Becoming King

by Troy Jackson

  Although King’s academic writings would provide a scholarly gloss for his oratory in Montgomery, it was in King’s personal correspondence and his early sermons that he first expressed forcefully the social gospel vision that distinguished his leadership during the bus boycott and afterward. In particular, King’s correspondence with Coretta Scott during their courtship in Boston reveals that he expected a major social transformation extending beyond civil rights reform. Because King was attracted to Scott partly because of her political involvement—she had been a Progressive Party activist during the 1948 election and involved in pacifist causes at Antioch College—he was able to confide to her his own radical leanings. “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he wrote in a July 1952 letter prompted by Scott’s gift of Edward Bellamy’s socialistic fantasy Looking Backward 2000–1887 (originally published in 1888). King asserted confidently that capitalism had “outlived its usefulness,” having “brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” King added that the change “would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This, it seems to me, is the most sane and ethical way for social change to take place.” Although the public expression of such thoughts would have been political heresy, King informed his future wife that both capitalism and communism were inconsistent with true Christian values. Even Bellamy was faulted for failing “to see that man is a sinner … and will still be a sinner until he submits to his life to the Grace of God. Ultimately our problem is [a?] theological one.” Cautioning Scott against excessive optimism, King observed: “It is probably true that capitalism is on its death bed, but social systems have a way of developing a long and powerful death bed breathing capacity. Remember it took feudalism more than 500 years to pass out from its death bed. Capitalism will be in America quite a few more years my dear.”

  King was not quite so candid in his sermons as in his letters to Scott, but the sermons he delivered while assisting his father at Ebenezer during the summer of 1953 (soon after his marriage in June) viewed racial segregation and discrimination in the context of a wide-ranging critique of the modern world and as aspects of a global struggle for peace with social justice. Several of these sermons focused criticism on modernity’s “false Gods”—science, nationalism, and materialism. Sharply criticizing American chauvinism and anticommunism, King offered blunt advice: “One cannot worship this false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time.”11 In another sermon King prepared that summer, he insisted international peace was the “cry that is ringing in the ears of the peoples of the world,” but such peace could be achieved only when Christians “place righteousness first. So long as we place our selfish economic gains first we will never have peace. So long as the nations of the world are contesting to see which can be the most [imperialistic] we will [never] have peace. Indeed the deep rumbling of discontent in our world today on the part of the masses is [actually] a revolt against imperialism, economic exploitation, and colonialism that has been perpetuated by western civilization for all these many years.”12

  King’s comprehensive Christian worldview was perhaps most evident in the sermon “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” which he delivered in August 1953 and, in various forms, later in his life. While rejecting communism as secularistic and materialistic, King nonetheless insisted that communism was “Christianity’s most formidable competitor and only serious rival.” Marxian thought, King argued, should challenge Christians to express their own “passionate concern for social justice.” Returning to the passage in the book of Luke that his father had used thirteen years earlier, King argued, “The Christian ought always to begin with a bias in favor of a movement which protests against the unfair treatment of the poor, for surely Christianity is itself such a protest.” Karl Marx could hardly be blamed for calling religion an opiate of the masses, King lamented. “When religion becomes [so] involved in a future good ‘over yonder’ that it forgets the present evils ‘over here’ it is a dry as dust religion and needs to be condemned.”13

  Less than a year after King delivered his sermon on communism, he accepted the call to become the pastor of the Dexter congregation and began to refine his unique leadership style. Jackson assesses the strengths and the limitations of this leadership, noting, for example, that King’s global prophetic vision ensured his prominence but sometimes obscured the pressing, prosaic concerns of the working-class MIA members who had regularly ridden buses and thus sacrificed the most on a daily basis during the boycott. Vernon Johns, King’s sometimes abrasive predecessor at Dexter, actually focused his ministry more than did King on the economic issues that were central to Christian social gospel. King, for his part, pushed gently yet consistently against complacency after becoming pastor of a congregation known to be difficult to control. Wary of the power of the church’s deacons, King used his acceptance address as an occasion to assert his spiritual authority and to suggest the immensity of the task ahead. Only twenty-five, he challenged his mostly older congregation to expand their vision: “It is a significant fact that I come to the pastorate of Dexter at the most crucial hour of our world’s history; at a time when the flame of war might arise at any time to redden the skies of our dark and dreary world; at a time when men know all [too] well that without the proper guidance the whole of civilization can be plunged across the abyss of destruction…. Dexter, like all other churches, must somehow lead men and women of a decadent generation to the high mountain of peace and salvation.”

  That some Dexter members welcomed King’s ambitious agenda would become evident during the bus boycott, but it is nonetheless worth noting that King not only encouraged church members to become registered voters and NAACP leaders but also to see the southern Jim Crow system as part of a passing global order of colonialism and imperialism. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision of May 1954, King became even more convinced that segregation was doomed, unless, as he warned in an address the following year to Montgomery’s NAACP branch, black Americans became “victims to the cult of inevitable progress.” King also warned against becoming “so complacent that we forget the struggles of other minorities. We must unite with oppressed minorities throughout the world.”14 As Rosa Parks listened to King’s address, she might well have been encouraged to take her own stand against complacency less than six months later. King’s words undoubtedly inspired black leaders who shared his sense that the southern Jim Crow system was a vulnerable anachronism. Soon after King spoke, he was invited to join the branch’s executive committee.

  Thus, the decision to elect King to head the MIA was unexpected, but the qualities of mind that King demonstrated in his early ministry were well suited to the role of being the principal spokesperson of the boycott movement. His subsequent decade of civil rights leadership was, in some respects, a departure from his original social gospel mission, but only to the extent that he necessarily narrowed his focus to the southern issues of segregation and racial barriers to voting. Seen from the perspective of his entire ministry, the years from Montgomery to the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were a time during which he felt compelled to play down the radicalism of his social gospel Christianity. To be sure, during his entire public life, he would often describe the African American freedom struggle in the context of African and Asian anticolonial struggles, and he would often draw attention to the issue of international peace. But only toward the end of this decade of civil rights reform did these broader concerns become a central part of his message, as it was in his rarely heard Nobel lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964. Only after the Voting Rights bill had been enacted did King make clear that even this landmark reform did not fulfill his dream. Only then would he return to his social gospel mission of achieving economic justice, bringing his ministry to Chicago and then Memphis as part of the Poor People’s Campaign. Only then, to the consternation of those who saw
him merely as a civil rights leader, would he speak out unambiguously against war, imperialism, and militarism.

  It is worthwhile to speculate regarding what would have happened to King if he had not accepted the call to Dexter or if he had not been selected to head the MIA. If not for Rosa Parks, he might not have become the preeminent African American of his era or a Nobel laureate or have his birth commemorated with a national holiday. It is also likely that, if not for King’s role in the Montgomery bus boycott, the contributions of grassroots activists in Montgomery and other protest centers would be remembered differently. Jackson suggests, moreover, that King’s oratorical brilliance may have fostered his rise to international prominence while also diminishing his ability to sustain a mass movement. Not until the Birmingham campaign of 1963 would King experience a similar degree of success in mobilizing an entire black community. By acknowledging that the bus boycott had only a limited impact on the lives of Montgomery’s black working class, Becoming King is a necessary corrective to romanticized versions of civil rights progress and Great Man historical myths. Yet Jackson also reminds us that historic social movements provide opportunities for some men and women of all classes and backgrounds to rise unexpectedly to greatness.

  Having acknowledged the importance of contingency in King’s emergence as a leader, he demonstrates that King’s prophetic vision encouraged others to see their resistance to injustice as more historically significant than would otherwise have been the case. Because of King, the African American freedom struggle gained a historical significance it would otherwise have lacked. The Montgomery bus boycott would have happened without King, but King’s oratory helped to ensure that the boycott became one of those exceptional local movements for justice that would send ripples of inspiration to oppressed people elsewhere.

  Clayborne Carson

  Notes

  1. King, “Conquering Self-Centeredness,” August 11, 1957.

  2. Birth of a New Age, December 1955–December 1956, ed. Clayborne Carson, Stewart Burns, Susan Carson, Peter Holloran, and Dana L. H. Powell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

  3. Ed. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Susan Englander, Troy Jackson, and Gerald L. Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).

  4. King, “Preaching Ministry” [September 14–November 24, 1948], in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 72.

  5. Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 5.

  6. Ibid., 16.

  7. Quote in introduction to Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 1, Called to Serve, January 1929–June 1951, ed. Clayborne Carson, Ralph E. Luker, and Penny A. Russell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 33–34.

  8. King, “How Modern Christians Should Think of Man,” November 29, 1949–February 15, 1950, in Papers, 1: 274.

  9. Carson, ed., Autobiography, 15.

  10. King, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” April 15, 1955, in Papers, 2: 512.

  11. King, “The False God of Nationalism,” July 12, 1953, in Papers, 6: 132.

  12. King, “First Things First,” August 2, 1953, in Papers, 6: 144–45.

  13. King, “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” August 9, 1953, in Papers, 6: 148–49.

  14. King, “The Peril of Superficial Optimism in the Area of Race Relations,” June 19, 1955, in Papers, 6: 215.

  Prologue

  The history books may write it Rev. King was born in Atlanta, and then came to Montgomery, but we feel that he was born in Montgomery in the struggle here, and now he is moving to Atlanta for bigger responsibilities.

  —Member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, November 1959

  Every year in elementary school classrooms throughout the United States, teachers share heroic stories that took place in Montgomery, Alabama, during the 1950s. Young children learn about the arrest of Rosa Parks, the boycott of Montgomery city buses, and the emergence of a young Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. One doesn’t have to be a historian to know the significant role the Montgomery movement played in the emergence of a broader civil rights struggle during the 1950s and 1960s. Although historians have written countless books covering the life and career of Martin Luther King, while others have contributed dozens of studies that cover aspects of the civil rights movement in Montgomery, a narrative recounting the important influence of this community on King’s career and civil rights leadership has yet to be written.1

  Brave white and black activists of Montgomery had a significant impact on King’s leadership. Not only did a handful of courageous men and women in Montgomery spearhead a protest movement; they also nurtured, influenced, and helped launch King’s public ministry. A closer examination of the Montgomery movement reveals how a young English professor at Alabama State University (Jo Ann Robinson) and a middle-aged Pullman porter (E. D. Nixon) played a larger role in King’s civil rights leadership than a white theologian like Reinhold Niebuhr or a global leader like Mahatma Gandhi. This book demonstrates how Montgomery and her people provided the true birthplace of Martin Luther King’s civil rights leadership.2

  In an essay published over a decade ago, Charles Payne argued that the story of the Montgomery movement needed to be retold. Contrary to the top-down, King-centered narrative of the boycott, Payne suggested that “Montgomery was largely a willed phenomenon, a history made by everyday people who were willing to do their spadework, not one shaped entirely by impersonal social forces or great individual leadership.” Asserting that many studies were “more theatrical than instructive,” he charged that “the popular conception of Montgomery—a tired woman refused to give up her seat and a prophet rose up to lead the grateful masses—is a good story but useless history.” This book attempts to be both a good story and useful history by emphasizing the contributions of many men and women, black and white, to Montgomery’s local struggle.3

  A more in-depth analysis of Montgomery in the 1950s demands a significant examination of the very real class differences in the African American community. Most local black leaders prior to the boycott believed the masses were passive and unwilling to get involved in any significant effort to bring change to their city. The rapid and nearly unanimous response by the working class to the call for a bus boycott contradicts this assessment. In reality, most blacks who organized to dismantle segregation were professionals who did not really know much about the daily lives or the thoughts of their town’s working-class blacks. By contrast, E. D. Nixon was a local leader who knew the so-called “black masses” in his city. Nixon worked for decades to improve the conditions facing African American laborers in Montgomery. He coupled a passion for overcoming segregation with a zeal for economic justice. He was not simply seeking an end to racial discrimination; he also sought justice in the courtrooms and economic opportunities that would extend to all of the black community.

  Conditions on city buses galvanized African American leaders and professionals along with the working class, resulting in an incredibly effective thirteen-month protest. Black professionals were ready to organize in an effort to win an ideological battle against white supremacy by insisting whites treat their race with dignity. Working-class people who actually rode the buses each day were tired of the abuse and mistreatment they experienced directly. The people were ready to act, and their protest captured the attention of the nation and the world. A year later, they celebrated the end of segregated buses in Montgomery.

  Most studies of Montgomery and the broader civil rights movement tend to leave the city’s struggle behind after the conclusion of the boycott and the launching of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Even works that take very seriously the contributions of many local men and women years before the boycott do not explore what happened in the city between 1957 and the end of the decade. This book, however, examines the lack of a sustained movement and the abse
nce of economic gains after the dawn of integrated buses. Although King gained a great deal from his experiences in Montgomery, the city itself remained segregated and racially repressive long after King returned to Atlanta. King friend and Alabama State College professor Lawrence Reddick claimed a year after the boycott that the true test of success for Montgomery was not “found in what it has done for the Negro community in this city” but rather through its “positive national and international effect.” The Montgomery movement provided a stepping-stone for a growing national civil rights movement, but its sustained local impact on the daily lives of black citizens from all socioeconomic classes was minimal.4

  King’s role, influence, and development remain an important part of the Montgomery story and the broader civil rights movement. While many more studies of local struggles are essential, there is also a need for the leaders and institutions of the movement to be understood through the lens of local communities. Glenn Eskew, in his work on the freedom struggle in Birmingham, includes a reexamination of King from the perspective of the people who participated in perhaps the most significant campaign of the era. In this book, instead of viewing Montgomery through the lens of King’s leadership, his leadership is explored through the lens of the civil rights struggle in Montgomery. Such an approach underscores King’s ability to connect with the educated and the unlettered, professionals and the working class. This also allows for a sharper critique of the shortcomings of King’s leadership following the bus protest, limitations he would not address until the last few years of his life. As the boycott came to an end, King’s inner circle began to be dominated by clergy and a few college professors who turned their focus to voter registration efforts and better recreation facilities. E. D. Nixon’s concern for sustained economic development and job creation was left behind, as was the original boycott demand for black bus drivers. Although King maintained an ability to listen to and speak the language of the working class, following the boycott his approach to the freedom struggle was defined more by professionals and clergy than by working-class activists.5