Famed as the place where Martin Luther King
Jr. preached, Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church attracts many visitors.
No one paid much attention when a short, chunky black man wearing a tan
suit and thick glasses slipped into a seat a few feet from the organ. Mrs. Martin Luther King Sr., 69, wife of the pastor and mother of the
slain civil rights leader, was playing. As the 500 worshipers bowed
their heads for the Lord's Prayer, Marcus Wayne Chenault, 23, opened
fire with two revolvers. “I'm tired of all this!” he screamed. “I'm taking over!” And he sprayed bullets wildly until both
guns were empty. He wounded three people, two of them —Mrs. King and Deacon Edward
Boykin, 69—fatally. “Nice Boy.” Martin Luther King Sr., 74, was just entering the
red brick church as his wife was shot. When he asked Chenault why he
did it, the youth replied: “Because she was a Christian and all
Christians are my enemies.” The next day Chenault declared that
his real name was “Servant Jacob.” “I am a Hebrew,”
he said. “I was sent here on a purpose and it's partly
accomplished.” Seeking the meaning of these remarks in Chenault's character and past,
investigators found confusion and paradox. In the bluegrass country of
Winchester, Ky., where he was raised, people remembered Wayne Chenault
as quiet, easygoing and studious, a “nice boy” who had a
newspaper route and attended Baptist church regularly with his devout
parents. Later in Dayton, Ohio, where his father is now a chemical
plant security guard, he was known as a clean-cut teen-ager who stayed
out of trouble and was “always making people laugh.” After he entered Ohio State University in 1970, Chenault began to change.
Recently he had come to be regarded as an oddball and a loner who had
few friends and fewer dates. He was a junior majoring in education when
he dropped out last December and began venting his increasingly
eccentric views through a blaring loudspeaker propped in his
second-floor window near the campus in Columbus. Until last week,
however, no one took seriously his amplified boast that he was “the
baddest ______________mother on the block.” Chenault's religious beliefs appeared to be a confused amalgam largely
of his own devising. Said a Columbus neighbor, Denise Underwood, 20:
“One week he was eating this because he wanted to be a Jew; then one
week he wouldn't eat this because he wanted to be a Muslim.” The core
of his murky philosophy was hatred of Christianity. Probably central to
his motivation was his sense of inadequacy and need for attention. Only
two weeks before the killings he told a friend that he would soon “be
all over the newspapers.”
