The store looks just like any other Walmart in the U.S. It sits off a busy Stockbridge highway and is sandwiched between fast food restaurants, car service shops and other retailers. However, the Walmart on North Henry Blvd. rests on land where Martin Luther King Sr.’s family toiled as sharecroppers.
“We stand here today on really sacred ground,” said author Jonathan Eig, who has written a new biography about Martin Luther King, Jr. called “King: A Life.” He signed copies and participated in a panel at the Walmart store Saturday. He was joined by Stockbridge Mayor Anthony S. Ford, City Councilman Alphonso Thomas, Martin Luther King Jr.’s nephew Isaac Farris Jr. and former Atlanta Mayor and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young.
Eig said he became interested in writing a book about MLK Jr. while he was working on a different one about Muhammad Ali. When he began researching the King family, he said he couldn’t find out where the ancestors were enslaved.
“Those ancestors were treated as property,” he said. “People and names didn’t matter to the government record keepers.”
Eig said the King family’s name began appearing in public records after the Civil War. They were working in Henry County.
“By 1910, they were on this very land right here, and it was owned at the time by a white family that employed the Kings to farm cotton and other crops,” he said.
At the time, MLK Sr. went by “Mike.” He grew up working, Eig said. At the age of 14 he became frustrated because he thought the white landowners weren’t paying his family enough for the work they did. So, he tied his shoes together, threw them over his shoulder and started walking to Atlanta.
“It was in Atlanta that he began to remake himself and to remake history,” Eig said. “That’s why this land that we stand on today should be recognized as a historical place.”
Farris put the 20-mile walking distance in perspective by explaining that Stockbridge wasn’t really an Atlanta suburb at the time.
“When I was coming up as a kid ... this was the country,” he said. “Atlanta was the city and this was the country. I can remember coming here with my grandfather and it was a day trip almost.”
His grandfather navigated the trip in a world long before Google Maps, he said.
“(My grandfather) would be saying stuff to the driver like, ‘OK, turn by the big tree,’” Farris said. “We weren’t looking for street signs. He was looking for the landscape.”
Young said when the elder King first came to Atlanta he couldn’t read or write. Still, he was ambitious.
“He saw Ebenezer Baptist Church,” Young said. “He says, ‘I’m going to pastor that church one day.’”
He did, but first, the senior King went to school for the first time. Farris and Young said he had to learn to read as a teenager sitting next to elementary school students. Still, the man called “Daddy King” by his family, worked hard enough to eventually gain acceptance to Morehouse College.
“I don’t think he graduated until he was in his thirties,” Young said. “But he always saw the importance of education.”
Councilman Thomas has commemorated MLK Sr. by spearheading an effort to name a street after him in Stockbridge called M. L. King, Sr. Heritage Trail St.
“We call (Stockbridge) the ancestral home of the King family,” he said. “This is the cradle of civil rights because ... without Daddy King what would the civil rights movement be?”
Farris agreed, noting that people shouldn’t feel intimidated by MLK Jr.’s work or legacy.
“I think he’s one of the greatest individuals that lived,” Farris said. “But he was a human being. So that means that we all are capable of contributing like he did.”
