Then there was Professor George D. Kelsey, director of the Department of Religion, who became King’s favorite classroom teacher. Before he encountered Kelsey, he was increasingly skeptical of religion, troubled by the discrepancy between his earlier fundamentalist instruction—King’s term for it—and what he was learning in history and philosophy. But Kelsey helped him work through his problems with fundamentalism. In his course on the Bible, Kelsey challenged King “to see that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape.” Kelsey also contended that pulpit fireworks were both useless and obsolete and that the modern minister should be a philosopher with social as well as spiritual concerns. Kelsey’s views set King ablaze. Thanks to him, “the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body,” and he began to rethink his religious attitudes.
Finally, he fell under the spell of Dr. Benjamin Mays, the college president and “a notorious modernist” in the eyes of the orthodox. As a preacher and theologian, Mays was out to renew the mission of the black church, charging in his books that too many preachers encouraged “socially irrelevant patterns of escape.” At Morehouse chapel, this tall and erudite man, with his iron-gray hair and hypnotic voice, mesmerized his young disciples by preaching stewardship, responsibility, and engagement. “Do whatever you do so well,” he counseled, “that no man living and no man yet unborn could do it better.” Here at Morehouse, he was not turning out doctors or lawyers or preachers, Mays said. He was turning out men.
Mays challenged the traditional view of Negro education as “accommodation under protest” and championed it instead as liberation through knowledge. Education, he told his students, allowed the Negro to be intellectually free; it was an instrument of social and personal renewal. Unlike most other Negro educators, Mays was active in the NAACP and spoke out against racial oppression. He lashed the white church in particular as America’s “most conservative and hypocritical institution.”
King was enormously impressed. He saw in Mays what he wanted “a real minister to be”—a rational man whose sermons were both spiritually and intellectually stimulating, a moral man who was socially involved. Thanks largely to Mays, King realized that the ministry could be a respectable force for ideas, even for social protest. And so at seventeen King elected to become a Baptist minister, like his father and maternal grandfather before him. “I came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders,” he recalled a few years later, “and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become.” Committed to the pulpit and God the Father, King also resolved a lingering question he had about his grandmother’s death: he became, he said, “a strong believer in personal immortality.”
With “no little trepidation,” he approached his Daddy and told him about his decision to become a preacher. Though secretly overjoyed, Daddy growled that he wanted to be “reassured.” M. L. would first have to preach a trial sermon in one of Ebenezer’s smaller auditoriums. When the prescribed day came, King felt very much on trial, what with his Daddy present as both judge and jury. Mustering his courage, he grasped the pulpit and launched into his sermon. “He was just seventeen,” the elder King said, “and the crowds kept coming, and we had to move to the main auditorium.” The sermon was a resounding success. But if young King expected accolades from his father, he was disappointed, for the old man was too reserved to show his satisfaction before his son. That night, though, Daddy got down on his knees and thanked God for giving him such a boy.
That same year, 1947, young King was ordained and made assistant pastor at Ebenezer. As God and fate would have it, he was following in his Daddy’s footsteps after all. But he was wrong if he thought this might ease his father’s dogmatic ways. One night after he’d begun preaching King went to a dance. When Daddy found out, he was furious. Did M. L. not understand that Baptist doctrine frowned on dancing, especially by a preacher? The following Sunday, Daddy made M. L. stand up before the entire congregation and apologize.
DURING SUMMER BREAKS FROM MOREHOUSE, King worked as a manual laborer in Atlanta so that he could pay some of his expenses. Daddy, of course, objected to such employment, for fear that white bosses would exploit and degrade his son. Besides, as Reverend King’s boy, M. L. could secure a respectable job at any number of Negro businesses in town. But young King wanted to find out what life was like for the underprivileged, to “learn their plight and to feel their feelings.” So, against Daddy’s wishes, he hired on at the Railway Express Company, unloading trucks and trains in torrid summer heat. He quit, though, when the white foreman called him a nigger. He took a similar job on the loading platform of the southern Spring and Mattress Company. As he struggled there in mindless physical toil, he noticed that he and other Negro laborers earned less money than their white counterparts even though they did the same work. King was beginning to understand what Professor Chivers meant when he said that capitalism exploited blacks and encouraged racism.
Because he could blame racism in part on the system, King felt less antagonistic toward white people now. Back at Morehouse, he served on the Atlanta Intercollegiate Council, an interracial student group, and learned that contact on fairly equal terms could alleviate racial hostility. “As I got to see more of white people,” he said of his experience on the council, “my resentment softened and a spirit of cooperation took its place.” At the same time, Morehouse professors inspired him with their frank discussions about race. They “encouraged us in a positive quest for solutions to racial ills,” King remembered, “and for the first time in my life, I realized that nobody was afraid.”
He realized, too, that he could never be “a spectator in the race problem,” that he wanted to be involved in “the very heat of it.” He hoped, of course, to be involved through the church. But how, by what method and means, were black folk to improve their lot in a white-dominated country? In his study of American history—and King was developing an acute sense of the past—he observed that Negroes since emancipation had searched in vain for that elusive path to real freedom, too often finding themselves on a dead-end street without an exit sign. In the 1890s, with Jim Crow segregation practices sweeping Dixie, Booker T. Washington advised Negroes to “let down your buckets where you are” and accept segregation, which the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld as the law of the land. Washington admonished his people to forget about political and social equality for now and to learn skills and trades to support themselves. By imitating white standards and values, perhaps they could earn white people’s friendship and preserve racial peace. But in King’s judgment it was “an obnoxious negative peace” in which “the Negro’s mind and soul were enslaved.”
As Washington preached accommodation and Negro self-help, W. E. B. Du Bois, a brilliant scholar whose militancy and race pride were reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’s, summoned the Negroes’ “talented tenth” to take the lead and find solutions to the misery of the black masses. In 1905, against a backdrop of spiraling racial violence, Du Bois led a small band of well-educated, bold, and unhappy Negro professionals who met in the city of Niagara Falls and issued a blazing manifesto to white America. They vowed to stand up and battle for the Negro’s “manhood rights,” denounce and defeat oppressive laws, and “assail the ears” and the conscience of white Americans “so long as America is unjust.” The Niagara Platform became a blueprint for the NAACP, established in 1909 in the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, with Du Bois and seven other Niagara leaders joining nineteen white racial progressives on the NAACP’s original board. The first nationwide organization dedicated to gaining Negroes their rights as citizens, the NAACP concentrated on legal action and court battles, winning its first victory in 1915—the same year the twentieth-century Klan was founded on Stone Mountain in Georgia—when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the grandfather clauses in the state constitutions of Oklahoma and Maryland.
The next year, flamboyant Marcus Garvey, wearing a braid-trimmed uniform and preachi
ng racial pride, launched a “Back to Africa” movement that reached from one to four million Negroes until Garvey’s downfall in 1923, when he was convicted and imprisoned for mail fraud. Still, in King’s view, his message had little appeal to millions of other Negroes who had roots in American soil that went back for generations. Du Bois dismissed Garvey’s version of the old colonization schemes as “spiritual bankruptcy and futility.” But Du Bois himself became disillusioned with America, resigned from the NAACP, and advocated “voluntary segregation” rather than integration.
For American Negroes, the road to freedom’s land was elusive indeed. The NAACP, fighting segregation through case-by-case litigation in the federal courts, continued to mark up hard-earned victories against southern white primaries and segregated law schools in the border states. But the masses of black folk in the South and the teeming ghettoes of the North languished in searing poverty. With white America largely indifferent to their suffering, in fact insisting that “niggers” were happy with their lot, voices of violence—of retaliation and doom—rang out from ghetto and “nigger town” soap boxes. At the same time, Negro ministers everywhere in the republic tended to preach Washington’s doctrine of accommodation and to promise their congregations that all would be gladness once they reached God’s Kingdom.
King shuddered at such a negative approach to the race problem. Yet Du Bois and Garvey hadn’t found the solution either. How indeed were Negroes to combat discrimination in a country ruled by the white majority? A class assignment in Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” offered a clue, introducing King to the idea of passive resistance. King was probably aware of the Negro civil disobedience then taking place in America: in 1947, A. Philip Randolph threatened to lead a protest march if the armed services were not desegregated (President Truman subsequently did desegregate them), and CORE conducted little-publicized “standins” and “freedom rides.” But whether he knew about these or not, King first encountered the theory itself in “Civil Disobedience.” He was infatuated with Thoreau’s provocative argument that a creative minority—even a minority of “one honest man”—could set in motion a moral revolution.
After his classes, King often visited President Mays’s office to discuss his studies and air his thoughts. It was Mays’s turn to be impressed. “I perceived immediately that this boy was mature beyond his years; that he spoke as a man who should have had ten more years’ experience than was possible. He had a balance and a maturity that were far beyond his years and a grasp of life and its problems that exceeded even that.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1948, at nineteen, King graduated from Morehouse with a degree in sociology and elected to study for his B.A. in divinity at Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania. “You’re mighty young to go to Crozer,” his Daddy said. But King was determined to attend Crozer. It was one of the best seminaries in the country; besides that, he wanted to get out of Atlanta—out of Dixie—and attend an integrated northern school as many another southern Negro was doing. Also, he’d been dating a young woman on a fairly regular basis, and both families assumed that they would marry. Daddy was especially keen on the idea, pointing out what “a fine girl” she was and what a prominent family she came from. He urged his son to marry her. He would help take care of her as long as M. L. was in school. Then he could assume the pastorship of Ebenezer when Daddy retired.
But young King was not ready for marriage. He longed to be free of his Daddy and entangling family alliances. Happily for him, Daddy did not object to his son’s continuing his education. And so he fled Atlanta that fall and headed for Crozer Seminary, situated in Chester, Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Delaware River just southwest of Philadelphia. Here King could pursue an independent life, relish the excitement of intellectual discovery, enjoy the freedom to seek and question without fatherly intrusions. Here for the first time he could truly be a man on his own.
He found Crozer a cloistered, tree-shaded campus located on a hilltop, seemingly a world apart from the smoky industrial city that surrounded it. Fewer than one hundred students—twelve of them women, six of them black—attended this private, nondenominational school, with its polished corridors and uncluttered walkways. Here King resided in a private room in a landscaped dormitory and matriculated in an atmosphere of quiet solemnity.
Still, he was terribly tense, unable to escape the fact that he was a Negro in a mostly white school. He was painfully aware of how whites stereotyped the Negro as lazy and messy, always laughing, always loud and late. He hated that image and tried desperately to avoid it. “If I were a minute late to class,” he said, “I was almost morbidly conscious of it and sure that everyone noticed it. Rather than be thought of as always laughing, I’m afraid I was grimly serious for a time. I had a tendency to overdress, to keep my room spotless, my shoes perfectly shined and my clothes immaculately pressed.”
He was just as intense in his studies, earning an A in every course he took in the curriculum—in Biblical criticism and church history, in the lives and works of the major prophets, in ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He even journeyed up to Philadelphia to take special philosophy classes at the University of Pennsylvania. His professors were vastly impressed with his academic zeal. The president of the seminary invited him out to his home and even left “this very bright young man” in charge of his class. Professor Kenneth Lee Smith, a bachelor who lived in King’s dormitory, recalled him as an animated student, ready to argue with anybody on theological matters and the role of the church in modern life.
For the role of the church concerned him deeply. As a potential minister, he was more determined than ever to be like Benjamin Mays and serve God and humanity from his pulpit. As a consequence, King was not content simply to follow Crozer’s prescribed course of study. On his own, he began a serious quest for a philosophical method to eliminate social evil, a quest that sent him poring over the works of the great social philosophers, “from Plato and Aristotle,” as he wrote later, “down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke.”
While he gained something from each of these thinkers, it was the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch who initially influenced him the most. In the turbulent 1890s, this tall, deaf, bearded scholar had taught church history at Rochester Theological Seminary, embroiled in ecclesiastical controversies of a bygone time. Beyond his study, a Social Gospel movement blazed in industrial America, as modernist Christians attacked the evils of unbridled capitalism and sought to make their religion relevant to the problems of the modern world. As the new century dawned, educated young clergymen across America demanded that social justice be defined in Christian terms.
Swept up in this tempest of reform, Rauschenbusch abandoned recondite scholarship and became the leading prophet of the new Social Gospel. In Christianity and the Social Crisis and other impassioned books, he blamed capitalism for all the squalor and want that plagued the land. Damning business as “the last entrenchment of autocracy,” capitalism as “a mammonistic organization with which Christianity can never be content,” Rauschenbusch summoned Christians to build a new social order—a true Christian commonwealth—in which moral law would replace Darwin’s law of the jungle. Such a commonwealth had been the original mission of Christianity, Rauschenbusch contended, since Christ had called for a kingdom of God on earth, a whole way of life dedicated to the moral reconstruction of society. Theologians and ecclesiastics, however, had misconstrued Christ’s teachings and founded not a kingdom but a church, which then amassed interests of its own. But what really shattered Christ’s dream was the industrial revolution, which spawned capitalism and a whole era of competition, greed, and plunder. Still, Rauschenbusch did not attribute such evil to man himself, for man was basically good, intrinsically perfectible, able to become like Christ. No, sin was the product of an evil society—in this case, capitalist society. Exploitation, prostitution, crime—all were inherent in a social system that exalted profit over virtue, selfishness over brotherhood. The time had come, Rauschenbusch
asserted, for Christians to eradicate capitalism, socialize vital economic resources, and establish God’s kingdom as Christ originally intended. The time had come to usher in “the glad tomorrow,” when man would inhabit a sinless Christian commonwealth based on love, cooperation, and solidarity.
At Crozer, King read Rauschenbusch in a state of high excitement. Here was the Christian activism he longed for. While he thought Rauschenbusch perilously close to equating God’s kingdom with a specific social and economic system, which no Christian should ever do, King nevertheless became an ardent disciple. As he said later, Rauschenbusch provided him with a theological foundation for social concerns he’d had since he was a boy. And he engaged in spirited debates with anybody—professors and preachers alike—who held that man had only a limited capacity for improvement and that the church should confine itself to matters of the soul. A socially relevant faith must deal with the whole man—his body and soul, his material and spiritual well-being. It must work for the kingdom “down here” as well as “over yonder.” Any religion that stressed only the souls of men and not their social and economic conditions was “a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”
What was more, Rauschenbusch’s denunciation of capitalism struck a sensitive nerve in him. He remembered growing up in the Depression and asking his parents about all the Negroes he saw in Atlanta’s breadlines. He remembered the exploitation he’d personally witnessed at the Southern Spring and Mattress Company and the lessons about capitalism pressed on him in Chivers’s sociology course. As a consequence, he came to have distinct “anticapitalist feelings.”
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