Remembering a Civil Rights Leader from Pottsville

“Like a fly in a bowl of milk, I endured those years without any notable traumas induced by my blackness.”

Charles H. King, Jr. wrote those words in his 1983 memoir, Fire in My Bones, looking back on his childhood in Pottsville. By then, King was no longer simply a boy from Schuylkill County. He had become a minister, a Civil Rights leader, a staff member of the 1967 Kerner Commission, and the founder of Atlanta’s Urban Crisis Center – an organization that forced Americans, in sometimes jarring fashion, to confront their racial attitudes. But before the national work, before the marches and seminars and headlines, there was a small coal town in the 1930s and a Black child learning how to navigate it.

Pottsville was a city of about 24,000 people when King was growing up there during the Great Depression. Fewer than 300 of the city’s residents were African American. In that environment, difference was amplified by scarcity caused by the economic crisis and racial prejudice.

King learned quickly how to make himself acceptable to his white classmates and neighbors. “I was the class clown, the cutup,” he remembered. Humor became his armor and performance became protection. He leaned into caricature because it made teachers and classmates comfortable. And with striking honesty, he later admitted what that meant: “I was apologizing then, at that tender age, for being black.”

King’s family carried a Southern past into the anthracite coal fields. His father had fled Louisiana in the early 20th century after allegedly killing a white man and escaping lynching. In Pottsville, he lived under an assumed name and became a church leader within the city’s small Black community.

Most of his early years, the younger King insisted, were relatively free of overt discrimination. Compared to the Jim Crow South, Pottsville felt almost insulated. But one moment, King later remembered, shattered the illusion. In eighth grade, a white shop teacher kicked at him for being late to class. “It was a brushing kick,” King wrote, “like one that is playfully delivered.” Yet the humiliation burned because it happened publicly, and he went home in tears.

“I saw my father through my tears surging ahead of me back to the school. He walked tall, angrily tall.” The elder King seized the teacher by the lapels and dragged him into the schoolyard, spewing rage that stunned his son. “That was my first exposure to black rebellion,” King wrote in his memoirs, and it came from “a deeply brooding and gentle man.” In that flash of fury, the North and South collided. The Coal Region’s quieter prejudices brushed up against a lifetime of remembered terror.

To be sure, Pottsville’s story on race has never been one-dimensional. Nicholas Biddle, an African American man who escaped slavery and settled in Schuylkill County, became a local hero after he was wounded while marching with Union soldiers in Baltimore, Maryland in April 1861. His story is woven into Schuylkill County’s memory of the Civil War.

Pottsville’s Soldiers’ Monument in Garfield Square includes “Emancipation” among the central events of the war – an acknowledgment carved in stone that the fight for freedom was among the proud motivators for men to serve during the conflict. Yet, prejudice remained, even if mild compared to the violent racism and segregation of the Jim Crow South that the elder King had escaped.

After graduating from Pottsville High School in 1943, the teenage King enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He expected to fight for democracy alongside his white classmates. Instead, he entered a segregated military. “My basic training was in Bainbridge, Maryland: all blacks, no whites.” He dreamed of manning guns aboard a battleship. Instead, he became “a highly trained member of the U.S. Navy: trained to serve white officers their dinners in the officers’ mess.” He wrote later that he “realized then that I was a servant, a nonperson – invisible.”

The defining moment came when he struck a white officer who called him a racial slur. At a trial at Captain’s Mast, he explained why. The captain’s response cut deeper than punishment.

“What else do you think you should be called?” King was sentenced to seven days on bread and water in the brig of the USS General John Pope, a Navy transport ship. “I sweated out those seven days and became actively aware that I was a black man,” he wrote. “I swore that never again would I retreat from that awareness.”

He did not retreat.

King left the military in 1945 and entered the ministry. He pastored a Baptist church in Evansville, Indiana, and later became executive director of the Civil Rights Commission in Gary. He took part in the major Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960s and served on the staff of the Kerner Commission, which warned that America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.” Moving to Atlanta, Georgia in the 1970s, he founded the Urban Crisis Center and conducted confrontational “encounter” seminars designed to force participants to confront prejudice head-on.

Charles H. King, Jr. died in 1991 at the age of 66. But the fire he described in his bones began long before the Civil Rights marches and commissions. His recollections of his childhood in Schuylkill County, and his service in a segregated Navy during World War II provide vital context about the complex racial history in our nation.