For years, we’ve been trying, with some frustration, to identify the white boy who introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to racism.
Dr. King told the story himself, first in a college essay, and then again in interviews, until it formed the core of his origin story. It went like this: He was 3 years old and still known as Mike, the name on his birth certificate, when he made friends with a white boy whose family owned a store across the street from the King family’s home in Atlanta. They played together almost every day. In 1935, when they turned 6 and entered school — “separate schools of course,” Dr. King later wrote — the parents of the white boy told their son he was no longer permitted to play with Mike.
Shocked, Mike asked his parents to explain. They sat at the family’s dinner table where “for the first time I was made aware of the existence of a race problem,” he would later write. “I had never been conscious of it before.”
In Dr. King’s account, Alberta Williams King and Martin Luther King Sr. tried to explain to their son the tragedy of American racism. They told him that many people used skin color to define and classify humans, to denigrate them, humiliate them, isolate them, deny them justice and profit from their punishment and penury.
Alberta Williams King reassured her son, “You’re as good as anyone.” Dr. King would say years later his mother’s response to his youthful pain gave him a sense of “somebody-ness.”
The question we are now forced to confront is what happens if we can’t confirm this story. As part of our work as King scholars, we’ve been hunting through archives and public records for seven years in search of Dr. King’s young white friend, and while we have one plausible possibility, we cannot be sure. We experienced disappointment as we hit one dead end after another. We began to wonder if Dr. King’s story could be trusted. We know from history and from human nature that origin stories are often shaped to serve other ends than a literal recounting of events.
Our conclusion is that a core piece of Dr. King’s biography, one that in his own telling propelled him to become his future self, can’t yet be verified. This raises a whole host of problems. What would it mean if he’d confused the details? What would it mean if he’d fabricated the story entirely?
As scholars and biographers of Dr. King, we admit we are prone to obsess about the details of his life. Want to know how many points he had in the Morehouse intramural basketball championship game? “Will Shoot,” the nickname his friends later gave him for his shoot-first-pass-never mentality, scored eight of his team’s 47 points. Want to know what brand of cologne he wore? It was Aramis.
Our search for the identity of the white boy has been driven by more than a fixation over detail. Dr. King told the story to make a larger point about the damage that racism does to all of us. Our history of legal and self-imposed separation continues to sit at the core of some of our nation’s most serious spiritual and political crises. With that in mind, we thought that learning what happened to Mike King’s young friend might provide insight into racism’s long-lasting costs.
There are some things we do know. Dr. King’s older sister, Christine King Farris, told her son she remembered her brother’s story and his playmate, but didn’t remember the name. City directories for 1935 confirm that there was a grocery on Auburn Avenue across from the King home, but city directories and census records indicate that the store’s proprietor, Minnie Smith, was a single woman with no children.
A white family owned the store a few years earlier, and that white family did have a child the same age as young Mike King, named Melvin.
As we investigated, we learned Melvin’s father was a Jewish refugee born in the Russian Empire who arrived in the United States in 1913. Despite having only a seventh-grade education, he assimilated with stunning speed. Within a single generation he had changed his name, presumably to make it sound more American, purchased a home, started a business and sent his children to college. Melvin attended Boys High, a public school where Black students were denied entry. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Georgia, a public college where Black students were also denied entry. He served in the Marine Corps. He married and had two children. He went into the family business, owning and operating a small grocery store in one of Atlanta’s predominantly Black neighborhoods.
In 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated and violence erupted in Black neighborhoods all over the country, a grocery store owned by Melvin went up in flames.
If Melvin was the boy who inadvertently opened Dr. King’s eyes to racism, the fire would represent an extraordinary and bitter irony. But we can’t be sure. The facts don’t entirely line up. Urban renewal and decay have transformed Auburn Avenue, erasing most of its original structures. We contacted one of Melvin’s children, who told us that his father, who died in 2003, never mentioned a childhood connection to Dr. King. With no other way to corroborate the story, we are withholding Melvin’s last name.
A new piece of evidence emerged last year: A photo discovered in a Wisconsin archive shows young Mike King kneeling in front of a grocery store, his brother A.D. behind him. There’s a sign on the outer wall of the shop. It appears to say something like “Harriman Grocery.” Alas, we couldn’t find any stores near the King home with a name that began with the letter H.
Where does this leave us? As historians, we’re fond of primary sources and hard, cold facts. If pressed, we would judge Dr. King’s story as “probably true.”
We’re also aware of this hard, cold fact: History isn’t concrete. It moves and changes with us. It’s not even in the past, as Baldwin, Faulkner and others remind us. We shape it as we speak. Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question about Mike King’s white playmate. Perhaps a better question is what the story meant to Dr. King, and what it means to us today.
Origin stories help us make sense of the world. The Greek and Roman columns in Washington and your local county courthouse are vivid reminders of America’s efforts to hitch a new democracy to its ancient antecedents. There are moral lessons we obtain from a hero’s origin story, whether it’s that of George Washington or Luke Skywalker. And those moral lessons can be more important than factual accuracy (in the case of Luke Skywalker, that argument is easy).
In the first recorded instance in which he told the story, Mike King had already changed his name to Martin Luther King Jr., which is also part of his origin story. At 19, he had moved to Pennsylvania to attend Crozer Theological Seminary, living outside the strictures of the Jim Crow South. He told the story of the grocery store owner’s son in a class assignment dedicated to tracing each student’s religious development.
Before he was famous, he used the story to communicate to his teacher and fellow students how he arrived at his faith and then journeyed toward loving his enemies.
His experience with the white grocer’s son was hardly his only exposure to the bruising effects of racism. When he was around 8 years old, he was slapped by a white woman at a department store because she mistakenly believed he had stepped on her foot. He and his father were denied service while shopping for shoes when they declined to sit in the back of the store. And at 15, he suffered the curses and threats of a white bus driver when he momentarily refused to give up his seat for a white passenger.
He didn’t need to be rejected by a white 6-year-old to know that all the schools he attended in Atlanta were segregated by race and inferior to better-funded white schools. Neither did he need that child to understand the menacing intent of the Ku Klux Klansmen who paraded down his street. But he told the story of the grocer’s son over and over, because once he suffered the afflictions of racism, nothing was ever the same.
The structure of Dr. King’s origin story fits into a longer tradition. From Frederick Douglass to Rosa Parks, Black Americans have told similar stories of being evicted from their childhood innocence by early racist encounters — thrown out of the Garden of Eden by no sin except the color of their skin. As the civil rights activist James Farmer once wrote, “Every Black child in the South has an early experience of racism that shafts his soul.”
Dr. King, like his forebears, told his story in the hopes that others might understand his struggle, as well as our struggle as a nation. His parents and Sunday-school teachers told him that his religion compelled him to love the people who enslaved his ancestors and continued to insist on his inferiority. He had to wrestle with a question that struck him forcefully as a child: “How could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends?”
His mother’s message — “You’re as good as anyone” — set him on a journey to become one of the most inspiring and transformative leaders in American history. His belief in his own “somebody-ness,” and his hope in the potential of American democracy, pushed him to challenge not only segregation laws but all of racism, all of America’s economic and cultural injustice, all its military aggression and all its hate. It was this commitment that led him to take unpopular stances and confront powerful rivals.
Sometimes, myth matters more than fact, and as historians, we have to respect the power of a great story and see it for what it is. In talking about his personal introduction to racism, Dr. King sought to make a point about our collective journey: that our self-imposed division threatened to rot not only individual souls but the soul of our nation. And that’s a story we still need to tell, even if some of the details remain unknowable.
Lerone Martin is the senior editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, a professor at Stanford University and the author of “Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr.” Jonathan Eig is the author of “King: A Life,” winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
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