“The Gospel I Will Preach” 37    between the professional and working classes, easing King’s later transi- tion into the ministry in Alabama’s capital city. Had King remained in Atlanta, his emergence into leadership would have happened at a much slower rate, given the number of pastors and community leaders already established as community power brokers as well as the long shadow of his prominent father. Although Atlanta played a major role in fostering King’s development, he became King the civil rights leader in Montgomery. King brought much of Atlanta with him to Montgomery, however, including the influence of his immediate family. When King’s maternal grandfather, Reverend A. D. Williams, took the helm of Ebenezer Bap- tist Church in 1894, the struggling Atlanta congregation numbered only thirteen members. Under Williams’s leadership, Ebenezer grew to sev- eral hundred, began an ambitious building program, and became one of the leading African American congregations in the city. King’s grandfa- ther was also active in the broader community, serving for a time as the branch president of the NAACP during the organization’s early years in the South. Although Williams died while Martin Luther King Jr. was only two, Williams had a significant influence on the development of King’s fa- ther. Martin Luther King Sr., later known simply as “Daddy King,” took over Ebenezer after his father-in-law’s death and helped the church grow from six hundred members in 1931 to several thousand by the late 1940s. He made a name for himself not only in Atlanta but also on the national stage as an active participant in the country’s largest African American organization, the National Baptist Convention. His congregation sat on “Sweet Auburn,” one of the most significant black business districts in the nation. Segregated housing ensured that black professionals and the working class lived in relatively close proximity, but Ebenezer was primar- ily populated by working-class congregants. The Great Depression struck Atlanta’s African American community early and hard, and Daddy King’s congregation was no exception. Faced with possible foreclosure on their building, the young pastor rallied his church both financially and numeri- cally. Following in the tradition of Williams, Daddy King served as a local leader of the NAACP, led a massive voter registration drive in 1939, and worked for the equalization of black teachers’ salaries with those of their 4 white counterparts in Atlanta’s public schools. In one of his few extant early speeches, Daddy King called for a