by Patrick Parr
Dr. Bean’s recommendation, on the other hand, was valuable because of the new church history professor’s links to Boston University. Bean still knew many of the current faculty and staff, having completed his ThD dissertation at BU in 1949. His words of praise were standard, confirming that ML’s “work is always of the highest grade” and noting, “The few questions he has asked in class have revealed a real interest in the subject under discussion.”5
With Enslin and Bean behind him, BU was likely to accept him, even if Yale was more of a toss-up. But like many students applying to prestigious institutions, ML had needed a “safety school.” The University of Edinburgh was ML’s safety. “Edinburgh was pretty easy to get into at that time,” says former Yale seminarian Andrew Burgess, since the UK “was still recovering from WWII and was especially encouraging US students to come there and support the economy.”6
Sure enough, on December 15, one day after Enslin sent off his recommendation letter to BU, ML headed down a few flights of stairs in Old Main to check his mailbox, #27. There it was: a letter of official acceptance to Edinburgh.
Edinburgh had plenty to recommend it even if ML got in to Boston or Yale. This was an institution that predated America itself, that Charles Darwin, David Hume, and Robert Louis Stevenson had attended. And it offered ML the opportunity to leave behind the racial roadblocks of America for a few years. “Martin,” Jimmy remembered, “and most of us in those days, saw Europe as the place to seek for higher education.”7 Of course, ML’s parents would have been stunned by the notion of their son living abroad in Scotland; they had a hard enough time accepting that he was living in the American North.
On January 11, 1951, four days before turning twenty-two, ML received his letter of acceptance from Boston University. He heard the good news less than a month after Enslin sent his recommendation.8
That left only Yale, and on February 3, ML walked in to a testing room to take the GRE. Although documents are scarce, it’s believed that by this point ML had been at least conditionally admitted to Yale. His final acceptance, however, would rely on a high GRE score.
In 1951, the test was only a few years old. To create a standard metric, Educational Testing Service had administered it to hundreds of first-year graduate students. The pool would have been weighted heavily toward students in northeastern academic circles, and against anyone from the segregated South. In other words, it was going to be a very difficult test for ML to do well on.
Just how difficult was it for students like ML? Take the account of black Crozer graduate Samuel Proctor. Hailing from Norfolk, Virginia, he attended Yale Divinity School in the late 1940s. While studying at Yale (on a $2,500 fellowship from Crozer), Proctor was told to go see the dean of the divinity school, Luther Weigle. Dean Weigle had become perplexed by the GRE scores black students were earning. As Proctor recalled:
One day Dr. Luther Weigle . . . sent for me. It scared me to death. What on earth had I done? “Mr. Proctor,” he began, dragging his chair close to mine, “why is it that so many of you colored fellows do so well here, when your Graduate Record Examination scores are so skewed? You are all far above average on the verbal tests and the social science tests, but your mathematics, sciences, and fine arts scores are far below other college graduates in the same majors, both regionally and nationally.” . . .
I looked in his eyes and spoke slowly. “Dean Weigle, we do better on verbal tests because we do a lot of debating and discussing. We are a talking people. We survive by images and analysis, analogues and metaphors, so we get to know words. We take flight in language as a buffer for our wounded psyches . . . on the other hand, we are hardly ever considered for jobs in the natural sciences and technology. Our schools have no well-equipped laboratories and our teachers were educated without any hope of being employed in the sciences, either. Therefore, our knowledge in those areas is comparatively sparse.9
ML certainly knew words, and in keeping with Proctor’s observations, his highest scores were in the Literature section, where he scored in the top 25th percentile (470). However, his Verbal results were less impressive, landing him among the lower half of test takers (350), and his Quantitative results were particularly poor, putting him in the bottom 10 percent (270).10
The results wouldn’t land in ML’s mailbox until March, but he must have known that the scores would not be pretty. Unfortunately, Dean Weigle had retired from Yale in 1949, so ML’s application would have faced a new dean who hadn’t heard Samuel Proctor’s explanation of black students’ standardized testing woes. In addition, Weigle’s replacement was perhaps less well acquainted with ML’s adviser George Davis, who’d earned his PhD from Yale. With these Crozer connections frayed, ML’s poor performance on the GRE most likely ensured a denial from his top-choice school.
Besides, according to Jimmy Beshai, Professor Davis and Snuffy Smith continued to advocate for Boston University. “As far as I can remember,” he says, they “were the two mentors who persuaded Martin to go to Boston rather than Edinburgh.”11 By the end of February, ML would have mostly made up his mind and chosen Boston University.
ML’s family could breathe easy. He was at least staying in America.
ML’s Class Schedule
Year III, Term 2, November 28, 1950–February 15, 1951
Time
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
8:00 AM
9:00 AM
Philosophy of Religion
Philosophy of Religion
Philosophy of Religion
Philosophy of Religion
10:00 AM
10:30 AM
Chapel service
Optional service
Devotional pd.
Theological Integration
Theological Integration
Theological Integration
Theological Integration
11:00 AM
11:30 AM
12:00 PM
1:00 PM
2:00 PM
3:00 PM
4:00 PM
Kant?
(at UPenn)
Vespers service (4:15 PM)
5:00 PM
No classes on Monday | Christmas break: Dec. 21–Jan. 1 |
Term examinations: Feb. 12–15
ML’s GPA for the term: 4.00
Philosophy of Religion
George Washington Davis, BD, ThM (Colgate-Rochester), PhD (Yale)
Course Description: “The origin, nature, development, function and value of religion both in general and as a Christian phenomenon; the validity of religious experience.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: A)
Theological Integration
Sankey Lee Blanton, ThM (Southern Baptist), STM (Andover Newton), DD (Wake Forest); President of Crozer, 1950–1962
Course Description: “An integrative course for Seniors only, in which the student’s seminary studies are drawn together into a statement of his own Christian faith and ministerial objectives. Required.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: A)
Kant
Paul Schrecker, LLD (University of Vienna), PhD (University of Berlin)
Course Description: An analysis of the concepts within Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason. Among other topics: the distinction between phenomena (beings of sense) and noumena (beings of reason); Kant’s definition of reality. Description based on ML’s class notes. Scheduling for this course, which was held at the University of Pennsylvania, is speculative; official time unknown. (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.12
Classes and Professors: Means and Ends
Philosophy of Religion
Let’s imagine a day in the life of Professor George Washington Davis. You’re forty-eight years old, married to a teacher, and have two teenage sons. When you’re not teaching three courses a week at Crozer, you often fill in as an interim pastor at local churches. You frequently invite your students over to your home behind Old Main for dinner and a chat. Currently, you’re teaching a Philosophy of Religion class to about twenty students, whom you recently assigned a long essay describing the origin of religion.
On February 9, 1951, one of your students, Martin L. King Jr., hands you his fifteen-page paper, folded long ways, his signature in the bottom right corner. Along with it, you collect nineteen other papers, all roughly the same length—around three hundred pages of material in all. These papers are handwritten and have not been professionally edited or organized; most of them have been patched together using sources you yourself may have suggested. It won’t be easy reading, and even if you can make it through each one in about thirty minutes, you’re looking at ten hours or more of grading time.
So you take your stack of papers and walk home. Your boys had a busy day at school in Chester, and your wife prepared a nice meal. You enjoy your time with family, maybe listen to a little talk radio, then dig in to that mountain of papers. The second term ends on February 15, and they’ll need their papers back before then.
You come to ML’s paper, and you begin to read the text. Ah, ML—student body president, former chairman of the Devotions Committee, and that voice! What an incredible talent. Other faculty echo how you feel: that he is one of the brightest students to come through Crozer.
As you peruse his paper, titled “The Origin of Religion in the Race” (meaning the human race), you see that he has listed nine sources on his bibliography page. There are times, however, when what ML writes sounds more like one of the nine authors he listed, so you slow your reading and wonder, your mind a bit cloudy from a long day’s work. Still, your concerns build after reading a paragraph like this:
It has been implied above that religion and magic have a common root. At this point we may state this position more fully. The question of the relation between these two attitudes or types of behaviour has often been discussed by anthropologists, and has an important bearing on the problem of the origin and nature of religion. In dealing with this relationship many questions inevitably arise. Have we sufficient grounds for assigning logical or chronological priority to the one rather than to the other? If so, to which of the two does priority belong? Can we place a genetic relation between them? Did the one spring from the other, by way of development or else by way of relapse? Or did they have independent origins? In an attempt to answer these questions at least three positions have emerged.13
Hmm . . . This reads a bit too smoothly for a student paper. His questions are clear, profound, and perfectly on target. And, oddly enough, ML even uses the British spelling behaviour.
Now, at this point, you as a professor have a choice. You could walk five minutes over to the Pearl Hall library and compare the books that ML has listed to what he wrote. But maybe you look at the clock and realize the library’s closed, or maybe you simply balk at the prospect of hunting through each of the nine books ML has cited to find the material he might have cribbed. Perhaps you consider that once you begin investigating ML’s paper for plagiarism, it will feel wrong not to check all the other students’ papers for signs of copying as well.
After all, ML is going places. In fact, at the moment, he is Crozer, and in the back of your mind, you may recognize that he came from a different educational background than the one you grew up in. At worst, you might think to yourself, he went to a lot of trouble to assemble a tapestry of thoughts, and he listed far more sources than other students who barely eke by. Or perhaps you just want to finish grading a few more papers before bedtime. In any case, the thought of double-checking ML’s attribution skills floats away.
And that’s that. “Thoughtful, critical analysis,” you write on ML’s paper. Grade: A.
But if you had gone to the library, and if you’d happened to find D. Miall Edwards’s 1940 book The Philosophy of Religion, and if you’d turned to pages 47–48, you would have seen that almost every single word in that quoted paragraph came from the pen of D. Miall Edwards. The only words that didn’t? The first five: “It has been implied above.”
This speculative account is about as close as we’ll get to understanding George Davis’s inaction where ML’s plagiarism is concerned. To be sure, Professor Davis should be forever lauded for introducing ML to so many theologians and scholars that influenced his later work. Davis also unanimously impressed the student body with his welcoming nature and his devotion to the ministry as well as to the life of the mind. But of all the professors who were exposed to ML’s attribution issues, Davis may have been best positioned to confront them. By the end of ML’s Crozer tenure, he would have taken at least eight classes from Davis, classes that involved writing essays using a variety of sources.
Even in the face of blatant examples of plagiarism like this one, however, Davis apparently chose not to broach the subject. Perhaps if he had discouraged ML from borrowing the thoughts of others, the young man’s course work would have become a far more revealing record of his own ideas. But it’s certainly easy to understand why Davis would have been reluctant to do so.
Theological Integration
“I believe [Crozer] is vitally necessary to the balance of theological education in our denomination at this critical time in the history of evangelical Christianity. The concept of religious freedom is being challenged in many lands, our own included.”
—Sankey L. Blanton14
In prior years, Theological Integration had been taught by Crozer’s president at the time, the stern, high-minded academic E. E. Aubrey. Now that President Sankey Blanton was at the helm, he was planning to revamp the entire curriculum for the 1951–1952 school year to bring it in line with his vision of a school for ministers, not religious scholars. Theological Integration would not survive the overhaul, but in its final year Blanton chose to respect tradition and teach the course himself.
Sankey Lee Blanton grew up in rural North Carolina, one of ten siblings in a family of Irish/English farmers. After joining the military in 1916, he fought across Europe during WWI and saw countless friends and allies die in combat. Witnessing such atrocities up close changed Blanton. He felt a new calling: the ministry. “We live not in peace but in war,” he said years later. “All of this but accentuates the urgent necessity of the best and highest sort of endeavors, methods and spirits in every kind of educational institution, particularly so in theological schools such as ours.”15
Across the northeast, Blanton earned degrees and also experience as a pastor in various churches. He found his better half and became a proud father of a daughter and son. In the decade prior to coming to Crozer, Blanton returned with his family to North Carolina, eventually ending up back at Wake Forest, his alma mater, where he became dean of religion. Now here he was, sitting in front of ML and the ten other seniors as the president of a renowned theological seminary.16
Crozer Seminary president Sankey Lee Blanton. From the collection of the Delaware County Historical Society
President Aubrey had dismissed ML’s class as the dumbest in Crozer’s history, and turned up his nose at the veterans who swelled the school’s ranks. But President Blanton had a real connection with them: many were fellow southerners, and some, such as WWII vet Horace Whitaker, had also heard the calling after watching so many soldiers die in battle. Still, the new president’s preacher-centric philosophy hadn’t immediately caught on; Blanton recruit Bullard acknowledged that, at least at the beginning, the president was “in the distinct minori
ty.”17
With Enslin’s Christian Beginnings still in print, his and Batten’s Crozer Quarterly publishing regularly, and Dr. James Pritchard creating scholarly waves and national news with his archaeological discoveries, Crozer’s brand remained geared more toward the theological scholar than the practicing preacher. Sure, Blanton had Robert Keighton on his side, and George Davis and Kenneth Smith were hoping to carve out hybrid identities as liberal scholarly pastors. Raymond Bean was the resident historian, which, as many in that field would admit, allows for a standing vote of abstention. But it would take a few years for Blanton to create the culture he desired. For the moment, he was still learning the ropes. Perhaps that’s why he chose to follow Aubrey’s lead and teach Theological Integration—to learn about the culture of Crozer from the students who’d been there the longest.
Little information is available about the actual content of this class, but judging by the course description and President Blanton’s own interests, it was bound to have included discussions of each student’s future as a minister. For ML in particular, already looking toward the future, the class would have been an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his abilities in front of the new president.
A good showing would have been particularly helpful when in January 1951, right in the middle of the term, ML formally applied for the $1,200 J. Lewis Crozer Fellowship, a grant that would go a long way in supporting his upcoming doctoral studies. Although Blanton wasn’t officially on the scholarship committee (the three members were chairman George Davis, Morton S. Enslin, and Charles Batten), he could still veto the committee’s decision.18