How childhood experiences inspired MLK’s dream

Like most of us, Martin Luther King Jr. learned the values that shaped his life while a child growing up and observing the world for the first time.

Born in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan. 15, 1929, he was fortunate to be raised in a peaceful, middle-class neighborhood. Despite the Great Depression of the 1930s, he experienced many positive events in his family home, urban community and the Baptist church where his father served as pastor.

But King also lived through unsettling boyhood events. As described in magazine interviews and in his autobiography, several incidents were particularly significant in King’s childhood development and, ultimately, in shaping his goals as a national civil rights leader in the 1950s and 1960s.

As a boy in Atlanta, King lived across the street from a store owned by a White man whose son was about King’s age. The boys were good friends until 1935, when it was time for them to enter the first grade. While the White boy attended an all-White school, King attended Yonge Street Elementary School, a school for Blacks only.

Adding insult to injury, the White boy’s father no longer allowed his son to play with King, telling him, “We are white, and you are colored.”

Hearing of this incident, King’s parents told him that although such segregation was unfair, their duty as Christians was to love everyone, regardless of their race and behavior.

King’s father was not always as forgiving when faced with discrimination. Father and son once entered through the front door of a shoe store in Atlanta, where a sales clerk informed them that they needed to go to the back of the store to be served.

King’s father replied, “We’ll either buy shoes sitting here or we won’t buy any shoes at all.”

Leaving the store, King remembered his father saying, “I don’t care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.”

In 1942, King enrolled in Booker T. Washington High School, the only high school for Black students in Atlanta. King soon excelled in public speaking. In fact, in April 1944, when he was a 15-year-old junior, he won the first oratorical contest he ever entered.

The contest was sponsored by the Negro Elks club in Dublin, Ga. King’s “dear” English teacher, Sarah Grace Bradley, accompanied him to the event.

King’s winning speech, “The Negro and the Constitution,” concluded with the statement that “Black America still wears chains. The finest Negro is at the mercy of the meanest White man.”

Elated by his victory, King and Bradley boarded a bus and took their seats in preparation for their long ride home to Atlanta.

When the bus grew crowded, the driver informed King and his teacher that they would have to stand so that White passengers could take their seats, as required by segregationist laws in Georgia. The driver cursed King and Bradley for not surrendering their seats fast enough.

Recalling the words of the speech he had just delivered, King wanted to remain seated. But, with young King in her charge, Bradley complied with the driver’s demand rather than resist or protest.

Bradley and King stood the rest of their 90-mile trip home. Years later, King wrote, “That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”

Bradley faced more discrimination soon after her distressing bus ride with King. On a business trip from Atlanta to Athens, Ga., she and her sister were denied access to two buses, were “manhandled” by bus company personnel and were arrested for “disorderly conduct.”

Finishing high school early, King enrolled at Morehouse College, a famous historically Black southern institution that both his father and grandfather had attended earlier.

In order to afford their tuition, King and several of his classmates traveled north to work on a farm in Connecticut during the summer before fall classes began.

King immediately noticed the difference in the way he was treated in the North. Writing to his father, he said that he “saw some things I had never anticipated to see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The White people here are very nice.”

After working hard all day, he and his fellow Black students could ride on any bus, shop in any store, attend any theater, eat in any restaurant and worship in any church in their free time.

The contrast between the discrimination King encountered in the South and the freedom he enjoyed in the North helped shape his guiding principles as a Black adult, an American citizen and a powerful civil rights leader.

In the words of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. hoped that children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,” as he had been as a boy, but by “the content of their character,” as he had been in that brief summer of 1944.

Martin Luther King Jr. devoted his life in pursuit of this most noble goal of human freedom.

(The 32nd annual celebration and remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. community solidarity and candlelight vigil will be held at 6 p.m., Monday, Jan. 19, at the Belen Public Library. The event is sponsored by the city of Belen’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Multicultural Commission. Please remember to try to abide by the commission’s motto: Living the Dream; Let Freedom Ring; Building Bridges for Unity and Understanding.)