by Patrick Parr
During the years of slavery in America it is said that after a hard days work the slaves would often hold secret religious meetings. All during the working day they were addressed with unnecessary vituperations and insulting epithets. But as they gathered in these meetings they gained a renewed faith as the old unlettered minister would come to his triumphant climax saying: “you—you are not niggers. You—you are not slaves. You are God’s children.” This established for them a true ground of personal dignity.30
To ML, the church’s passivity on slavery was its greatest sin, and he was determined to foster his own version of Christianity that served as a model for change. No longer would it stand neutral on difficult issues. There would be no dividing line between the church and the greater good of society, especially when it came to race.
ML’s other course with Professor Davis during term 2, The Development of Christian Ideas, was a review of major concepts that most of the students already knew. Davis, a liberal theologian to the core, was always concerned with adding depth, depth, and more depth to his students’ understanding. He knew that his fellow liberalists, if left unchecked, could focus so intently on nitpicking particular phrases, words, or concepts in the Bible that they’d lose sight of the larger truths they were trying to demonstrate. He urged his students not to simply skate across the surface of an issue but to plunge into it as deeply as they could bear:
Is there an inner continuity in the Bible, a thread of truth which runs through the sixty-six books as a thread runs through sixty-six pearls, holding them together and imparting a unity to them?31
Davis knew better than to give his students a ready-made response to this question. Taking the journey in search of the answer was just as important as the answer itself.
Still, in class as well as in his own book, Existentialism and Theology, published a few years later, Davis briefly shared his assessment of how history had interpreted “the person of Jesus.” From the “messiah,” the “divine Logos,” a “high priest,” then on to the Middle Ages, when he became a “thin, emaciated ascetic since the ideal man was then held to be one who ignored the world and neglected the demands of the flesh.” Davis finally described the twentieth-century interpretations of Jesus: a figure who has been globally fractionalized, “appropriated” by whoever needed him and defined variably as a “ruler,” a “comrade,” a “man of divine fire,” and a “liberator.”32 To Davis, this was not necessarily a bad thing; it simply indicated the large range of influential people attempting to grapple with the internal depths of Christianity’s soul.
At the end of one of ML’s papers for The Development of Christian Ideas (an essay titled “The Influence of Mystery Religions on Christianity”), Davis wrote a nearly 150-word personal comment to his student, giving ML an A but nudging him once more toward pursuing more depth:
Never stop with the external, which may seem like borrowing, but recognize there is the perennial struggle for truth, fuller [than] life itself. . . . Through experience, knowledge, as through other forms, the outer manifestations of religion change. The inner spiritual, continues ever.33
ML Comes of Age: “Have a Deep Belief in Your Own Dignity”
On January 15, 1950, inside the predominantly black Grace Methodist Church less than two miles from the Crozer campus, ML turned twenty-one years old. This was not a birthday celebration. Rather, ML was working. At 2:45 PM, at the invitation of the church’s pastor, B. A. Arnold, he stood in front of the youth at Grace Methodist and delivered a sermon.34
Unfortunately, what ML said to the young people that day has been lost, and all one can do is consider the events swirling around him at the time and imagine the emotions he must have felt staring into the eyes of children and teenagers as he himself entered full-fledged adulthood. Now twenty-one, ML enjoyed certain new rights, the most appealing of which may have been the right to vote. In 1950, the minimum age to cast a ballot was twenty-one, but especially back in Atlanta, ML would have encountered several challenges—literacy tests, poll taxes, a general vibe of intimidation radiating from the white clerk—designed to keep African American citizens away from the polls.
ML could have told the African American youths in front of him about his experiences in the South, or about how he’d arrived at Crozer a year and a half ago “grimly serious,” keeping his suit pressed as he stayed alert, making sure not to laugh too quickly. Or he could have brought up his younger days working as a newspaper carrier, moving up the ladder year by year until he was assistant manager. Only a white man could be made manager. But such blatant racial discrimination would not have been as familiar to young people in Chester as it was to those in Atlanta. Instead, he could have gone for the “responsibility” angle, telling his listeners that delivering newspapers had helped him become a more diligent worker and better money manager. That, however, was a truism that could have been uttered by any parent, and ML would not have wanted to sound like a father talking down to his children.
Perhaps the message he shared with them was similar to one he delivered at other points in his career. ML had spoken several times to the youth at churches in the South, and it’s been documented that as early as 1948 he’d been working on one of his more famous sermons, “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?,” delivered in high schools and geared specifically to students.*1 Here is a snippet of that sermon, after years of practice and revision. Near the end of his life, he could fire off these words without once looking at notes:
I want to ask you a question, and that is, what is in your life’s blueprint? This is the most important and crucial period of your lives, for what you do now and what you decide now, at this age, may well determine which way your life shall go. And whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, as the model for those who are to build the building. And a building is not well erected without a good, sound, and solid blueprint.
Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid, and a sound blueprint.35
He would go on to suggest that a life’s blueprint should include:
1. “A deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth, and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody.”
2. “The determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the days and the years unfold what . . . your life’s work will be. . . . Study hard . . . burn the midnight oil.”
3. “A commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice. Don’t allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them. Don’t allow anybody to cause you to lose your self-respect to the point that you do not struggle for justice. However young you are, you have a responsibility to seek to make your nation a better nation in which to live.”36
What would ML’s own life’s blueprint have been at this point in time, as he advised the youth at Grace Methodist Church on his twenty-first birthday? He was at the exact middle of his time at Crozer, and his plans for what would come after remained largely unwritten. He had mentors all around him eager to offer guidance: Rev. Barbour, George Davis, Morton Enslin, even his classmate Horace Whitaker. But he was also still pursuing a romantic relationship with Betty Moitz—something he knew full well these men would not approve of. Although they inspired ML and gave him dignity, it was the social limitations even they could not transcend that made him determined to “burn the midnight oil.”
As conflicting forces continued to shape his plans for the future, another influence arose that opened ML’s eyes to new possibilities. He had discussed Gandhi and debated his principles of nonviolence with Rev. Barbour, but it wasn’t until ML first heard the electrifying words of a famous southern preacher that he decided to immerse himself in the life of the Mahatma.
On November 23, 1949, Howard University president Mordecai Wyatt Johnson flew to Calcutta,
India, to learn all he could about the late Mohandas Gandhi and his nonviolent resistance movement, which had won India its independence from Great Britain just two years before. Johnson was there to evaluate, as one newspaper put it, “the possibilities of using the techniques developed by Mahatma Gandhi in an effort to obtain and preserve peace in the world.”37
A Baptist minister and a celebrated orator who became Howard’s first black president, Dr. Johnson was born in Tennessee in 1890, as southern states were at work rolling back the racial advancements of Reconstruction. He was not shy in telling audiences the plain truth of his past, his voice rumbling through the aisles: “I am the child of a slave. My father was a slave for twenty-five years before the emancipation. My mother was born in slavery. I have lived practically all my life on the territory of former slave states, so when you hear me talk, you are dealing with the real underdeveloped thing.”38
Johnson often thanked the northern white people who entered the South after the Civil War to establish educational institutions for the disenfranchised. Black people in the South, he said, “could have lost heart and hope, but, thank God, there were some who believed in our highest possibilities and talked with us, for the first time, on the highest level of human intelligence.”39
Now he was one of approximately thirty representatives from around the world who assembled in India for the World Pacifist Conference. The conference descended upon the town of Shantiniketan, north of Calcutta, to visit the school founded by Rabindranath Tagore, a poet and friend of Gandhi’s. Tagore had grown disgusted with the Western style of education and made it his mission to start a school that could engage a child at every level. After a few brief sessions at the school, the conference moved on to other cities across India. For several weeks, Johnson received an immersive master class in Gandhi’s techniques, as he interacted with the leaders and everyday citizens who fought alongside the Mahatma to win their country’s independence.40
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson at an undated speaking event. Paul Henderson Photograph Collection, Maryland Historical Society, HEN-00-a2-171
At the time, India seemed keen to shake off the remaining influence of the British Empire, and many in the Western world were concerned that it might fall into the hands of the Communists. To Johnson, the current situation was entirely the fault of the British and their “stupid blunder of treating the people of India as the United States has treated colored citizens in Alabama and Mississippi.”41 As he traveled from city to city on his tour, Johnson witnessed a populace just emerging from the shadow of a national bully. It reminded him of his parents’ experiences in the aftermath of emancipation, as well as the long road ahead for all African Americans.
The last week of Dr. Johnson’s visit to India included time spent at Gandhi’s ashram, or monastic retreat, in the village of Sevagram. Here Gandhi’s close friends and associates would have exposed Johnson to the complexities of Gandhi’s satyagraha, or truth-force—the Mahatma’s own philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which had sparked such mass acts of civil disobedience as the nearly 240-mile Salt March of 1930. Launched in response to the British prohibition on Indians producing or selling their own salt, this protest led to the arrest of Gandhi and tens of thousands of his followers.
After his five-week sojourn in India, a fiery Mordecai Johnson returned to America with a passion to share his experience. It was with this goal in mind that he gave a talk at Philadelphia’s Fellowship House on a Sunday afternoon in early 1950. As he spoke, a twenty-one-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. sat in the audience, ready to listen.42
It was an unrequired educational event off campus, and ML’s interest in the talk “was purely academic,” he later recalled. “I never thought I would be involved in a social movement where [Gandhi’s techniques] would be used.”43
As for the speaker, ML would have known about Johnson from his mentor Benjamin “Buck Benny” Mays, who had been dean of Howard’s School of Religion before his appointment to the Morehouse presidency. (Mays had also visited India himself, meeting Gandhi face to face in 1936.) What ML may not have been prepared for was the incendiary power with which Mordecai Johnson could motivate his listeners to rethink the status quo. He had no fear of arguing for change in front of people who were deeply invested in the current system; the previous August, before an audience of two thousand people at a Raleigh Baptist Assembly convention, he had skewered southern Christian culture, declaring in his booming voice that “the intolerance and bigotry in the South exists today because the church has become a prostitute and has sold her soul in order to possess a beautiful body.”44
The similarities between Mordecai Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. are also worth noting. Both were blessed with rich, southern baritone voices; both had strict, disciplinary fathers and kind, caring mothers; both delivered newspapers as teenagers; both were Morehouse men and then seminarians directly influenced by the social gospel. During that same speech in Raleigh, Johnson showed his passion for economic justice by telling the thousands in attendance how best to solve poverty: “One of the greatest purposes of the gospel is to bring about on this Earth a society, a movement which can assure the economic future of all mankind.”45 Change the word “society” to “brotherhood” or “beloved community” and his words could have come from King.
Whether ML felt some spiritual kinship with Dr. Johnson or was simply compelled by the power of his oratory, the young man responded fervently to his account of Gandhi’s techniques. “His message was so profound and electrifying,” ML would later write, “that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.”46 It’s unknown how deep these studies went at the time, but years later ML’s sister, Christine, would point to Johnson’s lecture in Philadelphia as a formative moment in the development of her brother’s own nonviolent methodology, adding, “Never doubt that education is the key to social, economic, and political empowerment.”47
Mordecai Johnson would have been pleased to have sparked ML’s interest, and even if the young man had disagreed with him on certain aspects of his speech, Johnson would have been fine with that as well. As the Howard president reportedly said during another talk, “The greatest tragedy in a democratic society is for a man to graduate from college thinking exactly as the generation that pays his tuition.”48
ML, studying hundreds of miles away from his parents, adapting to the ways of the North, and drawing ever closer to a white woman, would no doubt have agreed. He was still in the process of charting the path ahead of him, but he knew that from the perspective of Mama and Daddy King, his life’s blueprint had already taken the form of an impossible maze.
6
Chosen to Lead
Term 3, February 21–May 5, 1950
Falling in Love: “There Were People Who Knew About Them.”
Over the course of ML’s second year, his relationship with Betty Moitz grew closer—and more public. From chats in Miss Hannah’s kitchen and around campus, the couple had progressed to hanging out with Mac, Whit, and others in the recreation room down the hall from the kitchen. Betty would watch as ML and his friends played pool. “The men who worked in the kitchen and dining room used to go down to shoot pool or play table tennis every evening after dinner,” she remembers. “I was surprised how well [ML] played.”1
And their private time together was no longer limited to Betty driving ML around Chester. “We did go out on dates,” Betty says. “He was always trying to get me to go with him to restaurants in Chester. I was embarrassed to let him know I had never been to any of those places. In those days who went to restaurants? . . . You [usually] went to the movies.”2 ML would have known that dining at a predominantly white restaurant was a risky proposition, not only for himself but for Betty as well, but their relationship was a way for him to test the limits of northern culture.
Betty Moitz at her home on the Crozer campus, circa 1951. Courtesy of Dr. James Beshai
Such boundary-pushing becomes easier when one starts to f
all in love—and according to Betty, that’s exactly what was happening: “We were madly, madly in love, the way young people can fall in love.”3
Many of ML’s classmates could see how enamored he’d become. “King was extremely fond of her,” Marcus Wood recalled. “But he was also rather proud of the fact that he was able to socialize openly with a white girl.”4 Horace Whitaker also had his eye on the couple. “There were people who knew about them,” Whitaker said—himself among them—but “they didn’t flagrantly show their feelings toward each other.”5
ML could only trust one friend with his feelings toward Betty, and that was Mac. Around this time, ML and Betty went into Philadelphia with Walter McCall and his girlfriend at the time, policewoman Pearl E. Smith. The four headed back to Pearl’s home, and there was a moment when Betty and Pearl were speaking to each other in the kitchen. “They didn’t tell her anything about me,” Betty says. Pearl measured Betty up. It was true, Betty was tan, and Pearl gave her a nod of approval: “You know, you could pass [as black].” Mac overheard what Pearl said and “rolled on the floor, laughing.”6
Their relationship was becoming serious, the most serious one ML had ever been in up to this point. But his friends weren’t the only ones he kept in the dark. He also still resisted telling his family about Betty. Reckoning with their inevitable disapproval—and that of society in general—was a dilemma for another day. For now they were content to simply enjoy the beauty of each other’s company.