Alfred King
*Alfred King was born on this date in 1930. He was a Black Baptist minister and civil rights activist.
Alfred Daniel King was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the son of Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. He was the youngest of their three children (the other two being Willie Christine and Martin Luther King Jr.
Less interested in academics than his siblings, King started a family as a teenager and attended college later in life. He was married in 1950 to Naomi Ruth Barber King, with whom he had five children. Although, as a youth, King had resisted his father's ministerial urgings, he eventually began assisting his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
In 1959, King graduated from Morehouse College. That same year, he became pastor of Mount Vernon First Baptist Church in Newnan, Georgia. King was arrested, along with his older brother Martin and 70 others, while participating in an October 1960 lunch-counter sit-in in Atlanta. In 1963, King became a leader of the Birmingham campaign while pastoring at First Baptist Church of Ensley in Birmingham, Alabama. On May 11, 1963, King's house was bombed.
In August, after a bomb exploded at the home of a prominent Black lawyer in downtown Birmingham, outraged citizens, intent on revenge, poured into the streets. While rocks were thrown at gathering policemen and the situation escalated, King climbed on top of a parked car and shouted to the rioters in an attempt to quell their fury: "My friends, we have had enough problems tonight. If you're going to kill someone, then kill me; Stand up for your rights, but with nonviolence."
Like his brother, he believed in maintaining nonviolence in direct action campaigns. However, unlike his brother, King remained mainly outside the media spotlight. As one of his associates said, "Not being in the limelight never seemed to affect him, but because he stayed in the background, many people never knew that he was deeply involved, too." King was involved in the Selma demonstrations (Bloody Sunday) and participated in the Poor People's Campaign: Operation Food Basket, the sanitation living wage campaign, March in Washington, and many more.
King tended to stay in his brother's shadow, and many people never even knew that Martin Luther King Jr. had a brother. He supported his brother throughout the movement but never took the limelight away from him. King's side office at Zion Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, was bombed. King was in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when his brother was murdered in the room directly beneath Martin's at the Lorraine Hotel and had to be restrained by others due to the shock and emotion he was experiencing.
For the last part of his life, he suffered from alcoholism and depression and was active in the work on behalf of SCLC. On July 21, 1969, nine days before his 39th birthday, A. D. King was found dead in the swimming pool at his home. The cause of his death was an accidental drowning. His father said in his autobiography, "Alveda had been up the night before, she said, talking with her father and watching a television movie with him. He'd seemed unusually quiet and not very interested in the film. But he had wanted to stay up, and Alveda left him sitting in an easy chair, staring at the TV, when she went off to bed... I had questions about A.D.'s death, and I still have them now. He was a good swimmer. Why did he drown? I don't know – I don't know that we will ever know what happened."
Naomi King, his widow, said, "There is no doubt in my mind that the system killed my husband. My Boaz was murdered."
