym where SCOPE was meeting...

...I glowed with pleasure and didn't belabor the point that King doubtless would have welcomed the study, anyway...

...Learned historians, sociologists, political scientists, and other distinguished professors and writers came to Atlanta to instruct the students in the folkways of the dread South they were to invade...

...He often said the others would have risen to the leadership as handsomely as he did, because they would have had to...

...These notables were naturally impressed with the extraordinary quality as well as the fame of such King men as Abernathy, Andrew Young, James Bevel, and Hosea Williams...

...He wanted to come, but he couldn't invade Negro campuses without invitation from the schools...

...So, I recall that in 1960 when Dr...

...It is difficult to resist recalling how long young King was a prophet without honor in his own country—his native city, Atlanta—and I don't see why I should resist...

...You are His children, His own...

...Then, as if I were his favorite aunt, I put my arm through his and said, "Martin, these are real good, smart boys and they've got what seems to me an important and interesting study, and I wish they could do it...

...He knew that, and we laughed together...

...Dora called back and said we could come for a half hour at four...

...Ah, the mighty prophet, like all of us, did want honor in his own country, with the hope of all of us that our work will be accepted and loved by our own...

...I've heard him at Sunday services at his and his father's Ebenezer Baptist Church with the tears streaming down my cheeks, tears soon lost in laughter at his comic gibes at "Miss Anne" and "Mr...

...Scores of people stood hungry to hear the program, and the Ku Klux Klan picketed decorously outside...

...We made polite moves to leave, but Dr...

...Allen drove her home and stayed consoling with her for an hour or so...

...King, I will leave it to his intimates and to the moral leaders, intellectuals, and historians to judge his heart and measure his stature, and I'll remember the sweetness of his personality, the grace of his behavior, and the relish of his laughter, as I saw him from time to time...

...King, after a lot of jail-going and roughing-up, did desegregate part of downtown, the papers hailed this as a tribute to Atlanta shopkeepers and hash-slingers, our civic spirit, and the sweet and rational generosity of white folks in these parts...

...Bevel at one session questioning him with such solemnity that I could only think of the young Jesus instructing the rabbis in the temple...

...seem to get anything about you in the paper...

...King could know that when Coretta was at the airport with two children to fly to Memphis, it was our Mayor Ivan Allen (a gentleman with a gift for gracious gestures) who rushed to tell her that he was dead, and that he and Mrs...

...I realized that I was achieving the distinct impression that I had popped by Coretta's bedside twice a day with cup custard and calves' foot jelly, and I relished the interest on the academic faces smiling in the street light...

...And it is to digest these raunchy rumors and to say, in view of his life and death, what difference does it make...

...Were any of the power structure there...

...There was Mr...

...And so it went, until some of us local admirers of the famous young Negroes were infected with the fever, too...

...Why, yes, Martin said, after our fond exchange before the impressed and delighted professors, he thought it would be an important study, and he hoped the gentlemen would get along with their questionnaire...

...King, I felt emboldened to ask for a Christmas Eve appointment—with an international figure with three children—for four white students from Tulane University in New Orleans who had been going to jail with Negro sitters-in...

...However, every time Dr...

...After the style and triumph of the dinner, which concluded with startled whites and amused blacks crossing their hands to cross the clasped hands of each neighbor and sing "We Shall Overcome," as nice as you please, we committee conspirators repaired upstairs to a little cocktail party to beam on Coretta and Martin, congratulate ourselves, and rejoice in the upheld honor of Atlanta...

...King you're respectable young fellows and friends of the Movement...

...Charley...

...on any matter great or small, but he almost persuaded me that we were in weekly communication so he could take my word on matters of grave national urgency, and I reveled in our little act...

...the bell tones inquired of my daughter...

...King to come and spark the beginning movement, fire the campuses, and get something going...

...There was an inadvertent touch of ptomaine in the fancy fowl, or something, and a bunch of people got sick at home that night, but we quickly shut up about it at the stern behest of Miss Helen Bullard, a political savant and quiet power in our town, so it never got in the papers...

...They just want his advice about New Orleans...

...But any fool can see that he braved the fiercest and foulest jails in the South, staked himself and his family day by day for fourteen years against the sniper's guns and the Klan's bombs, and offered his person in the good cause from Selma to Chicago and Memphis, where one of them finally got him...

...In 1964, when Dr...

...I've never been able to understand my distaste for visitors who enjoy their peril and their association with our black celebrities so much...

...Others, including Mayor Allen and the famed former Mayor Hartsfield, who appear to read and know what's going on in the world, pulled strings, exerted pressure, and got a go-ahead sign from the uneasy power structure to honor our "Nobel-ist" (as we kept calling him, instead of Dr...

...When, a year and a half later, the students and Dr...

...Now, general reaction is gratefully to extol Dr...

...I wondered, why did he linger on the balcony where he could be shot...

...King after the meeting and she told me she'd had a mean virus and I said my daughter had, too...

...They had sat at the master's feet, questioning, learning, and loving, and he had respected, instructed, and loved them so that they left believing in his dream of a reformed and united South, a freer America, and more loving humankind...

...I heard Dr...

...When King spoke his usual stirring ". . . he knew, as he and his wife told me and anybody else who asked them, that any or all of the family might die any day . . ." words of brotherhood, the vast, hot hall full of people was enthralled...

...King an occasional pat on the back for not drawing white blood...

...All right," I said, pleased at the attention...

...Jack Rothschild, our tart and urbane rabbi, and Ralph Abernathy joked together...

...Marching on the Montgomery capi-tol with the eyes of the world on him, he stepped from the front ranks to speed to meet, embrace, and laugh joyfully with two obscure women, old family friends, parishioners perhaps, or maybe neighbors who came to help in the kitchen years ago...

...King, who behaved gratify-ingly as if Sissy (my daughter) and I were among her dearest friends...

...I don't know what's got into him," I remarked, "but why don't I tell Dr...

...I think she had the same bug Coretta had, coughing and upset stomach and all that...

...Two young sociologists proposed to Hosea Williams, SCOPE director, that they distribute questionnaires to the young missionaries to study their backgrounds and attitudes, and at summer's end pass out other questions to determine the effect the summer experience would have had on them...

...My already amiable rapport with the important visitors escalated to awe, until I felt some dismay at presenting myself as a favored handmaiden of "De Lawd" (as Snicks used to call King, a joke he enjoyed as much as the next one...

...So, in this little love song to the late Dr...

...Daddy" King, the great man's father, a handsome, light-brown man with an agreeable air of authority, smiled all around, and Mrs...

...Williams felt such a study might betray untoward sentiments or endanger the project...

...Dr...

...We of the committee didn't either, but we were nervous about what we could scrounge up...

...Well," he said, and his wide, golden-brown face with the high forehead, opulent mouth, and slant eyes opened in an enchanting smile and then a rich laugh of enjoyment...

...His personal presence was always warm and winsome because, I dare say, he kept so plain...

...Don McEvoy, the National Council of Christians and Jews man, and Eliza Paschall, the queen of the Human Relations Council, clicked glasses...

...One might as well ask why did he march on Washington, conduct Sunday church services in Atlanta, preach in Chicago, or march to Montgomery...

...King set foot in a city street or a Darktown dirt road from Albany, Georgia, to Washington or Chicago, leading nonviolent poor folks and fed-up black bourgeoisie in protest, our "power structure," our newspapers, and most of our preachers—by this time a little more sophisticated about civil liberties and demonstrations—conceded his right and the rectitude of black protest, but deplored taking disputes "into the streets...

...King joined Atlanta University students in sit-ins, marches, and picketing for civil rights, the papers and television did cover this untoward commotion with frontpage stories, pictures, and stunning television shots, accompanied by grave editorial comment to the effect that the students and Dr...

...There may have been a paragraph or so saying the Kings had come, but to save my life I can't remember it...

...Ralph will meet us at Paschall's," said an Ivy League dean off to lunch with Abernathy, as if we were about to break bread with Lyndon and Ladybird...

...Martin was sorry, and was glad she was better...

...King had just preached to the students at their night session, and I went up to Mrs...

...Of course, whenever there's a death, we all wish the loved one could have seen the flowers, the tears, and the grieving throngs, read the editorials, and forgiven the enemy rendered regretful and friendly by death...

...King cooperated handsomely in my ridiculous exhibition of counter-name-dropping, at the 1964 training sessions of SCLC's Southern Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) for students come South to spend the summer teaching and helping to organize Negro communities...

...It is not up to me to point out his courage, which has been proclaimed and questioned...

...Then the professors and I repaired to the back yard, and I said, "Hello Martin," and he greeted me with his customary sweet and plain cordiality...

...At an early meeting of the committee, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, King's close friend and second man in SCLC, made it clear that Dr...

...We dispersed, I amid accolades of the professors who exclaimed that I was "just perfect," struck "exactly the right note," and "handled it beautifully...

...And they all talked about how the Negro movement could cure the poor South of its ancient ills...

...Summerville—and a lot of vice presidents...

...I thought it wasn't his greatest speech, by any means, but the late Robert Summerville, head of the transit company, declared, "He's the world's greatest orator since Churchill died...

...King," I once said to him, when I had a little voice in a local editorial page column, "I 'just can't MARGARET LONG is a native Southerner and writer who has written extensively on the civil rights movement in the South...

...Steve Chanin, son of well-to-do Jewish merchants recently threatened by Klan cross-burnings in that middle-Georgia city...

...I heard him last summer in Mississippi prevail over the blood-stirring battle cries of Black Power firebrands calling for violent black retaliation to white violence...

...Sam Williams, our NAACP president, preacher, and suave saddle-burr to the white community, buttered up the ladies of all colors...

...It is also to hear the gossip from this fellow whose best friend was at this party, the "inside" report on scandalous tapes secreted at the FBI, the story from a civil rights worker who heard him haughtily brush off another civil rights worker appealing for bail money for brothers in jail, the more generous and imaginative raconteurs who endowed him with a white mistress in every European capital, and the revelations of the writer who personally knew the Communists in his organization...

...Coretta King was tawny and beautiful in a floor-length gold sheath, and countless other dark fashionables and handsome husbands were suave in party dress and alight with the felicity of the occasion, a comely turnout such as many of the whites had never seen before...

...She has had a long association with the Southern Regional Council, for which she edited The New South...

...I recall a group of pundits clustered around Reverend Mr...

...But she's been ailing...

...King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the consternation and confusion of most of white Atlanta were profound...

...And he knew, as he and his wife told me and anybody else who asked them, that any or all of the family of six might die any day...

...I wish he could know that the Constitution and Journal for days played his final story with space comparable to that of the Kennedy assassination...

...King kept on talking, and the children kept nodding and questioning and opinionating, and Mrs...

...King preach at a downtown Negro church and address meetings of students from the South who were organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNGC), where he proclaimed the proud, splendid, and holy promise of his new black movement: "We will love you, forgive you, suffer for you and die for you and redeem you until we are brothers...

...King appeared, either shirt-sleeved or in -a sweater, welcomed everybody, and thanked the youngsters with a soft-voiced grace for casting their lot with the Negroes...

...Certainly they're entitled to this pleasure, particularly since some of them have been shot dead in their tracks demonstrating their belief in black equality...

...King and SCLC didn't want any dinky little dinner or grudging tribute to our "Nobelist...

...To be sure, he has been surrounded by lieutenants and bodyguards, whisked away from precarious situations, and has occasionally avoided a perilous confrontation...