8 Surprising Things You Didn't Know About Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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http://www.alternet.org/activism/8-surprising-things-you-didnt-know-about-dr-martin-luther-king-jr



***SNIP

1. King was born Michael, and loved ones called him Mike.

The future "drum major for justice" was born Michael Lewis King, and family members called him Mike. At some point after his father, the Rev. M.L. King Sr., changed his own name to Martin Luther, the oldest son's name was also changed. Neither man spoke or wrote publicly about the change. The elder MLK insisted that his oldest son's name was incorrectly recorded as Michael at birth, implying that the boy was named after reformer Martin Luther. Some accounts state that both names were changed in 1934 (when Junior was five) following the father's visit to Germany, when King Sr. developed an appreciation for the first Protestant. Other biographers state that King Jr. changed his name as a teenager so as to again be named after his preacher father. Whenever the appellation occurred, it was never filed legally. Like religious figures before him, such as the disciple Simon and the apostle Paul, King underwent a spiritual name change. Though his wife called him Martin, to his big sister Christine, and the rest of his immediate family he was forever Mike.

2. King wanted to marry a white cafeteria worker.

At Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania during the late 1940s, King fell in love with a German cafeteria employee named Betty. Fellow seminarians, both white and black, talked him out of it, partially on the grounds that King's father would frown upon the interracial romance of a son he was grooming for a successor role in the pulpit. Not only would the relationship have been taboo in King's native Atlanta, but even had King chosen to pastor in the North (and further disappoint his father), MLK Sr. would have still viewed the cafeteria worker as below his son's station. Daddy King was dead set against his oldest son "marrying down." David Garrow, in his seminal civil rights book Bearing The Cross, wrote that King never recovered from the heartbreak caused by the socially unacceptable affair. The senior King was not all that enamored with his son's matrimonial choice of conservatory student Coretta Scott either, as his arranged choice of a bride for Martin Jr. was opera singer Mattiwilda Dobbs, whose father founded the Atlanta Civic League and the Atlanta Negro Voters League.

3. Picking tobacco revealed to him a more open society.

When King was 15, and again when he was 18, he worked summers harvesting tobacco in Simsbury, Connecticut, not far from Hartford. His experience as a middle-class son of a prominent black family from Atlanta's prosperous "Sweet" Auburn Avenue performing menial labor in Yankee territory helped shape his future. "On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in astonishment. “After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to.” In a correspondence to his mother, he continued the theme, “I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford. And we went to the largest shows there.”

4. King was not the first black American leader to adopt Gandhian principles.

Dr. King was not the first black leader to tour India and be influenced by the nonviolent teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi. He was preceded by James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Farmer, in turn, learned of Gandhi from Howard University theologian and educator Dr. Howard Thurman. Thurman had met Gandhi, and asked the Mahatma how his ideals might be implemented in the U.S. Gandhi responded that he wished nonviolent resistance as a strategy for social change had more of a global footing. Perhaps, he suggested to the theologian, black Americans could employ the tactic.