The Martin Luther King family tree, five generations from Georgia

The King Institute at Stanford traces both of King's lines to Georgia before the Civil War.¹ On his mother's side the oldest name is Willis Williams, born in 1810, whom the family remembered as an old slavery time preacher. He joined Shiloh Baptist Church in Greene County in 1846.¹ Lucrecia Daniel, called Creecy, joined the same church in 1855 at the age of fifteen. They married in the late 1850s or early 1860s and had five children.¹

On his father's side the line goes back to Henry County. Jim Long was born into slavery about 1842. After the war he kept at least two families in the county and registered to vote during Reconstruction.¹ His relationship with Jane Linsey, born in 1855, produced a daughter, Delia, in 1875.¹ No marriage between them is recorded, so the Martin Luther King family tree draws their couple line broken.

The National Archives at Atlanta drew its own Martin Luther King family tree from this research, From the Roots of a Tree, which The Legal Genealogist reproduced in 2019.⁶

Adam Daniel Williams, a son of Willis and Lucrecia, became pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1894 and held the post until 1931.⁸ He married Jennie Celeste Parks on 29 October 1899. She was born in Atlanta in April 1873, one of thirteen children of a carpenter, William Parks, and led the church's Missionary Society.¹

Their only surviving child, Alberta Christine Williams, was born at home on 13 September 1903.³ She studied at Spelman Seminary and Hampton, founded the Ebenezer choir and played its organ from 1932 to 1972.³ On 30 June 1974 a gunman shot her at the organ during a Sunday service, and she died that day.³

The King side was poorer. James Albert King, born in 1864, married Delia in 1895, and county tax lists show little property.¹ Their eldest son, Michael King, was born in Stockbridge on 19 December 1897.² He married Alberta Williams at Ebenezer on Thanksgiving Day 1926, and when A. D. Williams died in 1931 he succeeded his father-in-law as pastor. He served Ebenezer for 44 years and died in Atlanta in 1984.²

Father and son were both born Michael King. In 1934 the father took the name Martin Luther King, and the boy became Martin Luther King Jr.⁷

On the Martin Luther King family tree, King Sr. and Alberta have three children born in four years.² The eldest, Willie Christine, was born on 11 September 1927. As Christine King Farris she taught at Spelman College from 1958 until 2014, and she died in Atlanta on 29 June 2023.⁹ She married Isaac Newton Farris Sr. in 1960.⁹

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on 15 January 1929 at 501 Auburn Avenue, where he lived for his first twelve years.^1,6 His brother Alfred Daniel Williams King followed on 30 July 1930. A. D. King married Naomi Barber in 1950 and had five children.⁴ He was a pastor in Newnan, Ensley and Louisville, joined his father as co-pastor of Ebenezer in 1968, and drowned on 21 July 1969.⁴

Coretta Scott was born near Marion, Alabama, on 27 April 1927, the daughter of Obadiah Scott, called Obie, and Bernice McMurray Scott.⁵ She married King at her family's home near Marion on 18 June 1953.⁵ After his death she was the founding president of the King Center in Atlanta and chaired the federal commission for the King holiday. She died in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, on 30 January 2006.⁵

The couple had four children.⁵ Most of the family died in 2000 or later or are living, so the Martin Luther King family tree gives only public facts for them, names, years, marriages and offices.