The Seminarian
Page 16
ML had zero qualms about Daddy King finding out about Betty. Thanks to his emotional and intellectual development at Crozer and with Rev. Barbour, he could now debate any objections his father might raise. He might have even enjoyed shaking up the old man’s traditional foundations. But, as he told Whit that night, Mama King was a different story. Perhaps Alberta would have gradually accepted Betty, but the thought of even temporarily devastating his mother was something ML could not bear. Eventually, the conclusion proved inescapable. “They cooled it,” Whitaker said, adding that if Betty and ML had met in another day and age, they surely would have married.32
Rev. Barbour, too, recognized how much the relationship had meant to ML, and could tell that the young man was devastated by its ending. He “was a man of a broken heart,” Barbour remembered. “He never recovered.”33
As for Betty, it was ML’s magnetic personality, enthusiasm, and passion that had led her to briefly consider taking such a challenging path. From the moment she met ML in his first year right up to the end, she saw him as “always the same—maybe more determined to return south to help.”34
Classes and Professors: A Portrait of ML as a Young Man
Religious Development of Personality
ML’s daily Religious Development of Personality course was taught by a faculty member he’d never faced in class before, but one he knew well from his many other roles at Crozer: Dean Charles Batten. The moment a new student entered the seminary, there was an excellent chance Dean Batten would be the first person to greet him. When Lucius Hall pointed a gun at ML that first year, it was Batten who arranged a meeting with the students living in Old Main, calling for civility. Batten cut scholarship checks for current seminarians, wrote recommendations for students moving on to another school, and even presided over local weddings and funerals (including the funeral of Betty’s father). If there was a void, Batten filled it. “Whatever we look for,” he once said, “we will find—what we look for signifies what we are, and what we look for today, will determine what we will be tomorrow.”35
If Dean Batten had a specialty, it was forging connections between Crozer Theological Seminary and the outside world. He represented the school at conferences, reported updates to the press, and served as the business manager for Morton Enslin’s struggling Crozer Quarterly.36 His close affiliation with Enslin placed him in a precarious position as President Blanton’s realignment loomed.
ML’s Class Schedule
Year III, Term 1, September 12–November 22, 1950
Time
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
8:00 AM
9:00 AM
Rel. Development of Personality
Rel. Development of Personality
Rel. Development of Personality
Rel. Development of Personality
10:00 AM
10:30 AM
Chapel service
Optional service
Devotional pd.
Am. Christianity—Colonial Period
Am. Christianity—Colonial Period
Am. Christianity—Colonial Period
Am. Christianity—Colonial Period
11:00 AM
11:30 AM
The Minister’s Use of the Radio?
The Minister’s Use of the Radio?
12:00 PM
12:30 PM
1:00 PM
2:00 PM
3:00 PM
4:00 PM
Vespers service (4:15 PM)
Problems of Esthetics
(at UPenn)
5:00 PM
No classes on Monday | Term examinations: Nov. 20–22 |
Thanksgiving break: Nov. 23–27
ML’s GPA for the term: 4.00
Religious Development of Personality
Charles Edward Batten, BS (Temple), BD (Crozer); Dean of Crozer
Course Description: “The development of religious experience in persons of various age groups; the origin and growth of the individual’s religious ideas and ideals.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: A)
American Christianity—Colonial Period
Raymond Joseph Bean, BA (University of New Hampshire), BD (Andover Newton Theological School), ThD (Boston University)
Course Description: “The formation and increase of the various colonies with a study of the part religion played in each.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: A)
The Minister’s Use of the Radio
Robert Elwood Keighton, BD, ThM (Crozer)
Course Description: “The materials, techniques, and possibilities of an effective radio ministry; practice in the writing and production of varied radio programs with emphasis on the sermon. Field trips to broadcasting studios are part of the course.” The course catalog indicates that this was a third-term course, but ML’s transcript makes it clear that he took it during this term. Scheduling is speculative, based on the original third-term listing. (Credit hours: 2; ML’s grade: A)
Problems of Esthetics
John Stokes Adams Jr., BA, PhD (UPenn)
Course Description: An attempt to answer the centuries-old dilemma in esthetics: What is beauty, and how can it be measured? Selected topics connected to esthetics: historical, methodological, metaphysical. Description based on ML’s class notes. Held at University of Pennsylvania. (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: N/A)
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 President Sankey L. Blanton. 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 the 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.37
Among the seminarians, however, he was as well liked as he was familiar. In numerous interviews with former Crozer students, Batten was mentioned as being warm, kind-hearted, and able to get along with just about anyone. “He knew every student on campus by name,” says international student Jimmy Beshai. “Only [Kenneth] Smith and Batten were spared from criticism during and after dinner at the pool tables.”38 And Blanton import Jack Bullard remembers that Batten “was always very agreeable”; he chuckles at one particular memory of an interaction between Batten and ML.39
It was a cloudy day, Bullard says, and he and ML were playing pool in the basement rec room. “Dean Batten would go through the recreation room to his house,” and when he came upon ML, he decided to ask the student body president for help with some sort of dilemma. “They went back and forth about it,” Bullard recalls, and just about anytime ML made a suggestion, Batten would agree with whatever he said—much to the students’ amusement. “And then ML said, ‘Dean Batten, if I direct your attention outside . . . if I pointed out that it was a sunny day you would agree with me.”
Bullard was impressed at how direct ML was with Batten, even though he was still a twenty-one-year-old student. ML “got away with it,” his fellow seminarian says, because he had “such an easy and light spirit.”40
That spirit would serve ML well in Batten’s Religious Development of Personality course. The class was a rare opportunity for students to explore their own religious development, not as scholars or preachers but simply as people. For once, ML did not need to write with the goal of reaching a congregation or engaging with the academic research he’d been studying. He could truly be himself.
The result of this break in the clouds was the most revealing essay ML had ever written to that point. In “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” he offered a frank and wide-ranging assessment of his life and his religious beliefs. Batten clearly encouraged such introspection, writing enthusiastic comments in the margins such as “Corr
ect!” and “Right!”*2 When ML recounted how at the age of six his white friend had been told not to play with him anymore because of the color of his skin, Batten remarked, “How tragic!”41
ML even trusted Batten enough to reflect on his strong yet conflicted relationship with Daddy King: “Today I differ a great deal with my father theologically, but that admiration for a real father still remains.” And he was unabashed in his description of his own mental and physical advantages:
From the very beginning I was an extraordinarily healthy child. It is said that at my birth the doctors pronounced me a one hundred percent perfect child, from a physical point of view. Even today this physical harmony still abides, in that I hardly know how an ill moment feels. I guess the same thing would apply to my mental life. I have always been somewhat precocious, both physically and mentally. My I.Q. stands somewhat above the average. So it seems that from a hereditary point of view nature was very kind to me.
To this Batten replied, “Good! I like a man who has an intelligent evaluation of his abilities.”
As for the evolution of his religious beliefs, ML’s essay credited Morehouse for awakening within him “many doubts” that came with the “shackles of fundamentalism.” “This is why,” ML wrote, “when I came to Crozer, I could accept the liberal interpretation with relative ease.”42
ML admitted that he’d never had any kind of sky-opening experience of conversion: “Religion has just been something I grew up in. Conversion for me has been the gradual intaking of the noble [ideals] set forth in my family and my environment, and I must admit that this intaking has been largely unconscious.” In response to this comment, Batten may have suggested ML talk to “Mr. Pritchard,” but the handwriting on the original document has faded over time.
ML’s unusually candid writing for Batten was not limited to this one autobiographical essay. In a review of a book about personality development, ML wrote about another work he’d attempted to read, a book by Gardner Murphy, which had been “written for the expert, not the laymen.” ML freely confessed his confusion: “I was often lost behind the dim fog of psychological obscurities. (Am I just dumb).” Batten replied, “I think not.”43
And when ML slipped into the affected language of academic papers and Sunday-morning sermons, Batten was there to nudge him back toward honest sentiment. In another review for the class, of a book dealing with religion in education, ML ended by summing up his feelings about the work: “Even though I parted company with him on many points, I was kept spellbound throughout the book.” Batten circled “spellbound,” then wrote a comment jabbing his sensational word choice: “Isn’t this a bit strong?”44
For no other professor, in no other class, would ML write with such unembellished candor. Thus, any further analysis of ML’s state of mind while at Crozer should begin with his work for Religious Development of Personality, and the refreshing glimpse it offers into his natural written voice.
American Christianity—Colonial Period
Following the retirement of Crozer’s legendary church history professor R. E. E. Harkness, the school hired thirty-three-year-old historian Dr. Raymond J. Bean, who fit in easily with the Crozer crowd. “He was a live wire,” recalls one former student, “and extremely friendly.” Jimmy Beshai agrees; he saw that Dr. Bean had no trouble teaching a class of students from a wide variety of backgrounds. “He was always very open-minded about racial issues.”45
Bean’s mother and father had died when he was five, leaving him to be raised by his paternal grandparents, who “made every sacrifice to care for him and his younger sister.”46 When he started at Crozer, he was only five months removed from earning his doctorate at Boston University. He wrote his dissertation on William Miller, the New England farmer, Baptist preacher, and apocalyptic prognosticator who used the Book of Daniel to try to mathematically predict the Second Coming of Christ.
But Miller would have been a minor subtopic in ML’s course with Bean, American Christianity—Colonial Period. Examining Christianity’s influence over the American colonies before the Revolutionary War, the class had to cover an absolutely massive amount of ground, starting when Spanish Catholics established St. Augustine and Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1560s and ending around the time new notions of liberalism from Germany began to seep into American culture in the mid-1800s. Bean had about forty one-hour classes to teach the class three hundred years of history.
He was likely to have focused on popular topics such as the misuse of religious principles to justify the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692–1693, and Christianity’s widespread acceptance of slavery—the eternal bruise on the Christian church’s purity that ML often lamented. The professor may have mentioned that thanks to its Quaker founder, William Penn, Pennsylvania had been the first colony to denounce slavery.
On November 17, 1950, ML handed in to Dr. Bean an essay titled “An Appraisal of the Great Awakening.” ML’s writing in this essay is dry, but it perks up when he begins describing Anglican revivalist preacher George Whitefield. “The preaching ability of this moving spirit,” ML wrote, “cannot be exaggerated.”47
ML may very well have walked past the statue of George Whitefield on the UPenn campus while attending classes there, and he clearly admired the man for his ability to unify the faithful across all Christian denominations. Whitefield’s call for unity was based on rekindling Christians’ sense of moral purpose. As he shouted—and ML quoted—“God help us all to forget party names, and to become Christians in deed, and in truth.”48
Most of ML’s term paper is loaded with accidental plagiarism. I say “accidental” not to absolve ML of responsibility but simply because of the following example. In the two columns below, you’ll see that ML lifted an entire block of prose from Charles H. Maxson’s book. All but the first few words are identical:
The Virginia Gazette tells of the great concourse of people that filled the church of St. Mary Magdalene, London, long before the time of service, and of several hundred persons in the street who in vain endeavored to force themselves into the church and past the constables stationed at the door to preserve the peace. Such was the mad desire to see and hear the eloquent youth who had volunteered to go to Georgia as a missionary.
—Charles H. Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Chicago, 1920)
One of the colonial newspapers tells of the great concourse of people that filled the church of St. Mary Magdalene, London, long before the time of service and of several hundred persons in the street who in vain endeavored to force themselves into the church and past the constables stationed at the door to preserve the peace. Such was the mad desire to see and hear the eloquent youth who had volunteered to go to Georgia as a missionary.
—Martin L. King Jr., “An Appraisal of the Great Awakening” (November 17, 1950)49
The cribbing is so extensive and so blatant that if ML had truly wanted to pass Maxson’s words off as his own, he would have known better than to provide a source for Dr. Bean to check against. But in fact, in a footnote that accompanies the passage above, ML cites Maxson’s book directly, right down to the page number on which the copied text appears (p. 42).
Over his years at Crozer, ML had marginally improved his ability to credit his sources, but in examples such as this, which were many and varied, he continued to demonstrate a poor understanding of proper citation procedures. It seems likely that in his entire academic career, ML never had a professor take him aside and deliver a detailed explanation of the complexities of plagiarism, nor explain to him that the “art of voice merging,” while a useful technique for a preacher behind the pulpit, should not be utilized in an academic paper.50
Certainly, no such explanations were forthcoming from Dr. Bean. For his “Great Awakening” paper, he gave ML an A.
The Minister’s Use of Radio
Growing up in Atlanta, ML had often listened to the weekly sermons of radio preachers, not just Daddy King’s local rival W. H. Borders but also famed social gospel pastor
Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose nationally broadcast radio program reached millions of listeners. Fosdick’s voice and passion had a way of capturing the attention of the listener, and ML would draw from Fosdick’s language and structure in his own sermons.
So King must have been excited to be one of the first students to take Robert Keighton’s class The Minister’s Use of Radio. Though he’d had enough of Keighton in his first two years, it was an exciting opportunity to refine his preaching in a medium he’d always been drawn to.
The class would be held in a new radio room on the second floor of Old Main, part of a project begun in early 1949 to found an FM radio station at Crozer. The push had been initiated by a Chester dentist named Nathan Plafker in honor of his recently deceased wife, Pearl Ruth Plafker, and it had the support of Keighton and other Crozer trustees. But a working radio station was still far off and would require tens of thousands of dollars of additional funding. For now, Keighton had transformed two empty dormitory rooms on the second floor into a “one-room studio and a control room.” Keighton’s equipment consisted of a “brush recording machine and a turntable I have been using in my public speaking classes.”51 It was enough to at least conduct a course.
ML would’ve had some idea what to expect when he stepped into the classroom for the first time, since several of his friends—Mac, Whit, and Cyril Pyle—had delivered sermons over the radio for the local West Branch YMCA, on a program called Sunday Meditations. As Keighton began his instruction, ML took notes, listing the main components a radio sermon needed: