When Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929, his birth certificate listed his name as "Michael King Jr." - after his father Michael King Senior. How and when did Michael King become Martin Luther King?

 

 

In 1926 King began his studies to become a Baptist minister at the Morehouse School of Religion. That same year, on Thanksgiving Day, he married Alberta Williams in the Ebenezer Baptist Church that her father headed in Atlanta. Michael and Alberta King eventually had three children: a daughter, Willie Christine (1927), Michael Luther Jr. (later Martin Luther King Jr., 1929-1968), and another son, Alfred Daniel Williams (1930-1969).

 

After the death of Alberta's father, King took over as the pastor of the Ebenezer Church in March 1931, a position he would hold for four decades. He was a respected religious leader, one who kept his church going even during the difficult years of the Great Depression. Soon the "young Rev. King was the best-paid Negro minister in the city."¹ In 1934 he was able to join ten other Baptist ministers for a trip to the Holy Land and Europe, which included a visit to Berlin, Germany, where the Fifth Baptist World Alliance Congress (Kongress des Baptistischen Weltbundes) was being held in August at the Sportpalast on Potsdamer Straße in Berlin-Schöneberg. (1934 was the 100th anniversary of the first Baptist congregation in Germany, founded in April 1834 by Johann Gerhard Oncken in Hamburg with just seven members.) King may have traveled to Berlin knowing that the next Baptist World Alliance gathering was to be held in Atlanta in 1939.

 

Hitler was now in power in Germany and Nazi banners were hanging in the large hall beside Christian crosses. Hitler himself had spoken during Nazi rallies at the Sportpalast (torn down in 1973). Later, in 1943, it was the site where Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels declared "total war" against the Allies. (Allied bombs damaged the Sportpalast in 1944, but it was rebuilt during the war.) While the German press noted the racially integrated audience (there was a delegation of 30 black Baptists, including Rev. King), and a church commission on "Racialism" strongly condemned the color bar and anti-Semitism, many of the American Baptists in Berlin viewed the non-smoking, non-drinking Hitler and the Nazis in a more positive light. But even most German Baptists failed to see the danger the Nazis posed to them and the world. The Nazis achieved a propaganda coup that made people think, erroneously, that the Nazis were accepting of the Christian faithful and their churches.

 

Over the years there was a transformation of the names from Michael King to Michael Luther King and finally Martin Luther King. Close friends and family continued to call both men Mike or M.L. It was not until July 1957 that the Michael King Jr. birth certificate was amended to read Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Martin Luther King Sr. died of a heart attack in Atlanta on November 11, 1984 - 16 years after the assassination of his son in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.

 

The Trip to Divided Berlin in 1964

In September 1964, at the invitation of Willy Brandt (then West Berlin's mayor, later West German chancellor) 35-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to West Berlin to speak at a ceremony commemorating the assassinated US president John F. Kennedy who had visited West Germany in 1963.

 

	During his brief visit to East Berlin in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon here in the Protestant St. Marienkirche.   PHOTO © Hyde Flippo

Early in the morning of September 13, the day after King's arrival at Tempelhof Airport, East German border guards had shot and wounded 21-year-old Michael Meyer as he was trying to escape from East Berlin. He swam across the Spree River along the Berlin Wall but found he was still in East Berlin. After being struck by several bullets, Meyer was rescued by an American soldier who heroically managed somehow to pull him over the Wall to safety. When King learned of the incident, he hurried to the Kreuzberg district to witness the scene of the rescue himself. The Wall was then only three years old. (In September 2010 a memorial plaque was placed at the site of the Berlin Wall shooting on Stallschreiber Straße to commemorate Dr. King's visit there in 1964.)

 

After a ceremony at the Schöneberg city hall where JFK had given his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, King spoke to an audience of over 20,000 people in the Waldbühne amphitheater near the Olympic Stadium. The occasion was "Tag der Kirche" (Day of the Church).

 

 

Although it was the same sermon he had delivered earlier at the Waldbühne amphitheater in the West, the East Berlin audience's reaction to his words of "freedom" and "civil disobedience" was dramatically different. His appearance was literally a godsend for the East German clergy, who were constantly confronted with opposition from the GDR government. In fact, the pastor of the Marienkirche, Werner Arnold, had recently been imprisoned by the authorities for his outspoken criticism of the Berlin Wall and helping smuggle people across the border.

 

 

Dr. King also took time to speak with black students at East Berlin's Humboldt University, not far from the Marienkirche. Because of the standing-room-only audience at the first church, a second appearance was arranged at the last minute for the Sophienkirche, near the Brecht Theater. (In both cases, people learned of King's visit only by word of mouth.) King was mobbed by autograph seekers before he left the church. That evening, invited by his host Gerhard Schmitt, an East German clergyman, he visited a Lutheran hospice near the Friedrichstraße train station, met with other clergy in the hotel's restaurant, and signed the hospice guestbook. In May 2010 a memorial plaque was installed on the building, now the  Hotel Albrechtshof, to commemorate Dr. King's visit.

 

It was midnight before King finally returned to West Berlin. No mention of his amazing visit to the capital of the GDR ever appeared in the East German media. GDR citizens were not allowed to hear or read words such as: "Here on either side of the Wall are God's children and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact."

 

Back in the western half of the city, an exhausted Martin Luther King spent the night at the Berlin Senate's guesthouse and flew from West Berlin to Munich the next day. Several days later he had a private meeting with the pope before returning to Atlanta. In December he would fly to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize.