MLK’s sister has fond memories of family home

Martin didn’t hatch the plan. His younger brother A.D. did. But Martin went along with it, and so did their sister Christine, the oldest.

They borrowed their grandmother’s fox fur, the one with the head intact, complete with those beady black eyes. Stuck it on a pole. Then the three King children — minister’s children, no less — crouched down behind the shrubs in their front yard, and when people walked by on Auburn Avenue, bam! They’d push it up over the bushes, right at them.

Enlarge this image

JESSICA McGOWAN/jmcgowan@ajc.com

‘He was a typical child and he had a normal, typical boyhood,’ Christine King Farris says of her brother Martin.

Enlarge this image

JESSICA McGOWAN/jmcgowan@ajc.com

About 62,000 visitors toured the National Historic Site last year. National Park Service Rangers give tours daily.

Enlarge this image

JESSICA McGOWAN/jmcgowan@ajc.com

As boys, Alfred Daniel and Martin Luther shared this bedroom at the King home on Auburn Avenue.

IF YOU GO
• King Birth Home tours, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Free, conducted by National Park Service rangers. Reservations must be made at MLK National Historic Site Visitor Center in person. 450 Auburn Ave. 404-331-5190, www.nps.gov.malu.
• On Monday, the Park Service has an open house and no reservations are needed. Rangers will be stationed throughout the home to talk about its history.
• Book reading and signing. Christine King Farris will give a short talk on "Through It All" and sign copies 3-5 p.m. Sunday at the King Center Auditorium. Bernice A. King, King's daughter, also will sign books on sale at the King Center.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

“The fright on those people’s faces, and the hollerin’!” recalls Christine King Farris. Standing in her old front yard, her eyes light up and she laughs easily.

Outside the National Historical Site at 501 Auburn Ave., people stop, gape, take photos, pay homage. Inside, they stand respectfully and peer into roped-off rooms on tours given by the National Park Service. No taxidermied foxes pop up to terrorize them.

To its visitors (62,000 last year), the house where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born and lived for his first 12 years is a shrine and a museum. To Farris, it’s the home where her father, “Daddy King,” quizzed the children on politics at the dinner table, where her mother held rehearsals for the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, where she learned to bake cakes with her grandmother.

And where her brother M.L., the childhood nickname she still uses, decapitated her dolls and left the pieces scattered around the house in that special way that little brothers have of tormenting their sisters.

“People want to go, ‘Ohhh, Dr. King!’ ” she says, mimicking a fluttery, sycophantic voice. “They want to make him a saint, which he was not.

“I don’t want people to paint him as some kind of icon,” she continues. “He was a typical child and he had a normal, typical boyhood. I want children to be able to identify with him, to know that they, too, can make a contribution.”

Farris is 81. Her brother Martin would be turning 80 Jan. 15. Youngest child A.D. (Alfred Daniel), also a Baptist minister and activist, died in 1969, a year after his famous brother; he’d be 78.

An associate professor of education at Spelman College, Farris finally has written her memoir, “Through It All: Reflections on My Life, My Family and My Faith.” It follows “My Brother Martin,” a children’s book she wrote to show how utterly normal her brother was as a boy, so that others won’t be afraid to attempt what he did.

How normal? She stands in the home’s ancient, tiny kitchen and looks at the sink. When it came time to wash dishes after supper, she recalls, M.L. invariably needed to use the bathroom.

Down the hall from the kitchen is the living room, where the King family’s piano still stands. Their mother, Alberta Williams King, hired a music teacher to give the three King children piano lessons, but only Christine stuck with it. M.L. didn’t, but he learned just enough to memorize the first few measures of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”

After he was famous, she recalls, “He would visit people and sit down at the piano play the first few measures of ‘Moonlight Sonata.’”

She switches again to that voice of the overly worshipful. “Oh, Dr. King, we didn’t know you could play piano!” He could, but he had pretty much run through his repertoire at that point.

Farris is taking The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on a private, and quite rare, tour of King’s boyhood home; being allowed to photograph the interior is even rarer. She has recently arrived from services at Ebenezer and is still in her Sunday best: a tangerine dress, jacket with jeweled lapels and wide-brimmed hat, all of it matching. Her history and Ebenezer’s are entwined: Her brother, father and grandfather were all pastors there.

She moves slowly, sometimes. But when it comes time to climb the steep stairs in the house, she takes them decisively, without pausing. She points out a wooden railing along the hall on the second floor, which looks straight down the stairway to the first floor.

Time for another story: One night when M.L. was young, he was supposed to be in bed asleep in the second-story bedroom he shared with A.D. But his mother was holding choir practice and he snuck out to listen to the voices from below.

He sat on the railing, fell asleep on the spot, and fell straight down to the hard wooden first floor. There isn’t a parent alive who can look at the distance from the railing to the floor and not feel a little sick at the thought of a child falling that far.

The King Birth Home was built in 1895, and was known as the Williams House after the Rev. A.D. Williams (namesake of A.D. King) and his wife, Jennie, bought the house in 1909. He was the pastor of Ebenezer, and the house was only about a block away.

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. married the Williamses’ only daughter, Alberta, he moved into his in-laws’ house. The Williamses took a downstairs bedroom, the Kings an upstairs room. It was there the three King children were born.

When Christine came, first, in 1927, she was early and the Kings had not yet bought a crib. So she went straight from the birthing bed into a drawer in their dresser, where she stayed a couple of nights until they bought a crib.

The Kings eventually moved on to a nicer brick house on Boulevard in 1941, when M.L. was 12. But it was here, in those early years, that he was formed, Farris says.

“People think he just came,” she says. “He didn’t just come.

“My grandfather, he was a freedom fighter, so to speak. He led a boycott against what’s now The Atlanta Journal-Constitution because they were saying negative things about black people. He led another protest to get a bond issue for the establishment of [Atlanta’s] first black high school, Booker T. Washington High School.

“Then my father came along and took people to vote. So my brother saw all of this. It was part of him. It was part of his upbringing.”