Authors: Troy Jackson
Mays saw the leadership and social philosophy of India’s Gandhi as a possible model for the direction in which African Americans should move to secure greater equality in the United States. During King’s junior year at Morehouse, Mays traveled to India, where he met Gandhi. Following the Indian leader’s death in early 1948, Mays wrote an article fondly recalling the ninety minutes they had spent together a year earlier. The primary topic of their discussion had been the use of nonviolence as a method for bringing about social change. Mays credited “the moral and spiritual power of non-violence” as the turning point in the struggle for Indian independence from Great Britain. While not a novel assessment, Mays’s articulation of this belief must have made an impression on young King. When looking for models and examples to hold up before his students at Morehouse, Mays found none more powerful than Gandhi’s independence movement in India.
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Over his last eighteen months at Morehouse, King was in regular contact with a man who had met with and been inspired by Gandhi. Although King rarely mentioned Gandhi in his early religious writings and sermons, Mays’s enthusiastic articulation of his precepts planted seeds that would fully blossom years later as King entered into the heart of the struggle for civil rights in Montgomery. In one extant assignment submitted for a course at Crozer, King did include a reference to the Indian leader as an example of one whose life demonstrated “the working of the Spirit of God.” While it would be many years before King would intensely study Gandhi’s life and strategies, part of the resonance of the Indian movement with him can be linked to his exposure to Benjamin Mays.
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Although King may not have adopted nonviolence as a way of life until he found himself on the front lines of the struggle in Montgomery, he did subscribe to the Gandhian belief that the welfare of the oppressor must be taken into account in social struggle. Mays stressed this same theme in his speeches and articles, noting that discrimination “scars not only the soul of the segregated but the soul of the segregator as well.” From his student days onward, King consistently articulated that oppressors have value and are worthy of redemption. His hope was that by appealing to the hearts of these churchgoing, God-worshiping southerners, not only would laws be transformed, but the spirits of white southerners would be redeemed. Even in his earliest sermons and religious writings,
King already embraced the transforming power of the love ethic found in the teachings and life of Jesus.
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Years before he arrived in Montgomery, King believed in the redemptive power of love. As his public ministry and civil rights leadership took flight, he articulated a vision of African Americans carrying out a noble mission to both overcome segregation and save the soul of America. Mays had sounded a similar note while King was a student at Morehouse, arguing that the fight for justice and equality is part of “a battle to save the soul of the South and the soul of America.” For King, the ultimate weapon against evil and the best hope for redemption was found in one’s capacity to love. Appealing not only to Gandhi and Mays but also to the words of Jesus, King preached incessantly about the need to love and forgive as “love has within [it] a redemptive power.” King called forgiveness “the Christian weapon of social redemption” and the “Christian weapon against social evil,” believing that it represented “the solution to the race problem.” While King would develop a greater depth of understanding and conviction regarding nonviolence, many of his root convictions regarding the redemptive power of love were established long before he came to Montgomery.
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King changed and matured during his four years at Morehouse. Many scholars have emphasized the significance of the black Baptist roots in shaping the young King’s preaching and leadership, while others have noted how the white northern academy influenced his thought and convictions. The pivotal importance of Morehouse and Benjamin Mays are often downplayed. This oversight needs to be corrected. Were it not for King’s time at Morehouse and his exposure to a role model like Mays, one may justifiably ask whether King would have entered the ministry at all. During his time at Morehouse, King acquired the academic tools and language to navigate the educational landscape of Crozer Seminary and Boston University. He was able to engage the ideas that formed the curriculum of the white academy. King was prepared to set out on a task of synthesizing the vibrant black church tradition with the language and ideas of white theologians.
After his son’s four years at Morehouse, Daddy King offered King Jr. the opportunity to be the assistant pastor at Ebenezer. Convinced of the pressing need for a more educated pastorate, and desiring to move out
of the shadow of his imposing father, the young King declined. Instead he chose to head north to Crozer Theological Seminary. Located in a suburb of Philadelphia, Crozer was one of the leading seminaries of the day. The institution had also made a commitment to expand its diversity by accepting several African American students in the fall of 1948, including King as well as fellow Morehouse graduate and King’s close friend Walter McCall. Unlike many of his classmates, when nineteen-year-old Martin King searched for a seat in his first preaching course at Crozer, he did so as a licensed preacher, well-schooled in the African American church tradition. Although as a graduate of Morehouse he had all the educational credentials he would need to serve as a pastor in an African American Baptist church, King was not interested in merely following in the footsteps of his father or fulfilling the expectations placed on African American pastors. He was determined to break the mold, and three years at an elite white seminary would allow him to incorporate the best ideas and practices of the white liberal church into his pastorate.
King’s time at Crozer was a season of development and growth rather than one of activism. However, when a restaurant in New Jersey refused service to King and some of his friends, they refused to leave quietly. The owner finally threatened them with a gun and forcibly removed them. King and his companions tried to take the matter to the courts based on New Jersey’s civil rights laws, but they had to drop their case when none of the white witnesses would agree to testify. For the most part, however, King chose to avoid confrontation during this season of his life. This was far from King’s only negative experience during his time at Crozer. At one point, a fellow student pointed a gun at him, believing King had played a prank on him. King earned respect from fellow students with his calm response to this incident and for not holding a grudge against the gun-waving classmate. King preferred to respond to the scorn of a few students and professors with affability, forbearance, and forgiveness.
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As King completed his education at Crozer, some in Montgomery were already in the midst of a struggle for justice. Robinson had joined Burks as part of the Women’s Political Council (WPC). Vernon Johns was boldly challenging segregation and white violence in the pulpit and on the streets of Alabama’s capital. Although no longer an officer with the local NAACP, E. D. Nixon continued to agitate for change. King’s direct
involvement in the southern struggle would have to wait, however. He wanted to further his education before returning South, leading him to Boston University, where he pursued a Ph.D. in theology.
King intended to study a school of philosophy known as “personalism” with Edgar Brightman, one of Boston University’s many renowned professors. The core principle of personalism when applied to theology is that human beings in a community provide the best approximation of the character of God. Personalism supports having faith in a personal God who is in relationship with creation. This view meshed well with the tradition of many black churches, which tended to emphasize God’s accessibility and involvement in the world. Always interested in being a well-educated pastor, King was excited to embrace a theological system and language that validated many of his deepest religious convictions.
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In later years, King paid homage to the influence of significant white theologians, philosophers, and social theorists when recounting his intellectual development. In an essay titled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” penned for inclusion in
Stride toward Freedom,
King emphasized his exposure to Walter Rauschenbusch, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Many scholars disagree with the weight the essay grants to these thinkers, noting that they merely provided systems and language for deeply held beliefs King had developed years earlier from the African American Baptist church. For example, while King credited Niebuhr’s
Moral Man and Moral Society
for providing a necessary corrective to the unbridled optimism found in liberalism, many historians have rightly tempered the significance of Niebuhr’s influence, noting that living under segregation and white supremacy would check anyone’s unbridled optimism. During King’s first months at seminary, he was already questioning the significance of “high-minded” liberalism, suggesting it failed to address the daily challenges and struggles people face.
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By the time King reached Crozer, he was already familiar with the published sermons of the more renowned preachers of the day. Keith Miller has helpfully examined the extensive use of these homilies in King’s preaching, showing how he regularly borrowed titles, themes, images, and even paragraphs as building blocks for his own sermons. In an exercise for a preaching course during his first year at Crozer, Robert Keighton asked the class to write five brief sermon introductions. For one of these, King
copied the title and a two-sentence introduction from Fulton Sheen’s “The Effects of Conversion.” King continued to use the words and ideas of others in the pulpit, as evidenced in a sermon delivered at Ebenezer titled “The False God of Science,” which began with a paraphrase of the introduction from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “Why Worship?” The very next week, King again reworked portions of a Fosdick sermon in his introduction and as arguments to bolster a few of the sermon’s main points. In the same summer, King borrowed significant portions of Fosdick’s “Righteousness First” sermon for a message he retitled “First Things First.” He also leaned heavily on a Robert J. McCracken homily to compose “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity.” As many scholars have noted, King clearly used and failed to cite the work of other preachers for many of his homilies.
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Although King benefited significantly from his studies and his exposure to the sermon collections of prominent white preachers, his wife, Coretta Scott, greatly influenced him as well. She was more of an activist than King when they met during his first year in Boston. A native of Alabama, Scott had attended the integrated Antioch College in Ohio before enrolling at the New England Conservatory of Music. She was interested in politics and had actively supported the presidential candidacy of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in 1948, attending the party’s convention as a youth delegate. There is significant evidence that Scott and King shared many convictions regarding the necessity for economic and political change.
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Shortly after they began dating, Scott gave King a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian look at the future,
Looking Backward: 2000–1887.
The book celebrates the emergence of a classless society achieved through the demise of capitalism. Scott wrote a brief note to King inside the book: “Dear Martin, I should be interested to know your reaction to Bellamy’s predictions about our society. In some ways it is rather encouraging to see how our social order has changed since Bellamy’s time. There is still hope for the future…. Lest we become too impatient.” After reading the book, King wrote Scott a letter that included his thoughts on Bellamy’s work. Calling the author “a social prophet,” King added, “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” Perhaps seeking to impress his activist-minded girl
King included words he had used in a prayer at the conclusion of a sermon three years earlier: “Let us continue to hope, work, and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color.” This time King added, “This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.” With their engagement and subsequent marriage in 1953, King found a wife who would stimulate him intellectually and urge him to be more of an activist for the ideals to which they both subscribed.
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When considering King’s time in Philadelphia and Boston, it is easy to forget that he spent every summer back home in Atlanta working as an assistant pastor for his father at Ebenezer. In addition to filling pulpits in the northern church, including Twelfth Avenue Baptist Church in Boston, King remained grounded in the southern African American church. King preached regularly at Ebenezer during summer breaks as his father traveled or tended to other pastoral and denominational duties. This time at Ebenezer helped keep King connected to the concerns and challenges facing working-class African Americans in the segregated South. As he prepared to preach each Sunday, the composition of his audience demanded that he bridge the gap between the academy and the people as he attempted to share about the power and love of God. Many of King’s early Ebenezer sermon manuscripts remain, and their content demonstrates his efforts to remain connected to his home community in Atlanta.
During King’s graduate student years, he directly addressed racial issues from the pulpit. In an early sermon at Ebenezer, King noted: “The average white southerner is not bad. He goes to church every Sunday. He worships the same God we worship. He will send thousands of dollars to Africa and China for the missionary effort. Yet at the same time he will spend thousands of dollars in an attempt to keep the Negro segregated and discriminated.” A few weeks later, King challenged the United States to observe their faults rather than constantly pointing out the flaws in the Soviet Union: “While we see the splinters in Russia’s eye we fail to see the great plank of racial segregation and discrimination which is blocking the progress of America.” King did not let his audience off too easily, however, proceeding to chastise African Americans for discriminating against one another and seeing “the splinters in the white man’s eye” while failing to recognize “the planks in their own eye.” Even as a young theology
student, King was ready and willing to challenge injustice while also calling on his parishioners to examine themselves first so that true social transformation could occur. Years before King assumed the pastorate at Dexter, his sermons already included bold challenges to America and the church on issues of race, international affairs, and economic justice.
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