by Patrick Parr
ML also saw a young woman named Isabelle Durham, who lived about twenty-five miles away in the northwest Philadelphia neighborhood of Roxborough. Once, ML went with Isabelle’s family to a restaurant, but they were denied service because they were black. Although she wasn’t entirely sure of the details, Durham’s sister, Mildred Benn, recalled ML being visibly annoyed. “You will hear from me,” Benn believed ML said to a restaurant employee. “I will have this establishment closed.” Though it was most likely a coincidence, the restaurant soon “had a sign out front that said they were closed.”10
His sister’s friend Juanita Sellers also became a serious prospect at one point. Perhaps because she had known ML since his Auburn Avenue days and had earned his father’s seal of approval, she was the closest ML came to marrying someone from the Atlanta community. But June Dobbs, who was friends with Christine and Juanita as well as ML, saw hesitation on both sides. Juanita had always been more comfortable in cities, and she knew that ML’s calling wouldn’t necessarily allow him to settle in an urban environment. According to June, “ML always said back then, ‘The church that calls me first, that’s where I must go.’ . . . Juanita was getting scared, because she didn’t want to get involved in any country town.”11
ML, on the other hand, assumed that whomever he chose to be his wife would sacrifice her own hopes and dreams to follow him and support his career. Eventually, Juanita would make it clear that she had her own ambitions, signing a contract to work as a teacher. She noticed that right after she agreed to work, ML started to fade from her life.12 Though his family’s inevitable disapproval was enough to scuttle his relationship with Betty, their approval wouldn’t be enough to save his relationship with Juanita.
“The old order changeth, yielding place to the new.”
—Tennyson, quoted in the Chester Times13
It was a time of endings, not just for ML and his fellow seniors but for the whole Crozer community. As students, faculty, and staff contemplated President Blanton’s plans to do away with the Crozer they’d known, they also looked on sadly as the natural beauty of their campus was literally cut down.
After the vicious thunderstorm of November 1950, Crozer’s longtime superintendent of buildings and grounds, Bert Williams, made what was for him an excruciating decision. Seventeen of the giant silver maple trees that shaded the campus were so damaged that they would need to be removed. By April, the trees had been felled, and students were paid to help cut the large trunks and branches down to size so that they could be disposed of. In economic terms, it was a great gig—85 cents an hour and no commute—but for the many Crozer students who’d been angered by the decision to remove them, it would’ve been a bittersweet experience to profit from destroying the very thing they loved.14
It would have been especially sad for ML, who’d enjoyed his spring walks through Ship Creek Woods toward the tributary that rolled into the Delaware River. Damaged trees all around Ship Creek were also cut down, and the view along the path and from the window of ML’s dorm room would never be the same.
ML’s Class Schedule
Year III, Term 3, February 20–May 4, 1951
Time
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
8:00 AM
Christian Social Philosophy II
Christian Social Philosophy II
Christian Social Philosophy II
Christian Social Philosophy II
9:00 AM
Adv. Philosophy of Religion
Adv. Philosophy of Religion
Adv. Philosophy of Religion
Adv. Philosophy of Religion
10:00 AM
10:30 AM
Chapel service
Optional service
Devotional pd.
11:00 AM
11:30 AM
Christianity and Society
Christianity and Society
Christianity and Society
Christianity and Society
12:00 PM
12:30 PM
1:00 PM
2:00 PM
3:00 PM
4:00 PM
Vespers service (4:15 PM)
5:00 PM
No classes on Monday | Term examinations: May 1–4 |
Eighty-third commencement: May 6–8
ML’s GPA for the term: 3.89
Christian Social Philosophy II
Kenneth Lee Smith, BA (University of Richmond), BD (Crozer), PhD (in progress, Duke)
Course Description: “Post-Kantian thought in the nineteenth century (Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Troeltsch); the genesis and development of the ‘Social Gospel’ (Maurice and Rauschenbusch); the cultural crisis in contemporary society and the Christian response in the thought of: Catholicism, Anglo-Catholocism, Neo-Protestantism, and Liberalism; summary and constructive statement.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: A)
Advanced Philosophy of Religion
George Washington Davis, BD, ThM (Colgate-Rochester), PhD (Yale)
Course Description: “The religious view of the world, nature and the supernatural, God, evil, determinism, the relation of morality to religion, revelation, immorality; the reasonableness and finality of the Christian faith.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: A)
Christianity and Society
Kenneth Lee Smith, BA (University of Richmond), BD (Crozer), PhD (in progress, Duke)
Course Description: “The social principles of Christianity and their bearing on contemporary life; the church as an institution and its relation to the social, political, and economic orders; analysis and interpretation of certain practical issues; education, war, racial prejudice, and world order.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: 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.15
Classes and Professors: Things Get Personal
Christian Social Philosophy II; Christianity and Society
“When [King] came to Crozer, he was a biblical literalist. . . . He believed the Bible word-for-word. When he left Crozer, he could no longer believe that. It sort of shook him up. And a lot of other things at Crozer shook him up.”
—Kenneth Smith16
By his third term as a Crozer professor, Snuffy Smith had endeared himself to the entire student body. He’d lived in Old Main, making himself available to seminarians for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he’d encouraged them to debate important issues—even with him. As ML mentioned to an early biographer, “Smith loved an intellectual quarrel with his students.”17 His classes became a must to attend.
There were at least eleven students in Christian Social Philosophy II, a hearty size for a Crozer class. ML was one of them—and he apparently found it tricky to transition from seeing Smith as a pool room debate partner and informal adviser to interacting with him as a professor in a classroom setting. “King was always waiting for me when I came to class,” Smith recalled. “He was always dressed in a suit, white shirt, a tie, and his shoes were shined. It took him a long time to loosen up.” Nevertheless, he remembered ML as having “deep concentration on what was being said, and . . . penetrating questions.”18
ML hopped into Christian Social Philosophy II without taking the first section. Due to his previous two and a half years of study, he wouldn’t have had any trouble catching up with the content. According to Smith, the class “covered the ethical and social thought of the Church from New Testament times to the present.
Its major purpose was to analyze and to assess the various historical ‘strategies’ which have characterized the relationship between Christ and culture.”19
To that end, King was assigned a forty-five-minute oral report on contemporary French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Though ML was the only third-year student in the class, he knew his audience quite well. As he stood in front of the class to deliver his report, he would have seen three friends who’d joined him during that basketball blowout at the hands of Eastern Baptist, and international student Makoto Sakurabayashi, who presented his own oral report critiquing the strong and weak points of the social gospel—overcoming both his recent car accident and his second-language anxiety. Also in the class was second-year George W. Lawrence, a married father of two who lived in an apartment behind Old Main; his wife had made sandwiches for Mac and ML for their long drives south to Atlanta.20
ML’s oral report laid out Jacques Maritain’s views on “the disease of modernity,” which to Maritain “occurred when modern philosophy abandoned its dependence on theology.” Maritain blamed the global surge of Communism on this very fact: as soon as philosophy dismissed its need for God, Communism came roaring in to replace it. “In other words,” ML said in his report, “Maritain feels that atheism was one of the causes for the rise of Communism rather [than] a mere consequence. He attempts to prove historically that Marx was an atheist before he was a Communist.”
One can imagine the young preacher looking up at his classmates, friends, and Professor Smith with a bit of dramatic flair when he added, “But he does not stop here.” According to ML, Maritain believed that “Communism arose as a revolt against Christianity itself. It originated chiefly through the fault of a Christian world unfaithful to its own principles.”21
While Christian Social Philosophy examined a broad swath of history, ML’s second course with Smith, Christianity and Society, focused specifically on present-day issues. As the class delved into such topics as democracy, family concerns, the role of the United Nations, the strong influence of the labor movement, and nuclear warfare, Smith noted how ML started to open up, displaying a “lively interest” and offering “incisive observations.” The professor recalled that ML enjoyed connecting historical moments with contemporary struggles, that he “was interested in the strategies of the past only as they provided insights for the development of a Christian social ethic adequate to meet the needs of contemporary society.”22
It reminded Smith of someone. “At the time his favorite author in the field of ethics was Walter Rauschenbusch, and it was evident that he had read and pondered all of his major works.” There was a sense of urgency to Rauschenbusch’s social gospel that ML could relate to, the same desperation he heard in Daddy’s King’s voice: Things need to change! Rauschenbusch was not from the South, but he faced comparable problems preaching at a Baptist church in New York City’s crime-ridden, poverty-stricken Hell’s Kitchen. As families lined his pews with barely enough money to afford food, shelter, and clothing, Rauschenbusch dedicated his life to bridging the gap between church and society. The church must help cure society’s ills! A man like ML, who believed the church had become archaic and disconnected from the needs of its people, welcomed having his doom and gloom lifted by the eternal optimism of Walter Rauschenbusch. ML would echo Rauschenbusch’s ideas whenever he needed to pitch his message toward a white audience.23
The discussions with Smith continued in the rec room of Old Main. With Rauschenbusch in ML’s corner, Smith chose to counter with the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr, the realist. Wherever Rauschenbusch stood for sunny optimism, Niebuhr waited around the corner, leaning against a building: Sounds great, Walter, but how do we really do it? “We engaged in frequent debates,” Smith said, “about the relative merits of the social ethics of Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr, whom, I must confess, I followed somewhat uncritically during those early days of my teaching.”24
Niebuhr’s carefully moderated beliefs were a perfect template for a young professor just starting out in the classroom. In 1942, Niebuhr wrote that “we need the idealism of the Christian gospel to save us from cynicism and complacency. But we also need the realism to save us from sentimentality. In America at least the dangers of a perverse sentimentality have been greater than the perils of cynicism.”25 This cautious, middle-of-the-road approach was particularly helpful when leading discussions among full-grown adults with their own established beliefs.
ML’s position, however, was a bit different. The South needed change, and both black southerners and white society needed to believe that such change was possible. This required the sort of idealistic efforts Rauschenbusch wrote about in his book Christianity and the Social Crisis, which ML read and absorbed:
A minister mingling with both classes can act as an interpreter to both. He can soften the increasing class hatred of the working class. He can infuse the spirit of moral enthusiasm into the economic struggle of the dispossessed and lift it to something more. . . . On the other hand, among the well-to-do, [the minister] can strengthen . . . consciousness . . . [that] the working people have a real grievance. . . . If the ministry would awaken among the wealthy a sense of social compunction and moral uneasiness, that alone might save our nation from a revolutionary explosion.26
ML had a strong connection with Rauschenbusch’s urgent message of social change, but his debates with Professor Smith would have helped him to appreciate the importance of having the tempered realism of Niebuhr in his back pocket.*1 Just as Rev. Barbour urged him to synthesize white and black preaching styles, Smith encouraged him to strike a balance among differing philosophical influences.
“It is a pity that [there isn’t] a recording of Martin and Ken in discussion,” Jimmy Beshai says. “I felt that they were good friends. More than professor and student.” And ML himself remembered Smith fondly, telling a biographer later that he “had a tremendous capacity to grapple with big ideas.”27
Advanced Philosophy of Religion
Advanced Philosophy of Religion was ML’s final class with George Davis, who had persuaded him to pursue his doctorate at Boston University. Davis also encouraged him to study with BU professor Edgar S. Brightman, who specialized in the branch of religious thought known as personalism. So in Davis’s final class, ML would take the opportunity to learn as much as he could about Brightman, taking a deep dive into one of his most influential books, A Philosophy of Religion, published in 1940. Davis was the ideal professor to introduce the topic; according to Snuffy Smith, “Brightman was by far the single most important philosophical influence upon Davis’s theology.”28
Brightman’s view of personalism can be outlined very generally as follows:
Edgar S. Brightman:
“Personalism is the belief that conscious personality is both the supreme value and the supreme reality in the universe.”
“‘God is a spirit,’ a being whose esse is to be conscious, to experience, to think, to will, to love, and to control the ongoing universe by rational purpose.”
“Unless religion allows man to retain some degree of self-respect and of intelligence, it is doomed. A God about whom we dare not think is a God a thinking mind cannot worship.”29
According to this philosophy, there is God, or the Supreme Personality, a parental figure who invisibly invests human beings with five factors, the most vital of which are Love and Reason. Possessing these factors, then, connects us to the Supreme Personality. Simply by being human, we are fundamentally tied to God.
Thus, anything that seeks to deny or diminish an individual’s personhood is an affront to God. Perhaps you were once enslaved by a master or considered three-fifths of a human being, or you were not given certain educational advantages or were prohibited from sitting in a particular seat on a bus. “Every act of injustice,” ML would write later in life, “mars and defaces the image of God in man.”30
During late April 1951, ML wrote an essay for Davis’s course that used personalism as a lens to examine the
nature of evil. The paper, titled “Religion’s Answer to the Problem of Evil,” is long and plagiarized, but contains a few nuggets of insight into how twenty-two-year-old ML was processing Brightman’s ideas.
ML’s main beef with Brightman was how the professor viewed the actual power of the Supreme Personality. Although Brightman considered God’s existence to be infinite, he saw the existence of evil as evidence that God’s ability to affect the world, his will, is finite. ML’s paper does not propose an alternate conception, but it does suggest ML’s displeasure with the notion of a less-than-omnipotent God who cannot prevent evil from happening. Later on, during the civil rights movement, King would argue for the existence of an infinite, all-powerful God who could intervene in human history to aid those denied full personhood. Perhaps, echoing ML’s embrace of Walter Rauschenbusch’s optimism, the needs of his movement required him to proclaim an absolute God of goodness and hope. But the certainty with which he proclaimed it likely has roots in the studies he began here—and in the deep conviction of a mind that spent years pondering the very nature of man’s personality.
For now, ML would answer the problem of evil by leaning on his faith, concluding his paper with a sermonic flourish: “After we have climbed to the top of the speculative ladder we must leap out into the darkness of faith. But this leap is not a leap of despair, for it eventually cries with St. Paul, ‘for now we see through a glass darkly . . . but then shall I know even as I am known.’”31 Though his academic prose would always be mired in self-consciousness, when it came to writing a sermon, ML had no trouble letting loose. And Professor Davis seemed to approve of the overall effort, awarding the essay an A-.