Happy King Day POU!
This week we will highlight greats in the word of Pool and we start it off with none other than MLK himself!
King’s love of pool has been well documented. There’s a famous photo of him lining up a shot with the pool cue behind his back, a shot that only a skillful player could make or even attempt. Biographies say that King, to the dismay of his more traditionally Baptist father, took up pool at Crozier Theological Seminary while pursuing his doctorate. In a book called “Reflections on Our Pastor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” one of King’s former parishioners says King used pool to connect to Montgomery residents ignored by other preachers.
“I knew some of the guys who hung out in the vicinity of the pool room,” Wiley Thomas writes. “One or two of them were real thugs. However, these, too, loved Martin Luther King Jr.
“Wherever he went the pool room element followed. This element usually will not follow preachers, but then preachers do not usually go to pool rooms either.”
When racists firebombed King’s home in Montgomery, there were some members of Dexter who rushed over, Thomas writes, “but most of the people standing in the dark were community folk. The common people who loved and admired him.”
Despite having read of King’s love of pool, it wasn’t until Wednesday that I’d talked to anyone about what it was like playing with him. “He was good,” Alexander said Wednesday. “He was good,” and he described how calmly King would call out the shots he was about to make.
In the 50 years since his assassination, King has been sanitized and deified. He’s been stripped of his humanity, leaving much of the public with the impression of him as an ethereal civil rights saint. And that image of him contradicts one of his most salient arguments, that “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.”