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Ministers’ Union, then floor leader of the Georgia delegation to the National Baptist Convention. Later, as the NBC’s national treasurer and a member of both its foreign and home mission boards, Williams held some of the most influential positions of trust and patronage in the church of his time. For his community service, Morehouse conferred an honorary doctorate upon him in 1914, before he had even begun to build the new Ebenezer church. At the end of World War I, he sent Alberta to her mother’s alma mater, Spelman.
    By then, John D. Rockefeller was employing phalanxes of lawyers, bodyguards, and bureaucrats to protect him from those trying to beg or claim his money. In the spring of 1914, the “Ludlow massacre” secured his reputation as a principal villain in the history of labor unions, when Colorado militiamen attacked and burned a tent city of workers on strike against Rockefeller mining interests, killing six men by gunfire and thirteen women and children in the flames. A year later, Laura Spelman Rockefeller died, and the old man was obliged to keep her body in storage for three months until his lawyers worked out a truce with Ohio officials who threatened to arrest him under a $311 million tax judgment if he set foot in Ohio to bury her. Meanwhile, under pressure of old age, the new income tax law, inheritance taxes, and the U.S. government’s antitrust case against Standard Oil, Rockefeller accelerated his charitable contributions, giving $100 million to the new Rockefeller Foundation and another $50 million to his General Education Board, which supported Baptist colleges. Of the latter amount, $10 million went to build a new chapel and expand the divinity school at the University of Chicago. Other Rockefeller donations created stately new buildings along the landscaped quad at Spelman. The Bessie [Rockefeller] Strong Building and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Building were completed by 1918, in time for the education of Alberta Williams. Mike King, later known as Martin Luther King, Sr., and still later as Daddy King, met her while she was studying there.
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    Mike King gazed at Alberta Williams from a considerable distance before he talked with her. To him, the gap between himself and the eminent minister’s daughter was greater than the social distance between her and John D. Rockefeller. The latter two dressed in fine clothes and spoke proper English, whereas Mike King described himself as a semiliterate country bumpkin. Although he schemed to meet Alberta Williams for weeks, and planned to put on what airs he could, the first words he said in response to her greeting were, “Well, I’se preaching in two places.” He was wise enough to know that this would never do.
    Born in December 1899, the second of ten children on a sharecropper’s farm outside Stockbridge, Georgia, King had grown up currying mules, plowing fields, skipping most of what little school there was, and always living in fear of his father James. Late one night, a highly intoxicated James King began beating his wife Delia after starting an argument over whether she should cook a fish. Young Mike King was only fourteen, but he was barrel-chested and strong for his age. Somehow he managed to pull his enraged father off his mother and survive the desperate fight that ensued. When it was over, his father repeatedly vowed to kill him. Mother King eventually sold enough of the family livestock to buy a used Model T Ford for her son’s escape to Atlanta. To Mike King, working as a laborer in an Atlanta tire plant, the car was a prize almost beyond imagination. Aside from status and mobility, the Model T gave him the means to pursue the most coveted profession open to unschooled Negroes, the ministry. The car allowed him to keep his regular job while seeking Sunday work at tiny churches that might hire any untrained circuit preacher who sounded all right and could get himself to their remote