Free Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch Page B

rough and plain. King’s forte was power and bluster, as he demonstrated by walking out of the registrar’s office, past an alarmed secretary, and into the office of Dr. John Hope, the Morehouse president. Hope, the best friend and benefactor of W. E. B. Du Bois, was so admired as an educator that Negro parents had been naming their children after him for years. * He said almost nothing as King blurted out a speech about how he had always done things that people said were beyond him, that only five years earlier he couldn’t even read but now he could, that he wanted to go to Morehouse no matter what the tests said, and if given the chance he would prove again that people underestimated him. Finally stopping himself, King waited vainly for a reply and then retreated from the office in despair. It was all over. A secretary caught up with him as he was leaving the campus. Back in the office, Hope wordlessly handed him an envelope and told him to take it to the registrar, who made no attempt to hide his disgust a few minutes later when he read the order to admit the bearer to classes at Morehouse.
    Mike King and Alberta Williams were married at Ebenezer Baptist Church not long thereafter, on Thanksgiving Day of 1926. Reverend Williams arranged for three of the most prominent ministers in Atlanta to conduct the ceremony, and he gave away the bride. On returning from their honeymoon, the newlyweds moved into the middle upstairs bedroom in the Williams home on Auburn Avenue. The elder Williams couple were disposed to celebrate their only daughter’s marriage but not yet her departure from the home—certainly not to the kind of place Mike King could afford as a part-time student and preacher. In later years, it would become evident that factors other than money kept Alberta Williams King in her childhood home, as she would live there for many years after her husband became the highest-paid Negro minister in Atlanta. He was a powerful man who nevertheless bent to the personal domination of another family, particularly its women. Like John D. Rockefeller, King lived with his in-laws until they died.
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    John D. Rockefeller, Jr., now managing the family interests in place of his eighty-eight-year-old father, headed the Rockefeller entourage at the dedication of Sisters Chapel at Spelman College on May 19, 1927. This was front-page news even in the white newspapers. In one of his rare speeches, Rockefeller eulogized the Spelman sisters—his mother and his aunt Lucy—whose estates had paid for the chapel and for whom it was named. The tone of the ceremony was proud and festive, though mindful of racial politics. Every effort was made to foster the notion that Negro education was benign, posing no threat to the social or political order. Observers did not fail to note that the many white dignitaries on the program included the son of the chief chaplain to General Robert E. Lee himself. One of only two Negro speakers was a minister who had co-officiated at the marriage of Mike and Alberta King six months earlier.
    Rockefeller returned to a Baptist project far larger than the chapel—the construction of Riverside Church in New York. The second generation Rockefeller was shifting his interest to theological disputes that would touch the next generation of Kings. With growing alarm, he watched the pitched battles of the Harry Emerson Fosdick controversy, which paralleled the Scopes trial and shaped the world of theology for several decades to come. Fosdick was a preacher of such stature that the prestigious First Presbyterian Church of New York called him to its pulpit even though he was a Baptist. All had gone well until 1922, when Fosdick preached a sermon titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” In it he defended the efforts by liberal theologians such as Albert Schweitzer to reconcile religious faith with both science and modern historical scholarship. The Christian faith did not require strict