The Seminarian
Page 4
Dr. Pritchard saw it as his responsibility to knock the fundamentalist ideas out of his students’ heads forever. He focused on correcting their view of Moses as a “legendary character” and their “overinflated” sense of the story of Exodus so they could preach the tale with more precision. Later in the year it would be Enslin’s turn to eliminate all the glorified myths of Jesus and build him back up from scratch.24
There were nine students in Pritchard’s “O.T.” class, including a few of ML’s friends, such as wise counselor Horace Whitaker, room-raid savior Marcus Wood, and a unique but remote black seminarian from Panama, Cyril Pyle, who quickly found a role in the Chester community as a preacher and moderator at the local West Branch YMCA. King sat in the second-to-last row of the classroom, soaking in his professor’s pragmatic explanations. ML was quiet and dressed in an unwrinkled white-collared shirt, a black tie, suit coat, and black pants. The nineteen-year-old may have worried about whether he came across as a peer to his older classmates, but while some of them were paralyzed by the very idea of cutting Moses down to size, he enjoyed being challenged to dissect and scrutinize his previous beliefs. ML had always wanted Daddy King to take a more cerebral approach to his preaching. Over the years, he had watched his father deliver his message backed by not much other than plainspoken enthusiasm. It was this primal authority (Make it plain, son!) that pushed ML toward the other end of the spectrum.25
The first week of O.T. made clear what Crozer expected, and it was exactly what ML was hoping for. This was the intense class he needed to shake himself out of his youthful academic stagnation. In a letter to his mother in October 1948, he wrote, “Some times the professor [Pritchard] comes in class and tells us to read our . . . assignments in Hebrew, and that is really hard.”26
ML’s grades were considerably better than those of the other black students in the class, whose underperformance may reflect their resistance to Pritchard’s antifundamentalist approach. Perhaps they felt at first that it was unimportant whether a story was “true” or not. Like Daddy King, they may have surmised that preaching was more about delivery, passion, conviction, and belief. But for Dr. Pritchard, treating myth as truth for the sake of convenience meant short-changing the possibilities of a sermon. It was only with an understanding of historical fact that Old Testament legends could be most powerfully retold.27
Introduction to the Old Testament
Dr. James Pritchard, Term 1 Grades, Sept.–Nov. 1948
Robert C. Hill
A-
Robert E. Hopkins
B
Martin Luther King Jr.
B-
Joseph T. Kirkland
D-
Wendall A. Maloch
B
Cyril G. Pyle
D+
George T. Walton
A-
Horace E. Whitaker
D
Marcus G. Wood
D-
Dr. Pritchard: “I was tough in those days.”28
King may have been quicker to attune himself to his professor’s expectations, but at the time his writing skills were far from excellent. His work for Pritchard’s Old Testament class provide early examples of the problem documented by the King Papers Project at Stanford University: ML spent years at Crozer and Boston University lifting uncited passages from books and passing them off as his own. It is safe to say that if ML were a literature major at an American university in 2018, he would not be able to get away with such behavior. All a professor would need to do was paste a suspicious passage from ML’s paper into a search engine to find the matching source, and ML would be dismissed from school for plagiarism. But this was 1948, at a divinity school not heavily concerned with the rules of proper citation, and ML’s actions would go unpunished.29
In retrospect, however, the plagiarism is clear. Here are two examples of material ML lifted for an Old Testament paper about the prophet Jeremiah:
“Religion, in a sense, through the prophet, provides for its own advancement, and carries within it the promise of progress and renewed power.”
—T. Crouther Gordon, The Rebel Prophet: Studies in the Personality of Jeremiah (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932)
“Religion, in a sense, through men like Jeremiah, provides for its own advancement, and carries within it the promise of progress and renewed power.”
—King, “The Significant Contributions of Jeremiah to Religious Thought” (Fall 1948)
“. . . he perceived that what religion was to him it must be to all men—the response of the heart to the voice of God within.”
—John Skinner, Prophecy and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940)
“. . . he perceived that what religion was to him it must be to all men—the response of the heart to the voice of God [‘within” omitted].”
—King, “The Significant Contributions of Jeremiah to Religious Thought” (Fall 1948)
Tweaking only one or two words of a passage and presenting it as one’s own work is not something a student would do by accident. ML would have been fully aware that he was cribbing. And, to Pritchard’s credit, the professor did attempt to nudge ML very subtly in the direction of proper citation. In this paper, Pritchard corrected a footnote citation, and even made sure to let ML know about keeping better track of who wrote what: “This is Wellhausen as quoted in Pfeiffer.”30
Near the end of the paper, ML offered some telling words that were mostly his own: “[Jeremiah] was lightly esteemed in life. He became the supreme example of . . . the suffering servant. He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Although he had a bit of help from Isaiah in that last line, it’s clear that ML had sympathy for Jeremiah, “the suffering servant.”
Dr. Pritchard would long remember ML’s presence both in and out of his classroom. “I do have, of course, vivid memories of him in my class in Old Testament,” he recalled, but he knew ML better as his family babysitter, watching the professor’s children for thirty-five cents an hour: “On a more informal level were the numerous occasions when he came to our home on the campus to stay with our two young daughters when we would be out for the evening. They too came to know and appreciate him.”31 The job provided King with one of his early glimpses into white middle-class culture.
Meanwhile, ML was acclimating to the Crozer routine. He didn’t have much time to recover from Dr. Pritchard’s gauntlet of reality checks and Hebrew language demands, but back then Old Main was its own little world. From the classrooms on the first floor, ML could have headed down the stairs to the kitchen and grabbed a small snack. If he wasn’t hungry, he could have gone down the hall in the basement to the recreation room and set up a game of pool, table tennis, or shuffleboard with another seminarian. If he needed to cram for class, he could have perused the student-run bookstore for books related to a class topic. “He was a normal human being, especially in those early years,” Horace Whitaker recalled.32
Orientation for Juniors
What are the major problems confronting the Church today?
What qualities, knowledge, and skills are required of religious leaders?
What should be the aims of the churches?
—E. E. Aubrey33
These three questions sat atop Dr. Edwin Ewart Aubrey’s outline for ML’s second class of the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Orientation for Juniors. (At Crozer, a seminarian’s first year was referred to as “junior year,” the second year “middle,” and third year “senior.”) Students considered Aubrey, the president of Crozer at the time, to be “cold,” “stern and unyielding,” and someone who spoke “above” them. This was demonstrated one night in late September, when Aubrey called together all the new students. As ML, Marcus Wood, Horace Whitaker, and the other juniors took seats in the chapel, Aubrey stood in front of them and declared that they were “the dumbest class the school has ever had.”34
Dr. E. E. Aubrey, circa the early 1950s. From the Collections of the University of Penn
sylvania Archives
To the faculty, their president was an “idealist” and a man who refused to “cut corners.” He had wanted to keep the academic standards high at Crozer, but the school’s trustees leaned on him to increase enrollment, hoping for the swift financial kick many other institutions were then enjoying by expanding their student body. With soldiers returning from the war and looking to continue their studies, and black preachers hoping to follow in the footsteps of J. Pius Barbour, there were plenty of applicants, even if their grades were middling.35 Aubrey was not impressed by these enthusiastic but average enrollees, not even the full-grown men who’d seen battle. From his perspective, they were lucky to be Crozer students. In fact, for his Orientation for Juniors class, one of the first required readings was an article titled “Theological Education in the Post-War World.” The author? A British academic by the name of E. E. Aubrey.36
Aubrey could sense that his time at Crozer was approaching its end. Not only was he being asked to lower his standards, but midway through the first term he lost a valued ally and friend, renowned Crozer faculty member Maynard Cassady. Professor Cassady died at home on October 24, 1948, and Aubrey, perhaps preoccupied with funeral arrangements, scheduled a test for the Orientation class on October 26.37 Several weeks later, Aubrey would resign as president of Crozer, choosing instead to head up a new religious department at the University of Pennsylvania. Due perhaps to Aubrey’s tumultuous situation but likely also to ML’s own timidity, this class resulted in the lowest grade ML would ever receive at Crozer, a C-.38
Aubrey shouldn’t be dismissed as merely a snooty disciplinarian, however. According to Samuel D. Proctor, a well-respected black preacher who graduated from Crozer two years before ML’s arrival, Aubrey was a family man devoted to his wife and two children. Proctor and his own wife, Bessie, lived with the Aubreys as “domestic help” in 1946, and Proctor made a point of highlighting the human side of Crozer’s president:
[Aubrey and his wife] loved books, opera, the symphonies and art galleries; they never listened to the radio, never knew which football team was out front, who won the World Series, or which basketball teams made the final four. They could not dance. In nine months of living in the same house with them (we had a private apartment on the third floor), I never saw her without heels, stockings, and makeup; and I never saw him without a collar and tie. Bessie and I studied them as though they were in a museum. I enjoyed talking theology with Dr. Aubrey, and Mrs. Aubrey wanted to teach my wife more about cooking than she would ever need to know.39
The Proctors’ experience with the Aubreys was similar to ML’s with the Pritchards: it provided an extended peek into the lifestyles of upper-middle-class white people who, as Samuel Proctor recalled, “did not have to be concerned with their survival, their identity, or their space and basic rights and freedom.” Eventually, Proctor came to see the Aubreys as gracious “stage actors.” He appreciated their welcoming spirit, but their souls were “laminated”—shielded, Proctor believed, from actual human suffering.40
Preaching Ministry of the Church; Public Speaking
Around the time ML decided to attend Crozer, the professor who would soon be teaching his Preaching Ministry and Public Speaking courses, Robert Keighton, contributed a fiery essay to the Crozer Quarterly. Entitled “I Am a Minister,” the essay described the devolving cultural status of the preacher, and how vital it was not to succumb to this downhill slide into irrelevance:
The uncomfortable fact is that the ministry has lost its sense of dignity. The minister has acquiesced in the general conspiracy to rob him of his authority. . . . I have known some ministers who were more concerned to have us know that they had a secretary than that they had a gospel.41
Though his essay may have emphasized the importance of biblical truth over empty signifiers, all recorded accounts suggest that Professor Keighton himself was a dramatist at heart,*3 a frustrated scholar of British literature who’d found a way to pay the bills by teaching preachers how to perform. To prove a point in class, nine times out of ten Keighton would quote a literary figure; he chose authors such as Keats, Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Dickens over Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Other professors often jabbed him for his lack of scriptural emphasis. If only you knew your Bible the way you knew Shakespeare! was a comment Keighton heard frequently.42 A few professors also described him as “dry,” while one future colleague who’d once been Keighton’s student refused to mince words: “Arrogant . . . [a] son of a bitch.”43
Professor Robert Keighton in the early 1950s. From the book jacket of The Man Who Would Preach, published by Abingdon Press
Whether pompous or a champion of ministerial high standards, Keighton was Crozer’s sole preaching professor, and as such, his impact on ML’s education was considerable.*4 ML would end up taking ten courses from him, and the moment he first walked into Keighton’s classroom was the first day of his education in the ways of a white liberal preacher. For over a decade, ML had soaked in the power and bluster of southern black preachers like his father and William Holmes Borders. There was an urgency to these men’s voices, a sort of confident desperation. Every Sunday they pushed the message Things need to change! Keighton, on the other hand, did not come from the South, nor had he suffered for long periods of time as a “secondary citizen.” For Keighton, the act of preaching meant asking the audience How can we be better? and Can we get there with dignity? 44
Keighton’s vision was that a minister should inspire through confidence, grace, and sophistication; from his perspective, whooping had no place in a sermon. One former student recalled that “Keighton did not like the style of black preachers, full of imagery of fire and brimstone. Black students did not do well in his class.”45 ML was an exception, however, earning a B+ in Preaching Ministry. And over ML’s years at Crozer, Keighton’s ever-present example would help him to understand what many white people of faith wanted to hear, and how they wanted it delivered.
By a few accounts, Keighton was mainly indifferent to ML as a student, later calling him a “product of his environment.” A day after Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Keighton was quoted as saying that ML was “a rather quiet, unassuming, good student who I feel gave very little evidence of the direction or the way he was going to develop.”46
But, in fact, it was in Keighton’s Preaching Ministry class that ML first started to formulate grand ambitions for what he could accomplish as a religious leader. “On the one hand,” ML wrote in a handwritten outline of sermon notes, “I must attempt to change the soul of individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other I must attempt to change the societies so that the individual soul will [have a chance to] change.” He asserted “that the minister should possess profundity of conviction. We have [too] many minister[s] in the pulpit who are great spellbounders and [too] few who possess spiritual power. It is my profound conviction that I, as an aspirant for the ministry, should possess these powers.”47 Now this was a driven man, and Keighton, the suppressed Shakespearean, would surely have approved.
Choir; Church Music
“To this day [fifty years later] I can picture Mike King standing at the front of our choir group, leading all of us through the soaring passages of his favorite hymn: ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.’”
—Marcus Wood48
If you entered the tall front doors of Old Main in 1948, took a left, and headed down the hallway until nearly the end, you would find a door on your right that led into the chapel. On Thursday afternoons, ML would pass through this door to spend two hours singing for and learning from Ruth B. Grooters, organist extraordinaire.49
With the exception of a professor he would take a class from at the University of Pennsylvania in his middle year, Grooters was the only female instructor ML had during his years at Crozer. Very little has been written about ML’s experience with Grooters, but considering he’d spent his childhood singing in the choir at Ebenezer Baptist for Mama King, Grooters’s course must have prov
ided at least a small dose of weekly nostalgia. At Ebenezer, King’s mother would play the organ as his already smooth voice cranked out “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus,” gospel style. The congregation ate him up, and ministers all around loved to have ML come over to their church to sing, giving them a chance to start a “special collection” in his name. ML’s love of music continued at Morehouse College, where he sang in the glee club.50 So it’s unsurprising that he made a positive impression on Ruth Grooters as well. Said Bobbie Hoopes, Ruth’s daughter, “She was a very private person, but I remember her mentioning, later in life, that Martin Luther King Jr. had been in her chapel choir, and in class, where he was a good singer and student.”51
The first hour of Grooters’s class was Choir, dedicated to hymnal singing, the men’s voices bouncing off the broad walls of the chapel. The second hour, Church Music, was more instructional. Grooters had the students—basses, baritones, and tenors—sit down and work on the basic harmonies within the group. She gave them “sight singing” assignments, passing around new music and having them work out their parts on the fly. The main goal of Grooters’s instruction was to make sure the students were ready for the annual candlelight vespers holiday concert, held in the chapel each December. It was open to the public, and almost always locally reported by the Chester Times.52