The Seminarian

by Patrick Parr

  Did it have a hook? . . .

  Did the central idea make a difference?

  Did it have a pay off or climax?

  Did the sermon deal with a problem that it leads to a choice in contemporary living?

  Was the development of it clear?

  Did pictures come to your mind?52

  The sermons ML and the other students recorded for the course may actually have been broadcast. Back in 1949, Keighton had indicated that he wouldn’t wait for a full-fledged radio station before putting Crozer on the air, saying that the programs produced in their radio room could “be recorded or cabled to nearby radio stations for transcription so that although we may be far from our own station, our radio output is immediate.”53

  Unfortunately, no such recordings of ML from his Crozer years have survived. But as the years passed, ML would become very comfortable in a radio booth—and it all started down the hall from his dorm room, two hours a week, learning how to tailor his slow-cooked southern baritone for the microphone.

  Problems of Esthetics

  “In the history of philosophy, the muddle that is esthetics, or philosophy of art, has had a career that quite belies the importance now assigned to it. Kicked around among the philosophic disciplines, relegated to the backstairs for centuries, the highlights of its history are so feebly discernible that many a respectable historian of philosophy can safely neglect it altogether.”

  —John Stokes Adams Jr., 195154

  As ML’s professor John S. Adams explained, esthetics is the “philosophy of art,” and if you’re puzzled by the idea of pushing those two concepts together, you’re not alone. Reducing the idea of esthetics to an easily digestible explanation would mean undercutting its profundity. When studying philosophy, as ML enjoyed doing, a student must be comfortable swimming in ambiguous waters. “It is clearer today than ever before,” Professor Adams once wrote, “that the history of philosophy is not the history of a particular set of texts, not the patient exposition of what a succession of past thinkers said, but an effort to discern what they were trying to say, in the light of their times—a light now quite possibly clearer to us than to them.”55

  It was a heady, humanistic effort, for which ML once again ventured from the cloistered environment of Crozer to the larger world of the University of Pennsylvania.*3 ML hopped on the bus outside Old Main, then took the train to the Thirtieth Street Station in downtown Philadelphia. From there it was a bit of a walk to the UPenn classroom where Dr. John Stokes Adams Jr. waited to expound upon “the muddle that is esthetics.”

  Who John S. Adams was is clearer. At the time ML took his class, Adams was a married father with three children. Forty-five years old, Adams had spent most of his professional career juggling the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer with the melancholic joys of the piano. One close friend called Adams “the finest amateur pianist I have ever heard.” Several others also mentioned his “sensitive” spirit.56 In the coming years Adams’s marriage would dissolve, leading him toward struggles with the bottle. But as ML took a seat in his class, Adams stood before him an excellent professor, more than capable of entangling his students in a web of quizzical prompts.

  “For centuries,” read ML’s class notes, “the major problem of esthetics is, ‘What is beauty?’” Other questions he jotted down include:

  “Should esthetics confind [sic] itself to art material or should its universe be co-existent with the world of nature”

  “Does esthetics today suffer from a lack of more original thinking or rigor in thinking?”

  “Is the problem of the creative process exclusively to be dealt with by experimental psychology”

  “Ask yourself, What do you want to hear[:] music, or do you want to hear an obsessed personality entertaining [an] audience?”57

  Although these kinds of inquiries will always have an answer that is just enough out of reach to create a new question, Adams did toss the class a few solutions. He offered them various thinkers’ attempts at defining terms (“Hegel—‘Beauty is truth shining through a sensuous mirror,’” ML recorded in his notes), as well as the different moral equivalencies used to assess works of art throughout history (e.g., what’s good must be beautiful, or what’s ugly must be evil).58

  Notably, Adams did not rely on religion to answer these complicated questions, so his class would have required ML to think outside the Christian frame of his Crozer studies. Thanks to the seminary’s connection to UPenn, ML was discovering what life as a PhD student would soon entail . . .

  Call of the Dr.: “A Golden Boy, in a Way”

  “For some time now I have had a great deal of interest in Edinburgh, and would like very much to study there.”

  —ML

  “It so happens that Yale is my preference . . .”

  —ML

  “I have gotten some valuable information about Boston University, and I have been convinced that there are definite advantages there for me.”

  —ML59

  As he grew more comfortable looking for answers and new questions outside the religious realm, ML was also growing into his leadership role. The student body president found that seminarians new and old were listening to his sermons and soliciting his opinions. Junior Jack Bullard hadn’t known the timid ML who first arrived at Crozer, but he saw how confident he was now. “Anyone who dropped in on campus,” says Bullard, “would find that he’d become accustomed to being the leader . . . a golden boy, in a way.”60

  On November 3 the golden boy was a featured speaker at an interseminary conference on the Crozer campus. That Friday night, ML’s audience included fellow students and respected clergymen from local theological institutions such as Temple School of Theology, Lafayette College, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Religious Fellowship House in Philadelphia. For President Sankey Blanton, the event was another chance to nudge the school’s reputation in an evangelical direction, so it should come as no surprise that the theme of the conference was “Personal Evangelism.”61

  It’s a topic ML would have been extremely comfortable with, since his recent evolution had not erased the influence of his Auburn Avenue upbringing, watching week after week as his father attempted to rip the ceiling off Ebenezer Baptist with his cathartic whooping. There was a duality within ML that he could no longer deny—the young man who lit up a cigarette in front of Daddy King to prove that he now made his own decisions was the same one who thought he had no choice but to break up with the woman he loved rather than risk his mother’s disapproval.

  By this point, his goal as a preacher was to have the best of both worlds, to merge the bullying power of his father with the refined intellectual framework of a highly educated man. (Charismatic but nuanced forebears such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Benjamin Mays would have opened his eyes to the possibility.) Though returning to the South to preach “was his whole expectation,” as Horace Whitaker put it,62 he couldn’t go back yet. Not until he was able show his father (and himself) how a preacher could sound with power and intellect. And to do that, he would be the first person in the history of his family to pursue a doctoral degree.

  His father might have hoped that he would at least continue his studies closer to home, but in 1950 there were not enough appropriate PhD programs in the South to make that a feasible option. But with a daunting array of possibilities in the North and even overseas, ML turned to his Crozer professors to point him in the right direction. It would have boosted his prospects considerably that a seminary as renowned as Crozer was supporting his future academic endeavors.

  ML’s most important consultations were with George Davis, whose office was on the first floor and whose home was just steps from Old Main. Although ML didn’t have a class with him in term 1, it was part of Davis’s job as chairman of the scholarship committee and as a member of the committee on higher degrees to help advise students on life after Crozer.63 By the end of the fall, ML had submitted application materials to three schools: Yale, Boston Unive
rsity, and Edinburgh University in Scotland.

  Jimmy Beshai listened to ML discuss his graduate school options at dinner, during eight ball down in the catacombs, and while hanging out in the hallway in the middle of the week. ML dreamed of Yale, which had the best reputation, but the university required applicants to score well on a new standardized test, the GRE—a daunting prospect for someone who’d grown up outside the northeast liberal environment in which the exam was designed. Admission to Boston University seemed more attainable; the school had already accepted several African American students, such as past Crozer graduate Samuel Proctor.

  Leaving America altogether to attend Edinburgh University seemed like an odd option, but Jimmy could see why ML was interested. “Edinburgh was . . . seen in those days as a European university that promoted liberal theology, and Enslin may have suggested it to Martin and got him to apply for admission.” Jimmy was more definitive about which professors were lobbying for BU: “Davis and Smith were strong advocates of Boston.”64

  Snuffy Smith had by now become another important influence on King’s academic development. With the Betty Moitz rivalry behind them, ML’s reserved attitude around the young professor began to relax, and they were soon trading opinions on theologians over dinner. Smith was fond not only of social gospel prophet Walter Rauschenbusch but also of Reinhold Niebuhr, a “Christian realist.” ML mentioned that he’d already been exposed to both theologians while at Morehouse—Rauschenbusch through sermons by Benjamin Mays and Niebuhr through Professor George Kelsey. Rauschenbusch would also have been a topic of discussion in just about every class ML took with George W. Davis.65

  As the days passed that fall term, Jimmy Beshai and other students had also started to overhear lively conversations among Snuffy, ML, and Mac.66 Snuffy would fan the two seminarians’ zeal for social justice, while serving as a mediating force between them. Left on their own, ML and Mac tended to argue “like cats and dogs,” said Horace Whitaker, but adding Smith into the mix provoked discussions that lasted through the night—“bull sessions,” the professor called them.67

  During the last weekend of November, a vicious thunderstorm wreaked havoc on Chester and the surrounding area. The property damage alone amounted to over half a million dollars. Two people were killed; local bridges were destroyed by tidal waves. On the Crozer campus, the nearly century-old silver maple trees that held a special place in the hearts of many students and faculty were uprooted and ripped apart by the wind and pounding rain. It would have been a sad sight to see out of ML’s room 52: behind Old Main and into Ship Creek Woods, where ML loved to walk and sit by the water, trees and branches had collapsed.68

  On these rainy nights, there was always Mac, the radio, and some cards to play. As the smooth and bluesy “A Dreamer with a Penny” played in the background, ML and Mac would share their thoughts on the importance of wealth. “‘I’d rather be a [dreamer] with a penny, than a rich man with a worried mind,’” Mac recalled decades later. “We used to discuss this as a part of philosophy of life.”69

  Another bluesy song they enjoyed was Amos Milburn’s “Bad Bad Whiskey,” often ruminating on the lyric “Bad, bad whiskey made me lose my happy home.”70 ML wasn’t much of a drinker back then, and one time he criticized the drinking habits of another black student, Joe Kirkland, who like ML was the son of a preacher and had grown up in the shadow of his successful father. The major difference, more like a vast gulf, was geographical. Kirkland grew up around Philadelphia and saw ML as “sheltered,” a southern boy raised without a full understanding of the real world. ML, on the other hand, may have seen Kirkland as jaded—embittered from the illusion of northern freedom.

  Once, Kirkland had a can of beer in his dorm room, and when ML saw it, he shook his head: “Don’t you know you have the burdens of the Negro race on your shoulders?” Kirkland didn’t care in the least,*4 but for ML, it was always important to show a sense of professionalism.71

  8

  The Recommended Plagiarist

  Term 2, November 28, 1950–

  February 15, 1951

  Acceptance and Failure: “Chief Weaknesses”

  It was one thing for ML to decide on a middle path between the deep-rooted influence of the charismatic Daddy King and the liberating power of his own intellect, and another one entirely to put it into practice behind the pulpit. It was a delicate balancing act—on the one hand, to stay connected with his southern Baptist heritage despite his years of study in the North; on the other, to not let his intellectual aspirations be swallowed up by showmanship.

  Staying connected to his roots had sometimes been difficult during his summers at Ebenezer. Though his sermons were generally well received, when he tried to incorporate what he’d been learning at Crozer, many in the congregation would grow bored with the snooty anecdotes from old books written by white men. It was something he continued to struggle with, if an evaluation he received in early December 1950 is any indication.

  During the first three months of his senior year, ML had participated in Crozer’s fieldwork program, serving as an assistant pastor at First Baptist of East Elmhurst, in Queens. The church was only a hop, skip, and jump from where his sister, Christine, lived; its pastor, Rev. William E. Gardner, was a friend of Daddy King’s. But when it came time to evaluate ML’s performance for the Crozer fieldwork committee, Rev. Gardner did not hesitate to dish out the tough love. He began with praise for ML’s “superior mental ability” and “impressive personality,” then detailed his weak points:

  I FEEL THAT THE CHIEF WEAKNESSES WHICH THE SEMINARY MIGHT HELP HIM OVERCOME ARE: An attitude of aloofness, disdain & possible snobbishness which prevent his coming to close grips with the rank and file of ordinary people. Also, a smugness that refuses to adapt itself to the demands of ministering effectively to the average Negro congregation.1

  For a young man who had feared for so long that he would end up preaching exactly like his father, it was hard to find his way back from the opposite extreme. It was easier to lean on his intellect, over which he alone held sway, than to contend with the influences and demands that were beyond his control. That may explain why Rev. Gardner gave ML his lowest marks—three Cs—in categories labeled “WILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT SUGGESTION AND CRITICISM,” “UNDERSTANDING OF GROUP WORK TECHNIQUES,” and “CONCERN FOR INDIVIDUALS IN GROUP.”2

  On the other side of the balancing act, although ML had confidence in his intellect and his pulpit abilities, his good friend Whit would recall that his preaching at the time was “more style than content.” He might, for instance, dramatize the action of putting his sermon notes in his jacket pocket just before speaking. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. I know this by heart. Even his slow and deliberate style of preaching—his tendency to draw . . . his words . . . out . . . with his . . . . . . Southern . . . draaaawl—rubbed some the wrong way.3 Audiences wouldn’t complain later in King’s life, when he used such rhetorical flourishes to promote the noble cause of civil rights. But all too often at Crozer, they were embellishments without a larger purpose.

  Young ML was still building the intellectual foundations that would ground his practiced rhetoric. These efforts would continue in his doctoral studies; the question now was where he would pursue them—Yale, Boston, or Edinburgh.

  Admission to ML’s first-choice PhD program, Yale, depended on a GRE test that was still months away, so in the meantime he attempted to lock down his other options. He asked two professors, Morton Scott Enslin and Raymond J. Bean, to write recommendations for him to Boston University.

  Enslin’s recommendation has not aged well, displaying the biblical scholar’s eccentric personality at its most exasperating. Watch his sentences roll toward a stone wall:

  He has proved himself to be a very competent student, conscientious, industrious, and with more than usual insight. . . .

  He is president of the Student Government and has conducted himself well in this position.

  The fact that with our student body larg
ely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation.

  The comparatively small number of forward-looking and thoroughly trained negro leaders is, as I am sure you’ll agree, still so small that it is more than an even chance that one as adequately trained as King will find ample opportunity for useful service.

  He is entirely free from those somewhat annoying qualities which some men of his race acquire when they find themselves in the distinctly higher percent of their group.

  In Enslin’s defense, he may have known the recipient of this letter, BU dean Chester Alter, and believed that what others would see as racial insensitivity, Alter would take as blunt honesty. The line “as I am sure you will agree” suggests that Enslin and Alter may have had prior discussions and been chummy with each other. Both men went to Harvard, although at different times, and Enslin grew up in Somerville, Massachusetts, only a few miles away from Boston University. Perhaps the tone underneath the recommendation was, between two northeast buddies, Look . . . King’s a good guy. I’m telling it like it is. Give him a chance.

  And as inappropriate as his words now seem, Enslin’s name carried considerable weight in 1950. By editing the Crozer Quarterly for the last decade, he’d garnered the respect of hundreds of scholars and theologians around the country. “Most of the anecdotes at the dinner table were about Enslin and Keighton,” says Jimmy Beshai, “not on account of their racial high mindedness, but more on their high scholarship standards in general.”4 A positive Enslin recommendation was worth the risk, no matter his smug, pipe-puffing tone.