by Patrick Parr
ML apparently succeeded in making a positive impression. In the years that followed, Blanton would “emphatically” recommend ML for a future job position and urge him to come back to the Crozer campus “as often as you can.”19
Kant
“I observed here [in America] a new and timely civilization in the making, a civilization which, unburned [sic] by obsolete traditions and conventions, pioneered to restore civilization to its original function . . . to secure the pursuit of happiness.”
—Dr. Paul Schrecker, 194520
The ideas of German philosopher Immanuel Kant had been crucial to the first class ML took at the University of Pennsylvania, Ethics and Philosophy of History with Dr. Elizabeth Flower, but apparently he decided it was time for another go-around. After his morning class at Crozer, he once again set out for UPenn for a course devoted to this central figure in modern philosophy, taught by Dr. Paul Schrecker.
Born in Vienna but a French citizen of Jewish descent, Schrecker was a polyglot obsessed with the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (an important philosopher and the co-inventor of calculus); he owned more of Leibniz’s printed materials than anyone in the world. Before World War II, Schrecker taught at the University of Berlin, but when the Nazis began scrutinizing the university ranks, he fled to Paris with the help of a secret network of friends and associates. There he devoted himself to translating the works of Kant and Leibniz. When the Nazis invaded France, he again escaped—this time, thanks to the rescue efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation, to a new life in the United States.21
A few of ML’s notes from Schrecker’s class—and there are a lot of them—are peppered with references to Leibniz, a sign perhaps of the philosophical connections Schrecker drew between the two men. More important, of course, was what ML learned about Kant, who would have posed philosophical challenges for the young seminarian.
First, Kant was not Christian and did not concern himself much with organized religion. Second, he had little interest in directly confronting the problem of human oppression. “It is the people’s duty,” he wrote, “to endure even the most intolerable abuse of the supreme authority.”22 Clearly, Kant would not lose too much sleep over the plight of a slave; to him, maintaining order, reason, and balance was far more important.
ML would have agreed with Kant, however, in his insistence that the ends cannot justify the means. Both Dr. Flower’s class and Dr. Schrecker’s would have examined these comments by the philosopher in 1785:
Now I say: man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must be always regarded at the same time as an end.23
Twelve years later, in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King would employ a dash of this Kantian logic himself: “Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.”24
But his letter would go on to propose another principle of which Kant would certainly disapprove. “Now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so,” King wrote, “to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” The Birmingham police may have broken up the recent civil rights demonstrations without resorting to public displays of violence, “but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of flagrant racial injustice.”25 To King, it was wrong to categorically reject the possibility of civil disobedience, if the alternative was to accept a fundamentally flawed system. Kant’s reasoning was a finger trap of logic: Don’t use people as a means, but don’t disrupt the system if you believe it’s using you. Instead, simply stop thinking it is using you.26
Nonetheless, Kant was a critical figure of Enlightenment thought, who encouraged people in his time to “know” the world and exercise their own reason rather than mindlessly accepting conventional dogma. True to this directive, ML had considered the philosopher’s arguments with the help of Dr. Schrecker and Dr. Flower, and would ultimately decide for himself which to embrace and which to reject.
Basketball and Friends: “We Kept Him as a Sub”
Even in the delirium of choosing his next school and wrestling with complex religious and philosophical concepts, ML found time to relax and support his schoolmates. One way he did both was by taking part in an exhibition game between a hastily assembled Crozer basketball team and their rivals at Eastern Baptist Seminary.
The bad blood between the two schools mainly had to do with Crozer’s liberal ways. The running joke at Eastern was that they had each Crozer seminarian on their “prayer list,” because with the way they were being trained, all of them were going straight to hell. In fact, according to Kenneth Smith, Eastern had been founded in the 1920s as a protest against Crozer’s liberalism.27
As student body president, ML felt a responsibility to shepherd Crozer’s team through this showdown. He’d always loved basketball, often playing at the old Butler Street YMCA in Atlanta during his teenage years. At Crozer, he’d played pick-up games with his fellow students in Commencement Hall. But he had no plans to be a starter in the exhibition game; at five foot seven and 150 pounds, he’d given up hopes of playing against the likes of then–NBA stars George Mikan and Dolph Schayes.
No, according to ML’s Atlanta friends, his skills weren’t exactly professional level. ML “was one of the subs on our team,” one childhood friend remembered, “and we kept him as a sub because he didn’t know what teamwork was then.” The problem, the friend explained, was that “he was a ‘will-shoot.’ If he got his hands on the ball, no matter what teammates were free under the basket, he’d shoot, and it didn’t make it any better that he often sank the ball. But when we’d give him hell about it later, he’d just shrug his shoulders and say, ‘I just felt like shooting.’ And what more could you say if the guy had actually made the basket.”28
But on this night—Thursday, January 11, 1951—ML wasn’t too concerned with shooting. Except for him and middle-year students Raymond J. Dietrich and Billy Reardon, every player participating in the exhibition game was in his first year at Crozer. As he and his nine teammates boarded the bus to the game, he wanted more than anything for the team to have a good time. However, if their idea of having a good time meant winning . . . well, that hope fell away quickly.
After a thirty-minute bus ride, the Crozer team walked into a gymnasium in West Philadelphia at around 7:00 PM. They were about to face a team of Eastern Baptist players who were taller and far more skilled than they were. A box score that ran in the next day’s Chester Times would tell the sad tale.29
Back in 1950, most collegiate box scores only kept track of a few things: field goals (G), free throws (F), and points (P). According to those numbers, four Crozer players (Jesse H. Brown, Reese A. Mahoney, Lawrence J. Seyler, and Calixto O. Marques) played most of the game, while ML apparently contributed a two-pointer and a free throw to the team’s futile efforts.30 As far as I’ve found, this tiny mention in the Chester Times and a matching piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer are the only instances in which King’s name appears in any box score, and their account of the game’s final score isn’t pretty: 104–41. But in his brief basketball career in the North, ML put the ball in the hoop and sank a free throw, and the entire Philadelphia/Chester area would get to read all about it in the morning.
ML’s only recorded basketball game box score at Crozer, January 11, 1951. Used with permission of the Delaware County Daily Times
Three days later—the day before his twenty-second birthday—ML supported another friend, preaching for 1949 Crozer graduate Lloyd Burrus at Zion Baptist Church in Camden, New Jersey. Two weeks after that, on January 28, ML was invited by a Rev. D. W. White to speak at a 3:30 PM service at Temple Baptist Church in Chester. His busy schedule reaffirmed how far he’d come since the lonely days of his first ter
m at Crozer.31
The friend who’d first encouraged him to emerge from his shell, Walter McCall, had also come a long way since his first year. Sure, he still struggled to make ends meet, and that made it tough to find study time as he prepared to retake his failed comprehensive exams. But by the middle of his final year, he’d developed a knack for inspiring younger people to pursue their life’s goals. Speaking at a banquet in Linwood, Pennsylvania, in January 1951, McCall shared this gem with a crowd of a hundred: “We of the young generation must live up to our best, and as children of God, must discipline ourselves to seek to find and to give our best as we take our places in the world.”32
But Mac’s contentious nature could still land him in a great deal of controversy. During the winter of 1950–1951, he received unwelcome news from Pearl Smith, who’d been in Maple Shade, New Jersey, with Mac and ML the night they faced off against Ernest Nichols. Pearl told Mac that she was carrying his child, and that he had a choice: either acknowledge that the baby was his and do his part, or she’d take him to court. (In an era before DNA testing, of course, there was no way to definitively prove paternity.) Mac flatly said no, and Pearl Smith initiated a lawsuit.
Of all Mac’s friends at Crozer, only a few would have known about his situation. The Crozer faculty kept the case tightly under wraps, fearing both a public backlash and a strike against their liberal reputation. (Other seminaries: Way too free over there . . .) They wanted the conflict out of their hair as soon as possible. According to Horace Whitaker, it may have been George Davis who stuck his neck out for McCall, vouching for Mac’s integrity and convincing the court to declare Mac innocent of Pearl’s accusation. It will remain a mystery, however, as to whether McCall was telling the truth, or whether he relied on Crozer’s influence to get out of a problem of his own making.33
What ML thought of his friend’s crisis is also unknown. But Mac’s ability to get into trouble may have helped keep ML focused on his own goals. If he was ever tempted to take a situation too far—if he ever wondered, for instance, whether he’d been wrong to end things with Betty—there was Mac, demonstrating the dangers of treading too far over the line.
Near the end of each term, seminarians often invited their classmates to visit their home during the short break. As ML, Whit, and Mac headed down to Atlanta (ML was due to give a sermon at Ebenezer the following Sunday), another trio of students left the Crozer campus headed for Waynesboro, Virginia, hometown of first-year student William W. Coleman. Coleman was at the wheel, and with him were Makoto Sakurabayashi, ML’s friend from Japan, and Nolton W. Turner, a senior who’d joined ML’s class in their second year. While driving along Route 1 between Baltimore and DC, Coleman lost control of his car and slammed into a stone wall.
All three men were seriously injured. Sakurabayashi broke his nose, but he would recover in time for term 3. Turner broke his leg and had to withdraw from Crozer temporarily. William Coleman, however, was never the same. He broke his leg both above and below his knee, and suffered a brain hemorrhage. He would leave the school as well, and pass away the following year.34
ML and his friends returned to the seminary in late February to find a campus shrouded in sorrow. The accident “had a sad impact on all Crozer students,” Jimmy Beshai recalls.35 With Turner’s departure, ML’s graduating class had shrunk to ten seminarians—barely two-thirds the number they’d started with in September 1948.
9
A Divine Cause
Term 3, February 20–May 4, 1951
Wrapping Things Up: “You Will Hear from Me”
On Thursday, February 22, 1951, Galja Barish Votaw, a longtime columnist for the Chester Times, wrote a sweeping report detailing both the history and the current state of Crozer Theological Seminary. Votaw highlighted the seventeen hundred Crozer alumni serving all over America and the world, and the fifty-three active students on campus. She referred to the latter group admiringly as “completely interracial. . . . Negro, Oriental and European students live and study harmoniously on the campus to the enrichment of the lives of all.”1
Of course, this ignored the friction caused by the school’s still-ongoing turn from the scholarly to the practical. Votaw’s rosy assessment seemed to take President Blanton’s plans as a fait accompli, referring to the institution as “a professional school first and foremost . . . where the teaching of all subjects is done with an eye on preparation for ministry.”
ML warranted a mention of his own, though a somewhat garbled one. “This year,” Votaw wrote, “there are five Southern Negroes on the campus and one of them, Martin Luther Smith, from Atlanta, Ga., is the president of the student council.”2 One wonders if ML and Snuffy Smith, rivals who became friends, had a laugh at now becoming relatives.
But ML wouldn’t have spent much time worrying about a mistake in the local paper. Though his time at Crozer was coming to an end, his status as a community leader was still keeping him busy. The weekend after Votaw’s article published, Crozer held a three-day ministry conference for college students from over forty schools around the country who were curious about the Christian ministry. Events included discussion panels and speeches from fourteen “church officials.” ML is not among the documented participants, but as student body president he was likely on hand to answer the students’ questions about seminary life.3
Rev. Samuel D. Proctor did take part in the conference, leading a discussion group, and it was here that he met ML for the first time. By this point Proctor had transferred from Yale to Boston University to finish his PhD, so the two men would have had a lot to talk about. ML’s “goal at that time,” according to Proctor, “was to succeed Dr. Benjamin E. Mays as Morehouse College’s president.”4 ML may have been thinking of emulating not only his former Morehouse mentor but also Mordecai Johnson, who served simultaneously as president of Howard University and as a highly sought-after preacher.
“After lunch, I went over and talked with the young man in his dorm,” Proctor remembered. ML wanted to pick Proctor’s brain, asking him to reflect on books that “influenced” him. They discussed the classic works of Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Harry Fosdick. Proctor was struck by ML’s confidence. Having grown comfortable in his role as Crozer’s student leader, he had a calm and canny way of speaking—or, as Proctor recalled, a “Delphian assurance.”
Proctor came away impressed by ML. “It was immediately clear to me that I was talking to a prodigious candidate for leadership.”
On Sunday morning, February 25, ML returned to Fifth Presbyterian Church to preach the 11:00 AM service at the invitation of a supply pastor named M. C. Spann. Later in the term, on the night of April 15, he headed over to Edwards Street and spoke to the congregation of St. Daniel’s Methodist Church for a “Young People’s Day” service, at which two children’s choirs from other local churches performed.5
The St. Daniel’s appearance was ML’s last reported sermon as a Crozer student. Since coming north in the fall of 1948, ML had publicly delivered dozens of sermons in and around Chester, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York. Throughout his three years, he’d collected sermon material using a preprinted “topic, text and subject index” form. Most of the material was derived from Bible passages, and the left-hand side of the form allowed ML to catalog such quotes: book, chapter, and verse. In the space on the right-hand side, he could write general comments on how to use the material. ML’s index includes biblical references such as Matthew 23:25 (greed and self-indulgence) and Isaiah 40:15 (the sins of nationalism).6
There were also many verses not in his index that he had learned by heart. Marcus Wood remembered ML’s continued fascination with the prophets of the eighth century BC. “King was often heard in his room reciting the famous passage from Amos 5:23—‘Let Justice run down like water, and Righteousness like a mighty stream.’ . . . King saw himself as an Amos to the society in which he lived. As a reformer, he too would have to turn our nation upside down.”7
Though he was working har
d right up to the end, in some respects ML had it easy compared to many of his fellow seminarians, who’d burnished their skills and reputations as ministers over the past few years but couldn’t support themselves solely with random preaching assignments around the area. Francis Stewart, who during this term was voted the next student body president, still worked at Sears on the weekends. Horace Whitaker worked as an assistant director at the West Branch YMCA. Walter McCall continued to cut hair in his dorm room and wash dishes in the kitchen. Even Marcus Wood, who had his own pastorship in Woodbury, New Jersey, took shifts as a waiter in the dining room of Old Main. “I stood over his table many times and watched him using his amazing gift for rhetoric upon fellow-students and guests alike,” Wood recalled. “His father provided whatever financial aid was necessary.”8
Which meant that ML still had time for dating. Though Betty Moitz caused him the greatest heartbreak, ML is known to have gone out with several other women over his years at Crozer. The timing of these interactions isn’t always clear, but at one point, he explored a connection his family would have found more acceptable: while visiting Rev. Barbour’s home, Olee Barbour introduced him to a young black woman from Chester named Annette McClain. According to McClain, the two of them went “to the movies a couple of times”—but only as friends. Even so, she got to see a part of his life that Betty never did, attending a Crozer lecture where “I met his mother.” The young woman would remember ML for his kindness: “He was always a gentlemen and had a very high regard and respect for women.”9