The Seminarian
Page 10
Surprisingly, one of his sources was a book by E. E. Aubrey, of all people, the former Crozer president who had called ML’s class the dumbest in Crozer history. Granted, ML failed to use quotation marks when using Aubrey’s words, but he did include a bibliographic reference at the end of the paper.
Public Worship
“A church service gathers a congregation—people brought together by a common assent to the suppositions of the church, by precedent conditions of relationships—and they are dismissed with the implications and the obligations of the hour spent together still upon them.”
—Robert Keighton19
“You will notice that the Negro Church is the only sphere of Negro life that is not a carbon copy of the white man.”
—Rev. J. Pius Barbour20
In Public Worship, Robert Keighton attempted to simulate for his class the whole of a minister’s church experience, emphasizing the importance of the congregation and the duty of the preacher not only to attempt to deliver an excellent sermon but to be “with the people . . . beyond the limits of the hour” and “serve in various capacities.” With this class, Keighton hoped to take each student into the mind of the congregation and encourage him to better appreciate the act of worship.
But Keighton’s focus, as usual, was on the character of the white church experience. This may have proven particularly challenging to ML in light of his most recent preaching endeavors. He had just spent the summer learning how to captivate the southern black congregation at Ebenezer Baptist—learning their style of worship, his successful turns of phrase answered with exclamations of Mmhm or Amen or Yes, keep goin’. He’d shaken hands near the church front doors, learned the names and personalities of dozens of Ebenezer parishioners, and become familiar with their particular struggles—Jim Crow, an Atlanta population that had tripled in less than thirty years—which were different from those of a white Baptist congregation in the North.
And even now, back in the North, ML was attuning himself to the African American congregation at Rev. J. Pius Barbour’s church. Barely a month into his fall term at Crozer, ML was the main speaker at Calvary Baptist’s 3:30 PM service for “Homecoming Day.”21 It’s unknown what ML said to the congregation, but it’s clear that with each passing month, ML felt more comfortable behind the pulpit of a black congregation.
Rev. Barbour, however, believed that ML also needed to get comfortable with the forms of engagement Robert Keighton was teaching him. Barbour did not want ML to only be for black people. In Barbour’s mind, that would have been tragic:
The Negro Preachers who have been educated by white people and who have lacked the creative element, native to the Negro, have been dismal failures. But the Negro Preacher who has sharpened his intellect with the White Man’s intellectualism and has retained his native gift preaches to thousands all over the country. Ask any fair-minded man what kind of a crowd a Negro with a superb education and the feeling power of his people preaches to.22
Whether ML agreed with his Public Worship professor didn’t matter to Barbour. Keighton represented the “White Man’s intellectualism” that, like it or not, held a grip on the nation through radio programs, mainstream newspapers, and the earliest national television broadcasts. ML needed to learn as much about ministering to white audiences as he could if he hoped to have any kind of influence on the country as a whole.
Greek Religion
ML’s Greek Religion professor was Morton Scott Enslin, who along with the dean, Charles Batten, was arguably at the helm of Crozer Theological Seminary during this period of interim leadership. While President H. W. Smith crept quietly through the campus and looked forward to the quick end of his tenure, Enslin was running the Crozer Quarterly (at a loss) and serving as the committee chairman for “comprehensive examinations” and “higher degrees.”23
In his Greek Religion class, Enslin taught students about the symbolic links between Christianity and pre-Christian religions. One of ML’s papers described the “cult” of Mithraism, which, if it hadn’t been interrupted by Christianity, may have had a chance of spreading throughout the Western world. According to ML’s paper, “A Study of Mithraism,” the religion was paganistic in spirit, and ML keenly compared the “rites of initiation” in Mithraism with the beginnings of Christianity.24
Mithraism was not for the faint hearted. In order to be initiated, one was told to bathe in the blood of a sacrificial bull, immersing oneself completely and tasting the sacred liquid. Believers also ate the flesh of the recently speared bull. ML connected this tradition with the writings of the apostle Paul, who “thought of the [Christian] believer as buried with Christ in baptism and as feeding upon him in the Eucharist.”
Enslin was deeply impressed with ML’s paper, giving it an A. It probably didn’t hurt that ML used Enslin’s own book, Christian Beginnings, as one of his sources, even quoting (with the appropriate quotation marks!) Enslin’s own words.
More than the grade, though, it is Enslin’s commentary at the end of the paper that seems especially fascinating today. The first few lines are common professorial feedback: “This is an exceedingly good paper. You have given a very complete picture of the essential details and you have presented this in a balanced and restrained way. And furthermore you know how to write.” But then comes Enslin’s last line, which seems to transcend time and place: “You should go a long way if you continue to pay the price.”25
Betty Moitz and Barriers: 94 Percent of White Americans Disapproved
“No theology is needed to tell us that love is the law of life and to disobey it means to suffer the consequences; we see it every day in human experience.”
—Martin Luther King Jr. circa 194926
For Betty Moitz, the summer of 1949 had been a difficult one. Her father, William O. Moitz, an elevator inspector and Philadelphia native, had collapsed at a nearby hospital and passed away on May 9, during Crozer’s commencement activities. Mr. Moitz, at fifty-three, left behind his grieving mother, wife, and daughter.27 The three women remained in their campus home, Miss Hannah still tending to the seminarians’ dietary needs. And when ML returned to school the following fall, his and Betty’s relationship continued to blossom—though that posed its own difficulties for the young couple.
By this point, they had become more comfortable on campus, sitting on benches and sharing their hopes and dreams in full view of ML’s classmates and teachers. When asked if she had concerns about how they might be seen, Betty shrugs. “I never noticed. I always had a tan and dark brown hair.”28 But the twenty-year-old ML was more aware of the potential social fallout.
It’s important to understand that in 1949, interracial relationships were a long-standing American taboo. Since the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth, Americans had had issues with mixing. Less than forty miles from Crozer was the state of Maryland, where the first law against interracial marriage was enacted in 1664; the state would keep similar laws on its books for over three hundred years. Even a decade later, a 1958 Gallup Poll would report that an astounding 94 percent of white Americans disapproved of interracial marriage.29
Pennsylvania was in fact one of the most flexible states when it came to “miscegenation” laws. Still, that didn’t mean ML and Betty could head over to a local café and hold hands out in the open. Members of the Crozer community, despite their liberalism, would have had trouble throwing their support behind such an arrangement. They weren’t against it, but they weren’t exactly for it, either. Glares, scoffs, and head shakes were inevitable.
Cyril Pyle, ML’s classmate from Panama, worked in the kitchen and dining hall and witnessed ML and Betty getting closer. “I knew about it, thought it was bad, but I didn’t want to get involved.”30 One of the only students who actually supported their relationship was the man who had a hand in orchestrating their meeting: Walter McCall.
Not that ML needed anyone’s approval. Soon, their “dates” mainly consisted of Betty driving ML around the city of Chester, ignoring the scowls
of society. “I listened,” Betty says, “and he’d just talk and talk.” But she loved it—his enthusiasm, his anxious hopes “to return South and help people. He was wonderful—a joy to be with and listen to.”31
When ML’s sister came to visit him at Crozer, however, his friendship with Betty crept back into the shadows. It wasn’t that ML didn’t trust Christine—their relationship had always been strong—it was the fact that Christine was a direct conduit to Mama King, and that was something ML could not risk. Telling his sister about Betty would have meant putting her in the unenviable position of withholding important information from her mother in every letter and phone call home. And if Christine were to let slip that ML had been getting closer to a white woman, ML could only imagine the disappointment in his mother’s eyes. Betty knew about these concerns: “He was worried what she’d think.”32
Betty’s own mother wouldn’t have been against their relationship. During his early days in the kitchen washing dishes and over the rest of his time at Crozer, Miss Hannah had come to trust ML. As one former student’s wife said, “Hannah liked Martin. She thought he was a good person.”33
Betty Moitz, outside her home on campus and next to her car, 1950. Courtesy of Dr. James Beshai
Cyril Pyle remembered how Miss Hannah had “gestured” to him about Betty and ML, but the seminarian wanted no part. “I thought it was a dangerous situation that could get out of hand, and if it did get out of hand it would smear King. It would make [his future] hard for him.”34
5
Mordecai’s Fire
Term 2, November 29, 1949–
February 15, 1950
“For us, immortality will mean a spiritual existence. All of the details of what this existence will be like are somewhat beyond our intelligence. But with faith in God we may rest assured that death will not be a period that will end this great sentence of life, but it will be a comma punctuating it to loftier significance.”
—ML, age twenty-one,
at Crozer Theological Seminary1
ML and Communism: “Capitalism . . . Has Failed to Meet the Needs of the Masses”
“During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people.”
—ML2
On Friday, December 23, 1949, about a month into the second term of ML’s middle year, the Chester Times ran an article with the headline TRUMAN, POPE APPEAL FOR WORLD PEACE. In it, President Harry Truman delivered a message to Pope Pius XII that the US “was progressing ‘toward a better world’ by following the glorious lessons for man taught by the life of our Savior.” Truman then laid into America’s ever-growing enemy at the time, Soviet Russia, and expressed hope that it would fall into line, become “good neighbors, and . . . join with the multitude in striving to build a world wholly and truly at peace.”3
The president’s concern was likely one of a number of factors that inspired King to begin studying the ideals of Communism. Such global anxieties made the ideology a natural topic of conversation throughout ML’s time on campus, but his interest may have been heightened during this term as he studied Marx with Dr. Elizabeth Flower at the University of Pennsylvania (see here). His curiosity about the Soviet system may also have been piqued by a celebrity endorsement: as one Crozer student recalled, ML knew that black singer and actor Paul Robeson “had been to Russia and thought that Communism would favor racial integration more than capitalism.”4
More generally, ML became interested in understanding Marx because he had grown disgusted with American capitalism as it stood in 1949. In a paper at Crozer titled “Will Capitalism Survive?,” ML wrote, “I am convinced that capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” To King, capitalism had “failed to meet the needs of the masses.” He also wrote, in regards to the nationalization of health care, that everywhere “we turn we hear the demand for socialize[d] medicine.”5
At the end of the paper, ML used a sports analogy to describe America’s failed system. “Capitalism finds herself like a losing football team in the last quarter trying all types of tactics to survive. We are losing because we failed to check our weaknesses in the beginning of the game.”6 By studying Marx, ML was starting his own “weakness check.” He saw such archaic, broken systems around him—segregation, income inequality—that it was time to see if “the enemy” knew something he didn’t.
By the time Crozer’s Christmas break began (the same day the Chester Times reported on Truman’s message to the pope), ML was deep into his exploration of Marx’s writings. He spent most of his break with his family down in Atlanta, copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto at hand. They weren’t the kind of books you’d carry around freely in December 1949, just months before Senator Joseph McCarthy began leveling accusations of “card-carrying Communists” within the US government. ML, now Ebenezer’s associate pastor, would have needed to keep this kind of reading private.
As King rose to prominence in the coming years, he would need to be even more careful about his public sympathies. In his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom, carefully modulated so as to be easily absorbed by the white reading public, ML repudiated Marxism, citing its “deprecation of individual freedom” and its lack of a “place for God.” The latter was a particular deal breaker for the up-and-coming minister: “As a Christian I believe that there is a creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence of all reality—a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms.”7 But these words were written amid King’s rise as a leader of the civil rights movement, when he needed to publicly and unequivocally reject Communism to avoid inviting suspicion from the government.
Back in 1949, ML may have been more open to some of Marx’s ideas than he would later be willing to admit. Rev. J. Pius Barbour, always happy to go a few verbal rounds with ML, listened firsthand as ML’s young mind attempted to process the storm of concepts raining down on him through books, classes, and heated extracurricular discussions. ML “thought the capitalistic system was predicated on exploitation and prejudice, poverty,” Barbour said, “and that we wouldn’t solve these problems until we got a new social order.”8
Classes and Professors: Trial and Error
Ethics and Philosophy of History
“It is perhaps inappropriate for a white person to reflect on how much has been changed for the better in the decades since Martin Luther King was at Penn, rather than to lament how much still needs the doing. But perhaps I can speak as a woman and thus a member of a group that is itself still struggling for equality.”
—Dr. Elizabeth Flower9
ML’s Class Schedule
Year II, Term 2, November 29, 1949–February 15, 1950
Time
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
8:00 AM
Christian Theology for Today 241
Christian Theology for Today 241
Christian Theology for Today 241
Christian Theology for Today 241
9:00 AM
Conduct of Church Services
Preaching Problems
Conduct of Church Services
Preaching Problems
10:00 AM
10:30 AM
Chapel service
Optional service
Devotional pd.
The Development of Christian Ideas
The Development of Christian Ideas
The Development of Christian Ideas
The Development of Christian Ideas
11:00 AM
11:30 AM
12:00 PM
1:00 PM
2:00 PM
Pastoral Counseling
(audit)
3:00 PM
4:00 PM
Ethics and Philosophy of History
(audit, at UPenn)
5:00 PM
No classes on Monday | Christmas vacatio
n: Dec. 23–Jan. 2 |
Term examinations: Feb. 13–15
ML’s GPA for the term: 3.72
Christian Theology for Today 241
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.” Second of two terms. (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: A)
Conduct of Church Services
Robert Elwood Keighton, BD, ThM (Crozer)
Course Description: “The conduct, function, and values of the services and ceremonies of the Church; their contributions to the Christian community.” (Credit hours: 2; ML’s grade: B)
Preaching Problems
Robert Elwood Keighton, BD, ThM (Crozer)
Course Description: “A seminar for seniors designed to meet the practical problems of preaching arising from the experience of the student and the present-day demands of the pulpit.” Though the class was geared toward seniors, ML was permitted to enroll in his middle year. (Credit hours: 2; ML’s grade: B+)