Ed King (activist)

All the Way is a 2016 drama based on the historic events of 1964, the first year of the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Originally broadcast on HBO, the film was directed by Jay Roach and adapted by Robert Schenkkan from his original play of the same name. Bryan Cranston reprised his role as Johnson from the 2014 Broadway production of the play. Gregory Marcel portrays Rev. Ed King in a version of the scene from the play in which Hubert Humphrey offers the President's compromise solution to the renegade delegation.

In 2014, Ed King collaborated with Trent Watts on Ed King's Mississippi: Behind the Scenes of Freedom Summer, a book documenting civil rights activities in Mississippi during 1964. In addition to King's personal accounts of pivotal events in his home state, the book includes dozens of previously unpublished photographs taken by the minister, including informal images of Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, and Mississippi civil rights workers.

All the Way captured the 2014 Tony Award for Outstanding Play, and Bryan Cranston, in the role of Lyndon B. Johnson, won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. Ethan Phillips portrays Rev. King in a pivotal scene in which Hubert Humphrey presents the President's compromise solution that gives the renegades two at-large seats at the convention.

King was also a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a member of the Democratic National Committee, and a delegate to three Democratic National Conventions. He and other surviving MFDP delegates were honored at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston on the 40th anniversary of their efforts to end racial discrimination in the Democratic party.

Hanson, Lynette, "The Rev. Ed King", Jackson Free Press, 30 October 2003

From 1973 to 1977, King served as president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi and a member of the ACLU’s National Board.

In 1970, King joined the Methodist Board of Missions (later known as Global Ministries) as a special envoy giving lectures and sermons in New York and India, where he and his family lived during 1971 while King was involved with nonviolence development research at the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Foundation in New Delhi.

In 1967, King left Tougaloo to devote himself to the Delta Ministry, the church group he founded to support the Freedom Summer initiative. The Delta Ministry would grow into a longer-term project promoting the economic development of the Mississippi Delta region.

In 1966, Ed King was nominated as MFDP candidate for the Third District Congressional seat. Rev. King ran against incumbent John Bell Williams as part of another interracial ticket with Rev. Clifton Whitley. Ed King received 22 percent of vote, the best showing of any MFDP candidate that year.

Building on the success of the Freedom Vote, King become a leading organizer of Freedom Summer (1964), a volunteer campaign to help black Mississippians reclaim their right to vote, a basic civil right they were denied by Jim Crow societal barriers built into the voter registration process and other discriminatory laws and regulations. Over 1,000 volunteers from all over the country—mostly white college students—came to Mississippi to help canvas black communities, encouraging people to register and instructing them in the process.

Historian John Dittmer observed that by the summer of 1964, Ed King had become "the most visible white activist in the Mississippi [civil rights] movement, and he paid a heavy price for honoring his convictions." Since becoming a civil rights activist, King had been arrested and jailed, beaten, and even hospitalized with injuries related to an attempt on his life.

King’s focus was on getting white moderates across the state involved while preventing an eruption of racial violence in response to the federally-mandated integration of public schools scheduled for the fall of 1964.

On August 6, 1964, the MFDP held a statewide convention in which membership decided to mount a challenge to the credentials of the Mississippi Democratic party by naming their own alternate slate of electors to attend the Democratic National Convention scheduled to take place in Atlantic City, New Jersey, later in the month. Ed King was elected as National Committeeman and a member of the MFDP leadership, along with Victoria Gray, Lawrence Guyot, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Aaron Henry. Despite unrelenting pressure from the White Citizens’ Council and other Jim Crow supporters, the MFDP elected 68 delegates to the Democratic National Convention. (Of the four whites on the delegate list, three were connected to Tougaloo College.)

From 1964 to 1968, King served as MFDP National Committeeman with Victoria Gray as Committeewoman, on the Democratic National Committee. He was also served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and 1972. In 2004, at the Democratic National Convention held in Boston, Massachusetts, delegates recognized the 40th anniversary of the MFDP challenge by honoring Fannie Lou Hamer, Ed King and the other "outlaw" delegates who championed desegregation of the Democratic party.

King appears as a character in All the Way, a Robert Schenkkan play depicting the first year of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, with an emphasis on events surrounding the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After successful passage of the historic legislation, Johnson's bid to retain the White House in the 1964 presidential election is complicated by turmoil at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where the upstart Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party bids to unseat the all-white, official delegation that claims to represent the state.

In 1963, King played a part in an act of civil disobedience that gave the movement some of its most iconic images. On May 28, he and a small group of Tougaloo students and faculty drove 10 miles to downtown Jackson, joining multiracial demonstrators attempting to dine at a whites-only lunch counter in the Woolworth's store near the Governor’s mansion. As one of several demonstrations planned with guidance from Medgar Evers of the NAACP, the sit-in was a small-scale challenge to the Jim Crow custom of denying black Americans their most basic rights.

In 1963, very few black citizens were registered to vote in the American South. To demonstrate that black Americans were willing and able to participate in the electoral process, civil rights activists invited the state’s black population to participate in the Freedom Vote, a non-binding mock election scheduled to take place in parallel with the 1963 Mississippi gubernatorial race between two white establishment candidates, Paul B. Johnson Jr. and Rubel Phillips.

In October 1963, SNCC organizer and voting rights activist Bob Moses asked King to become the Freedom Vote candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi and running mate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) candidate for Governor, black pharmacist Aaron Henry.

In 1962, Ernst Borinski alerted King that the chaplaincy of Tougaloo College was vacant and urged him to apply for the post. Medgar Evers was more direct about the opportunity: “You have to come back because we need you, because this, my friend, is your calling.”

King received two degrees from Boston University: Master of Divinity (1961) and Master of Sacred Theology (1963).

In March 1960, Ed King took leave from his seminary studies to volunteer in Montgomery, Alabama, where, on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he helped organize secret interracial meetings where black students could mingle with white ministers and students from Huntingdon College. At this point, King preferred to work behind the scenes, building bridges between blacks and whites. He had made it clear to the Fellowship that he didn't want to take part in sit-ins or other activities that could result in his arrest—and bring notoriety that would prevent him from becoming the pastor of a white church in Mississippi. But the course of events led in another direction.

After graduating from Millsaps in 1958, King left Mississippi to attend Boston University School of Theology, where he became a regular participant in interdisciplinary meetings of religious, pacifist, and civil rights activists.

In December 1958, he met Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, starting a friendship that led to his involvement in the planning of the 1960 civil rights sit-ins with Rev. Jim Lawson of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It was in Montgomery in March 1960 that Ed King was first arrested for acts of civil disobedience.

King also attended the University of Michigan (summer 1956) and Harvard Divinity School (on a Merrill Fellowship, 1966).

Ralph Edwin King Jr. (born September 20, 1936), better known as Ed King, is a United Methodist minister, civil rights activist, and retired educator. He was a key figure in historic civil rights events taking place in Mississippi, including the Jackson Woolworth’s sit-in of 1963 and the Freedom Summer project in 1964. Rev. King held the position of Chaplain and Dean of Students, 1963–1967, at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. At this critical juncture of the civil rights movement, historian John Dittmer described King as “the most visible white activist in the Mississippi movement.”

King was born on September 20, 1936, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Ralph Edwin King Sr. and Julia Wilma Tucker King. His father, whose family came from West Virginia and Louisiana, was an engineer with the Mississippi River Commission. His mother’s family had deep roots in the antebellum history of Mississippi. King’s great-grandfather had served under General Robert E. Lee, and his grandfather, J.W. Tucker, was sheriff of Warren County, Mississippi.