During the Christmas holidays of 1949, King spent his spare time reading Karl Marx. He “carefully scrutinized” Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto and several interpretive studies of Marx and Lenin. King came away from his inquiries frowning with Christian concern. Communism, he believed was profoundly and fundamentally evil, “a Christian heresy” that had bound up certain Christian principles in a web of practices and concepts no true Christian could ever accept. First, he objected to Communism’s materialistic interpretation of history. The Communist contemptuously dismissed God as a figment of man’s imagination, religion as a product of fear, ignorance, and superstition. Class and economic conflict, not divine will, were the forces operating on man. He did not need a God or a Jesus. Man could save himself and create a better world alone.
King pronounced this “a grand illusion.” It was “cold atheism wrapped in the garments of materialism.” Reality, he maintained, could not be explained in terms of “matter in motion,” of the push and pull of economic forces. This left out too many “complexities.” It arrogantly ignored Christian thought, which affirmed that “at the heart of reality is a Heart,” King said, “a loving Father who works through history for the salvation of his children.” Man could never save himself because man was not the measure of all things. He needed God. He needed a Savior. Communism was egregiously wrong in denying man’s spiritual necessities.
Secondly, King could not accept the Communist tenet that the ends justified the means. He underscored Lenin’s directions on how to achieve the new classless society: “we must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, and withholding and concealing truth.” Alas, King observed, modern history had witnessed “many tortuous nights and horror-filled days” because Lenin’s followers took him at his word, resorting to perfidy and murder to build the Soviet state. As a Christian, King could never tolerate such “ethical relativism.” “Immoral means,” he stated flatly, “cannot bring moral ends.”
King also disdained Communism’s “crippling totalitarianism,” which he felt stripped man of his inalienable rights and shackled him to the state. In theory, the state was an “interim reality,” King noted, and was to “wither away” when the classless society emerged. But until then the state was omnipresent, with everything—religion, art, music, science—subordinated to its “gripping yoke.” The state thus robbed man of the one quality that Paul Tillich said made him a man: his freedom, which he expressed through his ability to think and respond. By denying him that right, Communism deprived man of all conscience, all reason, and reduced him to “a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.” Communism was just “all mixed up,” a confusing anthropology that was wrong about God and therefore about man. True, Communism started with “men aflame with a passion for social justice.” Yet it had betrayed its original impulse: while Communism trumpeted the glories of a classless society, it “created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice.”
Still, King worried that “Communism may be in the world because Christianity hasn’t been Christian enough,” and he prepared a sermon called “The Challenge of Communism to Christianity,” which he preached one summer at Morehouse. A latter-day Rauschenbusch summoned to battle a new evil, King enjoined the church to stop mouthing “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities,” cease being “the opium of the people” (as Marx described it), and concern itself anew with social justice—with the creation of “a world unity in which all barriers of caste and color are abolished.”
As it happened, King’s critique of Communism only intensified his dislike of capitalism. In truth, he thought Marx correct in much of his criticism in Das Kapital, which underscored for King the danger of constructing a system on the sole motive of profit. This encouraged “cut-throat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.” It made men so “I-centered” that they were no longer “thou-centered,” and led them into “tragic exploitation” and a concentration of wealth among the few. Moreover, people in a capitalist system—people here in America, even black people—too often judged a man’s worth by the size of his income, car, and home rather than his concern for humanity. Thus capitalism fostered a materialism just as evil as Communism. It lulled individual men into the illusion that they could grow and live in their own self-centered worlds—like the rich man in the parable, the man whom God called a fool. Regardless of what the capitalist claimed about rugged individualism, King thought John Donne had it right when he declared that no man is an island unto himself. As King liked to put it, all people in this world are “tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”
DURING BREAKS FROM HIS STUDIES at Crozer, King often visited J. Pius Barbour, a local minister who knew his Daddy and told him to “make yourself at home here, any time.” In the Barbours’ home, King watched television—a remarkable device that brought world events right into the living room—and savored Mrs. Barbour’s “down-home” cooking. Her specialty was a steak simmered in a spicy brown sauce. “He could eat more than any little man you ever saw in your life,” Mrs. Barbour declared. On Sundays, King sometimes preached in Barbour’s church, imparting the gospel in a restrained, almost scholarly, style. Among the church members were several young ladies who swooned over that handsome M. L. King, with his sartorial elegance and fetching smile. Walter McCall, a Crozer classmate and fellow Morehouse man, often accompanied King to the church, and they categorized the young women according to their looks: “a light sister” was not very pretty, but “a doctor” was a knockout.
One day the two friends took a car trip with a couple of young women, heading across the Delaware River into New Jersey. Presently they came to a roadside café in Maple Shade, just east of Camden, and stopped to get something to eat. They were the only Negroes in the place, though, and the waitress ignored them. At last King and McCall hailed the proprietor. “The best thing would be for you to leave,” he said. They tried to reason with him: New Jersey law prohibited racial discrimination in a public place, they said. “I want you out of here,” the man cried. When they refused to move, he drew a pistol—“I’ll kill for less”—and drove them out, firing the gun overhead to make his point.
Well, King and his companions were not going to let the matter rest. They went to the police; the proprietor was arrested and a suit filed against him by the Camden chapter of the NAACP. But the case fell through when the witnesses—three white students from the University of Pennsylvania—declined to testify.
Back at the seminary, King had another brush with violence when a North Carolina white student came banging on his door one day. The student was well known for his racial views: he couldn’t accept Negroes as his schoolmates and called them “darkies.” Somebody had messed up his room—a prank called a “room raid”—and he blamed King. He was in a tirade, shouting at King, hurling maledictions at him. Then he drew a pistol and threatened to shoot King dead. But King would not be rattled. Looking the maddened student in the eye, he calmly denied having anything to do with the room raid. By now the racket had attracted other students: they yelled at the North Carolinian, made him put his gun down. Afterward they brought the matter before the student government; but to everybody’s surprise King refused to press charges. With students and faculty alike clamoring against him, though, the North Carolinian publicly admitted he was wrong and extended King an apology.
After that King became the most popular student at Crozer, widely admired not only for his scholarship, but for his courage and grace as well. Certain of acceptance now, he began to relax some and get more involved in campus social life. What was more, he and the North Carolina student eventually became friends. The entire episode seemed a valuable lesson in how to convert a foe into a comrade.
COMMITTED THOUGH HE WAS to the social gospel, King had reservations at Crozer about the power of
Christian love, brotherly love, to effect social change. He’d read extensively in history, and it had revealed to him how impotent love could be. It had not ended slavery in antebellum America. No, it took the holocaust of Civil War to root out that abominable institution. Nor had the champions of brotherly love brought about an integrated America in this century, or stopped Hitler from plunging Europe into an inferno. The more King examined history, the more he wondered whether he could be a pacifist.
During his stay at Crozer, he attended a lecture on pacifism by Dr. A. J. Muste, executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Though deeply moved by Muste’s strong moral convictions, King was dubious about his Christian pacifist position that all war is evil. Maybe war could never be a positive good, an absolute good. But perhaps it could serve as “a negative good” to combat the spread of evil. Terrible though it was, war might be preferable to Nazi—or Communist—totalitarianism.
In this frame of mind, King took up Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power, which shook his faith in love more than anything he had read. Writing mostly in the 1880s, Nietzsche proclaimed God dead and warned that mass man—the moronic herd—was about to rise up and plunge the world into barbarism. Troubled and brooding, Nietzsche glorified war and preached the will to power. He raged against democracy and parliaments, assailed liberalism, socialism, and Communism, and flayed away at Christianity for encouraging servility and impotence with its “slave morality.” What was the alternative to mob rule? Nietzsche prophesied the coming of a master race—a superman who would control the masses and govern the earth.
King put Nietzsche’s work aside a little depressed. Though repelled by his obsession with power and race, King wondered if Nietzsche was not right about the weaknesses of Christian love. Maybe it could not change and purify the world. In fact, it seemed to King that the Christian injunctions to “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” were valid only in relationships between individuals, not in conflicts between nations or racial groups. Such conflicts needed a more realistic approach—though he wasn’t sure what that entailed. He still greatly admired Rauschenbusch’s compelling vision of a Christian commonwealth based on love. But how to bring that about? How to improve the lot of the masses—how to ameliorate the condition of his own dispirited people—without force and violence? King’s study of slavery—especially of Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831—convinced him that it was impractical, even suicidal, for a minority to strike back against a heavily armed majority. It was also morally wrong. Yet if love was an ineffective tool for social change, how was meaningful reform to be accomplished?
One Sunday in Philadelphia, King attended a lecture by Dr. Mordecai W. Johnson, president of Howard University. Johnson had just spent fifty days in India, and his lecture was a stirring presentation of the life and teachings of Gandhi. As King sat rooted to his chair, Johnson explained how Gandhi had forged Soul Force—the power of love or truth—into a mighty vehicle for social change. Gesturing from the lectern, Johnson argued that the moral power of Gandhian nonviolence could improve race relations in America, too.
King was spellbound. “I had heard of Gandhi,” he said, but Johnson’s “message was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works”—chief among them, Louis Fischer’s Life and Gandhi’s own Autobiography. King was deeply moved by Gandhi’s March to the Sea, fascinated by his simple and celibate life, inspired by his inner struggles. As Fischer pointed out, Gandhi had embraced nonviolence in part to subdue his own violent nature. As a young lawyer in South Africa, he shouted at his wife and in one memorable scene tried to drive her from their home. Fischer maintained that the celebrated mahatma calm of later years derived from long training in temper control: Gandhi had become “a self remade man.” This was a revelation for King, who had felt a lot of hatred in his life, especially toward whites. Now Gandhi showed him a means not only of harnessing his anger, but of channeling it into a positive and creative force.
Nonviolent resistance, Gandhi taught, meant noncooperation with evil, an idea he got from Thoreau, whose essay on civil disobedience “left a deep impression on me.” Thoreau, in turn, had studied the Bhagavad-Gita and several of the sacred Hindu Upanishads, which for King further illustrated the interconnected structure of reality. Gandhi, for his part, took Thoreau’s theory and gave it practical application in the form of strikes, boycotts, and protest marches, all conducted nonviolently and all predicated on love for the oppressor and a belief in divine justice. Gandhi’s goal was not to defeat the British in India, but to redeem them through love, so as to avoid a legacy of bitterness. His term for this—Satyagraha—reconciled love and force in a single, powerful concept.
With barely restrained enthusiasm, King embraced Satyagraha as the theoretical method he had been searching for. True, there were differences between Gandhi’s situation in India and the Negroes’ in America. Gandhi had led a majority against a small minority, and antagonisms between Indians and the British were scarcely so deep and bitter as black-white conflicts in this country. Nevertheless, King was convinced that Gandhi’s was the only moral and practical way for oppressed people to struggle against social injustice.
King thought Gandhi one of the great men of all time. “He was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful effective social force on a large scale.” King rejoiced that Christ had furnished him with the spirit; now Gandhi had showed him how it could work. Even in conflicts between groups and nations, you could love your enemies, turn your other cheek. Even if you were viciously beaten (as were Gandhi and his followers), your suffering could redeem your adversaries and purge you, too, of hatred. “The chain of hatred must be cut,” King reflected. “When it is broken, brotherhood can begin.”
After reading Gandhi, King sought a definition for the kind of love meant in Satyagraha. In the Greek language, he noted, there were three words for love: eros, which connoted romantic love; philia, which expressed intimate affection between friends or a man and a woman; and agape, which was defined as “understanding, redeeming good will for all men.” Neither Jesus nor Gandhi intended that he should love his enemies as friends or intimates. That was absurd. Agape was the kind of love they meant—a disinterested love for all humankind, a love that saw the neighbor in everyone it met. King was delighted with this definition and enjoyed explaining it to his friends and professors, even to his dates. Agape was the love in Christ’s teachings that took one to any length to restore “the beloved community,” to forgive (as Jesus told Peter) seventy times seven to preserve community. But reacting to hatred with hatred only added to the bitterness and divisions in the world. Through agape, though, one perceived all human life as interrelated, all men as brothers, all humanity as a single process. With that love, King believed, the broken community could be “cemented” together again, and the kingdom of God on earth—the mission of true Christianity—attained at last. Gandhi had shown King how that, too, could be done.
BY HIS SENIOR YEAR AT CROZER, King was an unabashed exponent of Protestant liberalism, which gave him an intellectual satisfaction he had never found in fundamentalism. He cherished what he considered liberalism’s dedication to truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind—which King thought the hallmark of an educated man. “I was absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of man,” he recalled, “and the natural power of human reason.”
Then he became involved with a young white woman, evidently the daughter of Crozer’s superintendent of buildings and grounds. They fell in love and spoke tentatively of marriage. At this juncture, Reverend Barbour intervened and gave King “a long, fatherly talk” about the terrible problems intermarriage would create for him in this country. Reluctantly, King broke off the relationship. When the woman’s parents learned of her affection for King, they sent her away from Chester. It was a painful experience for King, a soberin
g experience. Years later, in the company of close friends, he would still discourse on “the weltschmerz of prejudice.”
Perhaps the episode influenced his theological views, for in the same period he began having doubts about the natural goodness of man. He turned to Reinhold Niebuhr, whose ideas he’d studied in Crozer classes, and undertook a serious study of his theology and social ethics. A professor of religion at Union Theological Seminary, Niebuhr had pioneered neo-orthodoxy, the “new theology” that was the rage at American seminaries in midcentury. In works like Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr mounted an all-out attack against liberalism, accusing it of “a false optimism” about man’s essential nature. As history voluminously demonstrated, evil flourished ineradicably at all levels of human existence. It resided not only in man’s fallibility, but in his sinful denial of that fallibility, which derived from his innate pride and selfishness. It was, Niebuhr asserted, an absurd and wicked faith which held that sinful man could perfect himself and his world. In claiming that he could, Protestant liberals were naïve victims of the nineteenth-century “cult of inevitable progress,” which blinded them to man’s basic evil. On that score, though he had once been a pacifist, Niebuhr castigated pacifism as a simplistic position, resting as it did on the sectarian rubbish that man was intrinsically good and that divine grace could lift him from the contradictions of history. For Niebuhr, there was no fundamental moral difference between nonviolent and violent resistance. In fact, in the presence of a totalitarian menace like the Nazis, pacifism could be irresponsible—almost collusion with evil. Can we really believe, Niebuhr asked, that conscientious objectors to a military society could have softened Hitler’s heart and dissuaded him from invading Poland?
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