by Patrick Parr
Photographed in January 2016, this is the path ML took into what was then called Ship Creek Woods, behind the Old Main building. Farther down the path is Chester Creek, by which ML used to sit. Photo by the author
Moments of conflict swirled through ML’s mind as well: sand in his vegetables; Lucius Hall’s gun pointed at him; his meetings around campus with Betty and the awareness that even though he was attracted to a white woman, society, church culture, family, and friends would disapprove of any kind of relationship.
Was devoting his life to a church what he really wanted? He had his doubts, and near the end of his first year at Crozer, he wrote them down:
The church is suppose to be the most radical opposer of the status quo in society, yet, in many instances, it is the greatest preserver of the status quo. So it was very easy for slavery to receive a religious sanction. The church is one of the chief exponents of racial bigotry. Monopoly capitalism has always received the sanction of the church. . . . Since this is the case, we must admit that the church is far from Christ.24
He was frustrated. With his own eyes, not just in the South but in the North as well, he’d viewed a deeply flawed society, one that overwhelmed the oldest and purest impulses he still perceived within the church:
What has happened is this: the church, while flowing through the stream of history has picked up the evils of little tributaries, and these tributaries have been so powerful that they have been able to overwhelm the main stream.25
ML himself was flowing through history, picking up influences that instead of corrupting would clarify his place in the world. But here, near the Delaware River, he could stretch his legs and think for himself. He was under no national pressure to become a great man; he was under no obligation to be a leader of the civil rights movement—and he was under no expectation but his own to change the way society had been structured. By that tributary, ML pondered his existence. His first year at Crozer was ending, and he was due back at Ebenezer to serve as the associate pastor. No matter where he turned, a church was waiting for him. The institution, for better or worse, had begun to wrap itself around his mind.
And yet, as he prepared himself for a summer of southern preaching, a haunting thought was ringing through his head: “The church, in its present state, is not the hope of the world.”26
Year II
Exodus
Standard dorm room on the second floor of Old Main, where Martin Luther King Jr. lived. Courtesy of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, NY
4
A New Devotion
Term 1, September 13–
November 23, 1949
“The trouble with you fellows from Universities is you think that there is only one type in the World . . . the Socratic. But history records Attila the Hun as well as Jesus; Stalin as well as Paul. And by the way I never heard of Attila drinking the Hemlock or Stalin going to the cross. Don’t believe that mess about the Pen is mightier than the sword. Give me the sword!”
—J. Pius Barbour to King, 19541
New Leaders, New Friends, New Devotions: “It Takes an Audience Just About Two Minutes”
When ML returned to Atlanta in the summer of 1949, it was clear to his former Morehouse classmates that he’d changed. One of them, Samuel McKinney, spoke of his friend’s newfound maturity: “I think he really came into his own when he was in seminary. . . . He grew up quite a bit. He was able to move away from his own family and become his own person. Not that he wasn’t already.” McKinney, more than other friends, sympathized with ML’s desire to leave behind family—especially since they were both PKs: preacher’s kids. “We were both ‘refugees’ hoping to escape an assembly of hot air. Sons of preachers all the time. We didn’t want to listen to all that stuff.”2
But that summer, ML found himself back in the hot air, by his father’s side as the associate pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was his chance to put into practice everything he’d learned at Crozer and develop his oratorical muscles in front of a supportive congregation. “It takes an audience just about two minutes to find out if a man has any sense,” his mentor Rev. Barbour once wrote.3 ML had sense—but could he hold his congregation’s attention for three solid months?
With Daddy King on the sidelines with arms crossed, mother Alberta flipping between organ and piano, and brother AD and sister Christine watching from the pews, the twenty-year-old ML barreled his way through fourteen sermons in fourteen weeks. On May 22, in a sermon titled “A Way Out,” ML started by mentioning a “very close classmate” who’d confided in ML by telling him about a “crisis” in which his wife and mother had died within three weeks of each other:
The forms of these crises may be as diverse as the number of human beings. It may result from the death of a loved one, it may result from an unsuccessful love affair . . . or it may result from a child’s failure to [live] up to his parent’s expectation. . . . When men find themselves in these crisis situations they are forever trying to find a way out.4
By early June, ML had begun to settle into the rhythms of the Ebenezer congregation. On June 5, he preached on “Mastering Our Evil Selves,” bringing up the issue of race as he discussed the Jekyll and Hyde inside every human being:
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.
On July 24, ML felt comfortable enough to go global. In a sermon he called “Splinters and Planks,” he compared the escalating threat of Russia and Communism to America’s own civil threat, racism:
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.
By the time ML headed back to Crozer, he’d been reforged as a preacher. Yes, he’d had his family, friends, and hometown community behind him, but that’s something most of his fellow seminarians lacked, and he’d made the most of it. As he returned to room 52 on the second floor of Old Main, he could reintroduce himself as a young man—still well-dressed—whose oratorical skills had been tested and tempered.
Of course, Daddy King wanted to reintroduce his son to Crozer in a way that any alpha, driven father would: in style. One new seminarian, Francis Stewart, remembered seeing the King family on campus for the first time: “ML Sr. brought King back to the seminary in a big black limousine, and ML Sr. had a big gold chain across his chest . . . typical, classic black preacher. . . . He was planning on having ML take over his church . . . that was his dream . . . but King did everything he could to be as opposite to that type of person as he could be.”5
A new school year always brought changes, and in the fall of 1949, Crozer had been through plenty of them. Dr. Aubrey had officially left the Crozer presidency, becoming the head of a new department of religious thought just up the road at the University of Pennsylvania. Taking Aubrey’s place was an interim president named Dr. Howard Wayne Smith, who’d graduated from Crozer in 1896.
Dr. Smith, in his seventies at the time, didn’t plan to hold the post for long. In the local Chester paper, he said that “the interim period will be very brief.” Quiet by nature, Dr. Smith had a silent, unassuming way of walking around campus—as if at any moment he might fade away and not be seen again. Students nicknamed him “Creeping Jesus.” They viewed him as a “serious, sober, slow-moving administrator” with a “turtle-like demeanor.”6
As Creeping Jesus roamed the campus, ML welcomed a few new seminarians to the second floor of Old Main. One was a Japanese man nine years older than ML named Makoto Sakurabayashi, from Yokohama. Despite lingering tensions from the Pacific theater of World War II, Sakurabayashi had made the eight-thousand-mile trip to obtain an “Oriental certificate,” Crozer’s two-year program for international students. Standing around five feet tall, Sakurabaya
shi was described by other classmates as “highly cultured.”
Quite opposite in manner was fellow international student En-Chin Lin from Foochow, China, who had sloppy eating habits and “belched” during dinner. Despite Lin’s table manners, he may have been one of the oldest and most experienced students at the seminary, having completed his bachelor’s degree in counseling in 1935 and earned an MS in education from UPenn in 1949. He hoped to start a career as a director of teacher education.7
The student lounge, circa late 1940s, located near the end of the hallway on the second floor of Old Main. Courtesy of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, NY
There were also the “Yankees,” or white northerners who’d come to Crozer more accustomed to the campus culture. Two doors down from ML was new Yankee student Walter Stark, a pacifist and vegetarian who was given a hard time by other students for wearing a leather belt. Now in his late twenties, Stark had grown up on a farm in Michigan and served two years in prison for avoiding the war. His tendency to argue for the absolute goodness of man led to frequent debates with ML. “We had lots of discussions with each other,” Stark said. “At that time he wasn’t convinced of the nonviolent approach. . . . He didn’t strongly oppose it or anything like that, but he had serious questions about whether that approach would work.”8
When talks about the church, classes, and approaches to social action had run their course, ML, Stark, and other friends would go out at night to cut loose a bit. Stark remembered one evening at a New Jersey nightclub. As the band blared its music, a packed dance floor moved to the beat. For Stark, it wasn’t his cup of tea: “I couldn’t stand it in there. . . . It was a real low ceiling. Someone was playing and singing and jumping up there. And it was so thick with smoke and the smell of liquor, that that mixture I would have heaved up pretty soon if I had stayed there very long, so I just went out to the car.”9
Perhaps Stark’s opposite among the new students was Francis Stewart, who’d come up from Atlanta, having graduated from Mercer University in 1948. Stewart served in the Air Force during WWII, completing a tour in Italy. He was one of millions of veterans all over the country taking advantage of the GI Bill, but he also had a part-time job at Sears that kept him busy all week, followed by church duties on Sunday at First Baptist Church, a mile and a half away from Old Main. Married with a son, Stewart lived in the housing directly behind Old Main. Eventually Stewart would distinguish himself among the small class of 1952 by being elected student body president, but for now he was an incoming junior in awe of ML’s oratorical skills: “Nobody skipped chapel or played when King spoke. He was gifted. He always had something to say when he said it.”10
At the end of ML’s first year, the Crozer student body elected him to lead Friday devotions. His official title was “Devotions Committee chairman.” Each Friday morning from 10:00 to 10:30, ML was responsible for leading all his classmates through the student-only church service in the chapel on the first floor of Old Main. There was a presiding speaker—typically someone in his first year, to get his feet wet—and a sermon. Peppered throughout the vespers-like service, according to the program of one such service, were the Nunc Dimittis (the Song of Simeon), a recitation of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments), a hymn, and various gospel readings.11
For ML, it was an honor to be named chair of what may have been the most personal religious experience of the week for his fellow students. He’d earned the respect of grown men—soldiers who’d seen war, pacifists who’d refused the fight, and outsiders looking to rebel against the system. ML himself understood the value of that accomplishment. “It is our job as ministers,” ML wrote, “to bring the church back to the center of the human race.”12
Classes and Professors: An Intellectual Tug of War
Christian Theology for Today 240
“Christianity is not a balcony experience where we sit and watch the parade of life swing by. On the contrary, it is a descent into the busy road of life where we meet the issue of existence and move on toward fulfillment or disaster.”
—George W. Davis13
Christian Theology for Today was a required course, divided into two terms of material (numbered 240 and 241). It was ML’s third class with Professor George Davis, who’d also taught Great Theologians and Christian Mysticism. Although at first he came off as distant, Davis eventually won over just about all his students, either in the classroom or over dinner and a chat with his wife and sons. To the seminarians, Davis was a “real Christian,” said Horace Whitaker. “We all loved Davis.”14
During summers, Davis served as an interim pastor at the nearby First Baptist Church. In the fall, Davis took Walter McCall to a local apple orchard. They spent days crushing apples together to make cider. Devout yet laid back, Davis would not have objected if he’d heard that Mac usually transformed the results into hard apple cider, which other seminarians sampled when they felt the urge.15
ML’s Class Schedule
Year II, Term 1, September 13–November 23, 1949
Time
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
8:00 AM
Christian Theology for Today 240
Christian Theology for Today 240
Christian Theology for Today 240
Christian Theology for Today 240
9:00 AM
Public Worship
Public Worship
Public Worship
Public Worship
10:00 AM
10:30 AM
Chapel service
Optional service
Devotional pd.
11:00 AM
11:30 AM
Greek Religion
Greek Religion
Greek Religion
Greek Religion
12:00 PM
1:00 PM
2:00 PM
3:00 PM
4:00 PM
Vespers service (4:15 PM)
5:00 PM
No classes on Monday | Term examinations: Nov. 21–23 |
Thanksgiving break: Nov. 24–28
ML’s GPA for the term: 3.22
Christian Theology for Today 240
George Washington Davis, BD, ThM (Colgate-Rochester), PhD (Yale)
Course Description: “The nature and method of theology; the Christian faith in its systematic formulations; the Christian conception of God; man, his nature, need, and destiny; the religious significance of Jesus of Nazareth and his part in salvation; the place and task of the Church as the carrier of the Christian faith and experience.” First of two terms. (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: B+)
Public Worship
Robert Elwood Keighton, BD, ThM (Crozer)
Course Description: “The philosophy and psychology of worship; relationship of worship to other human activities; history and development of Christian worship; source materials; creation of actual worship services.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: B+)
Greek Religion
Morton Scott Enslin, BD (Andover Newton), ThD (Harvard), DD (Colby)
Course Description: “The origin and development of Minoan-Mycenaean and Greek religion.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: B)
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, a half-hour period was set aside at 10:00 AM for services in the chapel. On Tuesdays was a mandatory service led by interim president Dr. Howard Wayne Smith. Wednesday services were optional, generally led by a member of the faculty or an invited pastor from an evangelical institution. The Friday devotional period was run by the students themselves and presided over by ML as chairman of the Devotions Committee. On Thursday, the 10:00 AM slot was a free period, and a vespers service was held at 4:15 PM. This tightly planned service featured a speaker from a prescheduled list, usually a Crozer professor or a guest speaker from another institution.16
In Christian Theology, Davis took his time with the class, emphasizing what he would later say to incoming Crozer students: that it was important for them to d
evelop a deeper understanding of Christian theology, apprehending it on three different levels he referred to as:
1. The Strata: Students needed to immerse themselves in the meanings of the Bible and other sacred texts—many of which they studied in their first year at Crozer.
2. The Sub-strata: Students should absorb the history of the church, good and bad, and better understand how it came to be and where it could possibly go.
3. The Basis: Ambiguous for a reason, this level comprises the connective tissue related to the life of Christ and his teachings. As a divinity student rereads the Bible with new eyes, the student should begin to perceive a “thread of unity,” an emotional and hopefully satisfying pattern. Only then, Davis believed, can the seminarian be close to the spirit of Christ.17
The papers ML wrote for Davis reflect this multitiered process. In one, a B+ effort titled “The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God,” ML once again goes after Karl Barth, this time criticizing not his preaching skills but his thinking, in particular his attempt to “undermine the rational in religion.” Attempting to do so, ML wrote, “is one of the perils of our time.”18