The Birth Of “Little Mike”
When the world’s most celebrated civil rights leader was born on January 15, 1929, the doctor didn't write the baby’s name as “Martin Luther King Jr” on the birth certificate. Instead, he wrote the baby's name as “Michael King Jr., after this father, Michael King Sr.
For the first few years of his life, the little boy who would one day move the soul of the entire nation was simply known as “Little Mike.” His identity seems to be settled like any other boy of his age until a transformation trip across the Atlantic changed everything.
The Trip To Berlin,1934
In the year 1934, the elder Michael King, a well known pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, travelled to Berlin, Germany, for the Baptist World Alliance Congress. This was not an ordinary trip; it was a pilgrimage to the heart of the Protestant Reformation at a time when there was immense global tension.
While in Germany, the elder king was deeply moved by the story of Martin Luther, the 16th-century monk who famously nailed his “95 Theses” to a church door, challenging the most powerful institution of his time. King Sr. saw a parallel between Luther’s courage to protest institutional corruption and the radical injustices he faced back home in the American South.
A Rebranding Of Purpose
Michael King Sr. was so inspired by the German reformer’s legacy of protest and reformation that he made up his mind to perform a radical act of rebranding. Upon returning to Atlanta, he not only started calling himself by the name of “Martin Luther King Sr.,” he decided that his son should also be called as “Martin Luther King Jr.” It was not just an ordinary name change; his father was efficiently setting his son's destiny; aligning his name with a historical lineage of those who speak truth to power.
The Legal Trail: A 28-Year Wait
It is quite interesting to know that though the young King began using “Martin Luther” when he was just five years old, the change was not immediately reflected in his birth certificate for many years, probably decades. It was not until 1957, when he had already led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and became a national figure that he finally amended his birth records to officially adopt the name we know today.
Why Does Mystery Matters Today?
Knowing and understanding that MLK was once “Michael” reminds us that leaders are not just born; rather they are shaped by their acquired experiences, their heritage and even the “earned” names they carry along with themselves forward. By adopting the name of the Great Reformer, King Jr. not only inherited a title, he promised to fulfill a mission to reform a broken system through the “fierce urgency of now.”
Martin Luther King Jr. later reflected on this in East Berlin in 1964, telling a crowded church: “I come to you not altogether as a stranger, for the name that I happen to have is a name so familiar to you….. and I am happy that my parents decided to name me after the great Reformer.”
