Growing up during segregation, Bill Coates saw the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. differently than many other whites, including those closest to him. “Some of the people in my household — grandparents and so forth — weren’t big fans of his, as a lot of elderly white people weren’t in those days, especially in the South,” said Coates, senior minister of First Baptist Church on Green Street in Gainesville. “Even though I was steeped in what they had taught me — the beliefs they had given me and the prejudices as well, I suppose — King sounded like wisdom to me, like something from God to me.