2008 Woodie Awards
Memoir sheds light on King's predecessor
Greg Trotter/Religion News Service
Issue date: 2/4/08 Section: Divine Intervention
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s courageous leadership in the civil rights movement of the 1960s will be forever etched in the pages of American history. But even before King led the historic Montgomery bus boycott and other nonviolent protests, another King was pounding the pulpit and the pavement for social justice - his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., known as Daddy King to his family, friends and congregants.
The Rev. Gurdon Brewster has decided to make Daddy King's story better known. Brewster's memoir, "No Turning Back: My Summer with Daddy King," recounts a summer in 1961 that he spent with the elder King and his wife, Alberta, in Atlanta. The book offers an intimate look at the King family in that turbulent time and reveals the inner conflicts of Brewster - a White Episcopalian from the North immersed in the Black struggle for freedom and equality. The memoir illustrates the pivotal role of the senior King in the nonviolent fight for racial equality, while also raising questions of faith and social class within the young narrator. "People don't know much about Daddy King," Brewster said in a phone interview. "But Dr. King stood on the shoulders of Daddy King, who stood on the shoulders of (his father-in-law) Rev. A.D. Williams. There's a long legacy of civil rights work there."
In 1961, Brewster was a 24-year-old seminary student in New York who volunteered to participate in a program that sent White Episcopalians into black churches in the South for the summer. He requested Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Daddy King, a stocky preacher with a booming voice, served as pastor. Brewster was welcomed into the King household to live when no other family in the congregation offered to take him.
Over plates of grits and bacon in the mornings, Brewster learned the story of Daddy King's hard-fought journey, from sharecropper's son to big-city pastor. "Daddy King and M.L. shared a very similar faith in Christ," Brewster said, "but they expressed it differently because of where they came from." While the younger King grew up middle-class in Atlanta, Brewster said, Daddy King was reared in rural Stockbridge, Ga. His father plowed the fields on a White man's farm; his mother scrubbed floors for a living. Though his father wanted him to farm, Daddy King moved to Atlanta to go to school. He was so far behind that he had to attend the fifth grade when he was 20 years old. After scrapping his way through the intellectual rigors of Morehouse College, he became pastor of Ebenezer in 1931. In 1935, about 20 years before his son led the Montgomery bus boycott, the senior King led a march on City Hall for improved Black rights. He soon got hate mail for his efforts.
The Rev. Gurdon Brewster has decided to make Daddy King's story better known. Brewster's memoir, "No Turning Back: My Summer with Daddy King," recounts a summer in 1961 that he spent with the elder King and his wife, Alberta, in Atlanta. The book offers an intimate look at the King family in that turbulent time and reveals the inner conflicts of Brewster - a White Episcopalian from the North immersed in the Black struggle for freedom and equality. The memoir illustrates the pivotal role of the senior King in the nonviolent fight for racial equality, while also raising questions of faith and social class within the young narrator. "People don't know much about Daddy King," Brewster said in a phone interview. "But Dr. King stood on the shoulders of Daddy King, who stood on the shoulders of (his father-in-law) Rev. A.D. Williams. There's a long legacy of civil rights work there."
In 1961, Brewster was a 24-year-old seminary student in New York who volunteered to participate in a program that sent White Episcopalians into black churches in the South for the summer. He requested Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Daddy King, a stocky preacher with a booming voice, served as pastor. Brewster was welcomed into the King household to live when no other family in the congregation offered to take him.
Over plates of grits and bacon in the mornings, Brewster learned the story of Daddy King's hard-fought journey, from sharecropper's son to big-city pastor. "Daddy King and M.L. shared a very similar faith in Christ," Brewster said, "but they expressed it differently because of where they came from." While the younger King grew up middle-class in Atlanta, Brewster said, Daddy King was reared in rural Stockbridge, Ga. His father plowed the fields on a White man's farm; his mother scrubbed floors for a living. Though his father wanted him to farm, Daddy King moved to Atlanta to go to school. He was so far behind that he had to attend the fifth grade when he was 20 years old. After scrapping his way through the intellectual rigors of Morehouse College, he became pastor of Ebenezer in 1931. In 1935, about 20 years before his son led the Montgomery bus boycott, the senior King led a march on City Hall for improved Black rights. He soon got hate mail for his efforts.
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