Daddy King: An Autobiography

From coming of age under poverty and the looming threat of racial violence to preaching from the Ebenezer pulpit for forty years, King, Sr., candidly reveals his life inside the civil rights movement, illustrating the profound influence he had on his son. Born in 1899 to a family of sharecroppers in Stockbridge, Georgia, Martin Luther King, Sr., came of age under the looming threat of violence at the hands of white landowners. Growing up, he watched as his family was crushed by the weight of poverty and racism, and he resolved to escape to Atlanta to answer the calling to become a preacher. Before he engaged in acts of political dissent and stepped to the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he would preach for more than forty years, King Sr. strove to earn high school and college diplomas while working double shifts as a truck driver, and fought to win the heart of his future wife, Alberta Bunch Williams.