Former driver and personal assistant of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Tom Houck remembers Dr. King.

by Anya Litvak

They called him Uncle Tom.

Only 18 when he moved to Atlanta to join the civil rights movement, Tom Houck ended up becoming the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s driver and personal assistant, earning that joke of a nickname from King’s sons, who weren’t much younger than he was.

He did not look like Hoke driving Miss Daisy.

“I had a huge beard and hair down to my shoulders,” Houck says in a meat-grinder voice that many remember from his days as a radio talk-show host and TV political commentator. “I didn’t have a uniform or anything, but sometimes I wore a blue Mao jacket.”

In the 40 years since King was assassinated, everyone from his family members to his lieutenants to his secretary has written a memoir. So many authors called him to talk about King that Houck finally decided he should do a book, too.

He’s halfway through a memoir called “Driving Dr. King: Chasing the Dream.” He’ll talk about the project at the Auburn Avenue Research Library, part of the King holiday celebration.

Now 60, Houck looks less like a hippie teamster than an aging hipster, with his shaved head and white goatee. But he hasn’t lost a step when it comes to name-dropping and dealing juicy gossip.

When he started working on the book, he wanted to live on MLK Jr. Drive, so he moved into a loft in a converted factory outside the gates of Oakland Cemetery. There are surprisingly few mementos from his long career as an activist, media personality and (more recently) principal in MillerHouck, a bipartisan marketing and public affairs firm. His patron saint, King, looks over the scene in a bright Warhol-ish portrait in the stairwell.

“I was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time,” Houck says, pulling up a chair at a bistro table with his coffee and cigarettes.

The boy activist

Houck comes from Boston, where he became fascinated by the movement at an early age, picketing a Woolworth’s at 12 to show his support for the lunch counter sit-ins down South.

After his mother died, he moved with his aunt to Cambridge, Md., and then Jacksonville, where he joined demonstrators in nearby St. Augustine.

In the spring of his senior year, in 1965, he left school and linked arms with voting rights protesters in Selma, Ala., and got arrested for the first time.

“I guess I got arrested 19 or 20 times,” he says, ticking off civil rights and anti-war protests in a dozen locales.

Houck eventually went to work for Hosea Williams, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizer, who was none too happy when King asked whether any of his charges would like to come to Atlanta and help answer mail.

Houck volunteered.

King’s dubious response: “He kind of laughed and said, ‘Tom, I heard that you haven’t even finished high school.’ “

Even so, he told one of his aides to get the young man a bus ticket to Atlanta.

Arriving on a Sunday morning in September 1966, Houck waited in front of SCLC headquarters on Auburn Avenue as King finished preaching down the street at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Spotting him on the sidewalk after services, he invited Houck home for lunch.

“I was in awe,” he says. “Here was Da Lord, and I was going to have lunch with him.”

Lunch? Houck checks the clock and says he has to meet a couple of German reporters at Son’s Place, a soul food restaurant in Inman Park. They want to hear all about his famous boss.

Smoking and joking

Houck greets the journalists and begins to regale them over a plate of fried chicken, just the way he had at the Kings that Sunday 42 years ago.

“Martin loved chitlins, by the way, but Coretta wouldn’t cook them for him,” he says.

After that lunch in 1966, Houck recalls, King’s sons, Dexter and Martin III, pleaded with him to play football with them in the yard. Then he got into a long conversation with their mother, Coretta Scott King, who wanted to know all about him. She asked if he’d be willing to drive the children to school.

Soon he was working as the family’s regular driver, a position that paid $25 a week and included meals at the King home.

“I’d pick [King] up at the airport,” Houck says. “In those days, we didn’t have cellphones. You either listened to the radio or you talked. We talked a lot about where he had been, what he was going through.”

Houck takes a bite of chicken and continues his stream of consciousness.

“By the way, he was a chain smoker. I hadn’t started smoking yet, but I’d cover up for him. Before we got to his house, he’d give me his pack of Salems. Coretta would smell the smoke, and I’d say it was me, and she’d say, ‘No, that was Martin.’ “

Another bite of chicken, another story:

“He was a very funny man, a great practical joker.”

The butt of those jokes was usually his closest associate, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy.

Houck starts laughing as he describes the way King would place a water bucket over the door when he knew Abernathy was going to walk into a room.

Or the time he instructed Houck to pick them up at the airport in a car that he knew had a rusted-out floorboard just so he could see Abernathy step through to the pavement.

“He talked about that one for days,” Houck says, slamming his fist on the table and flipping a fork into the air. It sails past one German’s head.

“Are you OK?” he asks.

Relieved that he hasn’t forked a visiting journalist, Houck moves on. After driving for the Kings for a few months, he became an SCLC organizer and joined the leader on some of his many travels. By 1968, Houck was working on the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. He was in Knoxville when he heard King had been shot. He drove back to Atlanta immediately and coordinated transportation at the funeral.

“You know,” he says, “Harry Belafonte paid for a lot of the funeral.”

That delicate question

Houck glances at the clock. “I’ve got to leave in a minute.”

“One more question,” one of the Germans says.

It’s the inevitable one.

“There are stories about his womanizing . . .”

Houck cuts him off with an uproarious laugh. “I’m going to write about it in my book — and then I’m going to move to Canada.”

Actually, Houck explains later at his loft, he’s deeply ambivalent about the topic. While he did not witness infidelity or hear King discuss any liaisons, he heard things.

“This stuff is going to come out when the FBI files are released,” he says. “Why let J. Edgar Hoover and his boys treat Dr. King in a manner that will be far more scandalous than having someone like me bring it out in a more human context?”

On the other hand, he doesn’t want King’s alleged indiscretions to be the focus of his book.

“I don’t want to be known as a betrayer of the dream,” he says. “I’m still trying to work out what I’m going to do.”

He lights a cigarette and stares. For once, the tireless gossip doesn’t know what to say.

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© Copyright 2008, THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION