BV Sports | King Excels at YMCA Hoops
Before Heroism, King Was an Athlete
By Ray Holloman, AOL BlackVoices
Before he was Martin Luther King Jr., champion of Montgomery, Ala., hero of the Civil Rights Movement, and the second child of the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., the man who would become a beacon of American possibility was simply an Atlanta boy named M.L. He would become the calm, assured orator that marched the nation ahead to the unyielding drumbeat of civil equality; but first he was a boy of the 1930s, learning life’s lessons on the dusty diamonds of abandoned lots and the creaking hardwood floors of an aging basketball court.
Separating the man from the icon in the study of Martin Luther King is like separating the cream from your coffee, but behind the legend is the human possibility that makes King’s story so enthralling. The story not of King the legend, but of King the boy, of King the athlete.
In his application to Crozer Theological Seminary in 1948, his 19th year, King listed himself as 5-foot-7 and 150 pounds. But as in his more public and better-chronicled life, King let no obstacle stop him.
Depending upon which biography of King’s life you might accept, his first brush with the overarching racism of 1930s Atlanta occurred on a baseball diamond. When the 5-year-old M.L. and his baseball chum became old enough to attend elementary school, King discovered that while he would be at Yonge Street Elementary School, the black elementary school in Atlanta’s segregated school system, his white friend would attend the white elementary school.
Concurrently, the friend’s mother barred M.L. from playing with her son. While the story’s setting on the baseball realm may be apocryphal (and may well be intended to make King’s story more approachable for children as the baseball field motif occurs in children’s books more often than legitimate biography), the underlying event is unquestionably true. The “grocer’s son,” -- unnamed to history in biographies -- imbued in the young King a fully codified and unforgettable image of racism. The distinct color line on the playing field left King with an unshakable distrust of white people, one which he would only alleviate long after leaving the baseball diamonds of his youth.
But the story of M.L. the athlete isn’t entirely a story of racism and defeat. He excelled at athletics and forged the confidence so important to the remainder of his life.
Athletics also brought the young M.L. to the nexus of the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta – the Butler Street YMCA. King’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood was, in the 1940s, one of prosperity. Called the “richest Negro street in the world,” by Fortune magazine, the area was the cultural, political and economic home of Atlanta’s black elite. At the center of it all was the Butler Street YMCA, the so-called “black city hall” of Atlanta. In 1942, the Butler Street YMCA gave birth to the Hungry Club Forum, a discussion group founded so that black and white Atlantans could have lunch and discuss business and social issues, a multicultural establishment years ahead of its time in heavily segregated Atlanta. Later, the YMCA became the police headquarters for Atlanta’s eight black police officers, hired as the city’s department bowed in reluctant acceptance of a court order to hire African-American officers.