Lincoln×Jr.

Two men who rose from poverty meet the first dollar that made them feel rich—and discover what money can't buy.

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legend · A

Abraham Lincoln

1809–1865

Starts with a joke. Ends you.

corpus22.7k pages · letters, debates, speeches

Vera speaking

Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., on On the first time they had real money and what they did with it.

legend · B

Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–1968

Every sentence arrives on time

corpus11.3k pages · sermons, speeches, letters

full transcript

Vera
Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., on On the first time they had real money and what they did with it.
Abraham Lincoln
Well, Dr. King, I reckon we should start with a confession. The first time I had what you might call real money in my pocket, I'd already been a grown man for some years. Twenty-eight years old, elected to the Illinois legislature, and I got my first payment as a representative—two hundred and fifty dollars for the session. I remember looking at it and thinking I could finally pay off the debts from that store I'd run into the ground in New Salem. They called those debts my national debt, and I always said the nation got theirs paid off before I got mine paid.
Martin Luther King Jr.
That's a weight I understand, though my first real money came in a different form. I was twenty-five, just married, and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery called me to be their pastor. Five thousand two hundred dollars a year, which was more than my father made when he started in ministry. I remember standing in that little parsonage thinking, we can furnish this place. We can buy groceries without counting every penny.
Abraham Lincoln
Five thousand! That would've seemed a king's ransom to me in those days. Though I suppose by your time things cost more. What did you do with that first paycheck?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Coretta and I bought furniture. Simple things—a decent bed, a table, chairs that matched. It sounds ordinary, but when you've been a student scraping by, when you've watched your wife work as a clerk to help put you through Boston University, ordinary feels like grace. But I'll tell you what struck me most—the realization that this money came from a congregation, from people who worked as domestics and laborers, and many of them had far less than five thousand a year.
Abraham Lincoln
That's the thing that sits heavy, isn't it? I used to ride the circuit as a lawyer, and farmers would pay me in crops sometimes, or promise to pay when they could. When I finally had cash money steady, I knew it came from people who worked their fingers raw. My legislative pay came from taxes, which meant it came from everybody. Made me careful about spending it foolishly.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Careful is the right word. My father had taught me—he'd say, Son, money is a terrible master but an excellent servant. So after we bought what we needed, we started thinking about what we could give. The church expected the pastor to be present, to be dignified, but they didn't expect him to live high while they lived low.
Abraham Lincoln
I had a partner once, William Herndon, fine fellow but he liked to tell everyone that I never cared about money. That wasn't quite right. I cared about not owing it. After that business failure in New Salem, I spent years paying back seventeen dollars here, twenty there. A man named Mentor Graham helped me when I had nothing. So when I had something, I made sure I paid every penny back, even to the creditors of my dead partner.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Seventeen years you carried that debt, didn't you?
Abraham Lincoln
About that, yes. Some folks thought I was foolish. The debts weren't all legally mine to pay. But I'd given my word, and my word was about all I owned for a long stretch. When I finally cleared those debts, I felt richer than I ever did later when I was making four, five thousand a year at the law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
There's a freedom in that, isn't there? Being clear. I never wanted to owe anyone anything but love, as Paul wrote. Though I'll confess, when the Montgomery movement began and I was arrested that first time, I realized how little money meant in the face of the struggle. We'd just gotten comfortable, and suddenly comfort wasn't the point anymore.
Abraham Lincoln
That first arrest—that was the bus boycott beginning?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Yes. 1956, charged with conspiracy to boycott. Standing in that cell, I thought about my salary, about our little parsonage, about security. And I understood that if I was going to lead this movement, I had to hold money loosely. Very loosely. Eventually I gave most of my speaking fees away. Kept just enough to support my family.
Abraham Lincoln
How much of it did you give?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Most years, nearly all of it. The Nobel Prize money—fifty-four thousand dollars—I gave every penny to the movement. To CORE, SNCC, the NAACP, SCLC. I remember someone asking if I'd keep any, and I said, what would I keep it for?
Abraham Lincoln
Fifty-four thousand dollars. Lord. That's more than I made in total as president for four years. Though I suppose that was a hundred years before your time, and a dollar went further. Still. That's a staggering sum to give away.
Martin Luther King Jr.
I had a living. My family had enough. The movement needed it more. But I want to ask you something, Mr. Lincoln. You were a lawyer making good money by the 1850s—some years five thousand, more in the big cases. Then you became president at twenty-five thousand a year. Did wealth change how you saw people?
Abraham Lincoln
I hope it didn't. I tried not to let it. But I'll be honest with you—when I was poor, every rich man seemed a bit of a mystery to me. How'd he get there? Did he earn it or inherit it? Was he wise or just lucky? Then when I had money myself, I realized most men are about the same regardless. Some generous, some tight-fisted, rich and poor alike. Though I will say this—poverty is no virtue. It's hard and it's mean and it grinds people down.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Amen to that. We can romanticize poverty, make it seem noble, but there's no dignity in a child going hungry. No virtue in a man who can't afford medicine for his wife. That's why the movement wasn't just about civil rights—it was about economic rights. A man needs a job. A family needs a living wage.
Abraham Lincoln
Free labor, I used to call it. Not slave labor, but the right of a man to work and keep what he earns, to climb if he can. That was the whole argument, really. Slavery said some men exist only to make other men rich. Freedom says every man has the right to improve his condition.
Martin Luther King Jr.
And that's where the work continued, isn't it? After emancipation, after the vote, we still had to fight for the economic freedom you described. A black man could be legally free but economically shackled to sharecropping, to wages that couldn't feed a family. Freedom's a legal fact, but it has to become an economic fact too.
Abraham Lincoln
You're right about that. We didn't finish the work. I'll own that. We freed four million people and then left them without forty acres, without a mule, without much of anything except paper freedom. If I'd lived, maybe we'd have done more on that score. Maybe not. It's easy to say now.
Martin Luther King Jr.
You did what you could in your time. We tried to do what we could in ours. But I'll tell you what that first real money taught me—it taught me that having enough changes everything, and having more than enough means you have a choice. You can hoard it or you can use it. You can build bigger barns, as Jesus said, or you can invest it in the kingdom.
Abraham Lincoln
I never was much for building barns. Spent most of what I made on books, to be honest. Mary—my wife—she had different ideas about that. Thought I should spend more on the house, on clothes that fit properly. But a good book seemed to me the best use of money there was.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Books are an investment in yourself. I spent plenty on books too. Theology, philosophy, history. Coretta understood that, though she'd remind me we needed groceries as well. But here's what I wonder—when you had that first two hundred fifty dollars, after all those years of debt and difficulty, did you feel different? Did you feel like you'd arrived?
Abraham Lincoln
No. No, I felt relieved, not arrived. There's a difference. Arrived suggests you're finished climbing. Relieved just means the immediate worry has passed. I still had debts to pay, cases to argue, a career to build. The money was a tool, not a destination.
Martin Luther King Jr.
That's well said. I felt the same in Montgomery. The salary meant security, but the work was just beginning. And within months, the boycott started and security became a relative term. Our house was bombed. I received death threats daily. You realize quickly that money can't buy safety, can't buy justice, can't buy the things that actually matter.
Abraham Lincoln
Can't buy peace of mind either. I was never a wealthy man by any standard, but I had enough. And I spent four years in Washington carrying a weight that no amount of money could have lightened. Six hundred thousand dead. The nation torn apart. Some nights I'd have given every dollar I ever made for one good night's sleep.
Martin Luther King Jr.
I know something about those nights. The weight of leadership, the weight of knowing people are dying for a cause you've articulated. Money becomes almost irrelevant. You'd trade everything for the ability to stop the suffering, to bring people home alive.
Abraham Lincoln
But we couldn't. So we did what we could with what we had. Including our money, what little there was. You gave yours to the movement. I tried to give mine honestly earned and honestly spent. Maybe that's all any of us can do—use whatever we have, money or words or time, for something larger than ourselves.
Martin Luther King Jr.
That's the measure of it, isn't it? Not how much you had, but what you did with it. Not whether you were rich, but whether you were faithful. I used to tell people, I just want to leave a committed life behind. That's all. And money is only worth something if it helps you do that.
Abraham Lincoln
A committed life. That's a fine way to put it. Better than anything I would've said, though I tried to live by something similar. Do right, pay your debts, help where you can. If you do that, then that first dollar means something. And so does the last one.