In the summer of 1934, when Michael Luther King, Jr., was five years old, his father, Mike Sr., left his church in Atlanta and three children for a summer-long tour of Europe, Africa and the Holy Land. On his way back home he stopped in Berlin to attend a Baptist World Alliance meeting. It was after this trip that Mike Sr. legally changed he and his son’s first names to Martin.
The most popular story is that Mike King took the name Martin after his trip to Europe to honor Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation. The elder King had visited historic sites in Berlin where Martin Luther had defied the Catholic church.
But according to his 1980 autobiography, Daddy King said that he legally changed his name to Martin to abide by his dad’s deathbed wishes in 1933. Apparently, Daddy King’s mother and father wanted different names for their son when he was born in 1899. His mother wanted Michael, and his father wanted Martin. In his autobiography, Daddy King also said that he had started going by Martin after his mother’s death in 1924.
Still, he named his son Michael Jr. in 1929, although he claimed that he had intended to name his son Martin from the very beginning.
According to State Department records, King Jr.’s birth certificate was not filed until April 12, 1934, when he was five years and three months old.
Why did it take him five years to rectify the problem with the name?
According to Taylor Branch, the author of a three-volume study of the King years, King Jr. only commented publicly once about his name. After the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, King said that “perhaps” he had “earned” his name.
But to his childhood friends and to close intimates, King Jr. was always either M.L., Mike or Little Mike. His dad was Reverend King, Daddy King or simply Mike to people who had known him his whole life.
