The Seminarian

by Patrick Parr

  As Davis advocated, King would go on to study with Edgar Brightman at BU, becoming, as Jimmy Beshai recalls, “an advocate of personalism.”32 Unfortunately, ML’s new mentor would pass away less than two years later at the age of sixty-eight.*2

  The Graduate: “I Do Remember Moments That I Have Been Awe Awakened.”

  Degrees Awarded at Crozer

  May 8, 1951

  Bachelor of Divinity

  1. Edwin Alonzo Brooks

  Alexandria, VA

  BA Bucknell University 1948

  2. Eugene Hildreth Drew

  Rensselaer, NY

  BA Alderson-Broaddus 1948

  3. James Joseph Greene

  Portsmouth, VA

  BA University of Richmond 1949

  4. Martin Luther King Jr.

  Atlanta, GA

  BA Morehouse College 1948

  5. Joseph Timothy Kirkland

  Philadelphia, PA

  BA Virginia Union 1948

  6. Walter Raleigh McCall

  Marion, SC

  BA Morehouse College 1948

  7. Wendall Atlas Maloch

  Emerson, AR

  BA Hillsdale College 1948

  8. Cyril George Pyle

  Canal Zone, Panama

  BA Virginia Union 1948

  9. Horace Edward Whitaker

  Seaview, VA

  BA Virginia Union 1948

  10. Marcus Garvey Wood

  Charles Town, WV

  BA Storer College 1948

  Oriental Certificates

  1. En-Chin Lin

  Foochow, China

  BA Fukien Christian University 1935; MS in Ed. University of Pennsylvania 1949

  2. Makoto Sakurabayashi

  Yokohama, Japan

  BA University of Tokyo 1942

  On Sunday, May 6, at 3:30 PM in the chapel of Old Main, Martin Luther King Jr. and the other students sat in pews, awaiting President Sankey Blanton’s baccalaureate speech. Its theme was “The Cure for All Souls,” but it would not be the most compelling message ML received from the faculty in his last days at Crozer. By this point, with classes finished, he’d most likely been informed that out of the ten students being awarded their bachelor’s in divinity, he would be named the most outstanding student. On top of this, George Davis, Charles Batten, and Morton Enslin had agreed to award ML the J. Lewis Crozer Fellowship; the $1,200 grant would be applied in four installments toward his studies at Boston University.33

  ML was a remarkable student in a remarkable class: for the first time in the history of Crozer Theological Seminary, the majority of its graduating seniors—six of the ten—were black. Leave it to the ever-affable Dean Batten to salute the moment with a line in the Chester Times that would have carried significant weight back in 1951: “It is indicative of Crozer’s interracial policy.”34 To be sure, that policy wasn’t a cure-all. ML and the five other black graduates had contended with an all-white faculty and staff that wasn’t always sensitive to their specific backgrounds and issues. When Robert Keighton indicated his animosity toward black preaching styles, they’d gone off campus for more supportive guidance from Rev. J. Pius Barbour. And even here in an enclave of northern liberalism, they’d endured outbreaks of bigotry from the likes of Lucius Z. Hall. But all things considered, they would look back fondly on their time in the inclusive environment of Crozer. Perhaps Marcus Wood summed it up best: “We had spent three years in a miniature kingdom of God. . . . We all were concerned that as we moved up in life that we would make all of society a free society, a society where one would not be known by his race, creed or color.”35

  Monday, May 7, was given over to alumni events, with commencement exercises scheduled for the following Tuesday. In his last act as student body president, ML made sure his class would go through their historic day in style. Although they were officially receiving a bachelor’s degree in divinity, each man had already earned another BA; in fact, a four-year degree was required simply to be admitted to Crozer. ML wanted to elevate the ceremony beyond the college graduation they’d already experienced. He managed to persuade the administration to open their wallets and augment each graduate’s robe with a hood. “This was something that had not been done before,” recalled Marcus Wood. “Some of the seminary staff did not want to go along with it, but the class insisted.” Since academic hoods have specific colors corresponding to the subject of study, each seminarian would receive a scarlet hood, for theology. Where once ML had overdressed to hide his social anxiety and loneliness, now he was going out on a limb to upgrade his fellow graduates’ style.36

  Commencement began on May 8 at 10:30 AM. As the longest-standing member of the Crozer faculty, Robert Keighton led the short procession from the front entrance of Old Main over to Commencement Hall. Everyone took their seats, and Dr. John R. Humphreys, Crozer class of 1901, provided the invocation. Next came a hymn, then a prayer led by Dr. Frederick Allen, class of 1911. Humphreys and Allen’s grandfatherly presence was a salute to the seminary’s history, and a reminder to the young graduates eager to change the world that their calling was not a sprint but a marathon.37

  Next came Dr. Vernon B. Richardson, who’d graduated from Crozer in 1938. Tasked with delivering the commencement address, Richardson chose a broad theme: “The Preacher’s Heritage.” He knew from experience how Crozer put its students’ religious beliefs through the ringer, and he encouraged the graduates to look at the New Testament with fresh eyes. “Let no one ever fail to be awed by the mystery of a body of literature so profound being produced so quickly over so wide an area by so many minds responding to one life so briefly lived.” Richardson also warned graduates of preaching too impulsively. “The danger there is in appealing to man’s shallow nature, satisfying his daily needs without releasing his deeper nature.” Near the end of his speech, Richardson urged the ministers in Commencement Hall to commit fully to their role in society, saying that a preacher “must be acclimatized to a cultural and intellectual environment in many ways strangely different from his own. He must come to grips with ideas in the Gospel framework whether or not those patterns of thought are personally pleasing to him.”38

  After Richardson came good ol’ Sankey Blanton, who’d completed his first full year as president of Crozer. Blanton would eventually accomplish his mission to turn Crozer into an evangelical-minded seminary. In exactly three years, a “Blanton exodus” occurred. Morton Enslin relinquished control of the Crozer Quarterly and left the school, eventually landing at the St. Lawrence Theological School as a professor of biblical languages and literature, while James Pritchard headed west to join the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley. As the right and left hook of Crozer’s biblical reality check took their scholarly approach elsewhere, the school also lost Dean Charles Batten, master of community outreach and friend to every student. Batten accepted a position as director of Christian education at the Parish of the Epiphany Episcopal Church in Winchester, Massachusetts. ML would never forget Dean Batten’s unconditional support, confessing in a letter he wrote to Batten in 1956, while in the throes of the Montgomery bus boycott, that no matter how old he became, “I would feel strange not calling you ‘Dean.’”39

  His lasting impression of President Blanton would be more apprehensive. In response to the faculty exodus, ML wrote to fellow alum Francis Stewart that he believed Blanton “was desirous of getting rid of these men from the very beginning. What the outcome will be I don’t know. . . . I do hope that it won’t be disastrous.”40

  But back in 1951, ML was not too concerned with Crozer’s longevity. This was his day, and after James Greene walked across the stage, Martin Luther King Jr. went up to Sankey Blanton and then George Davis to receive his divinity degree and scarlet hood. In the crowd sat his sister, Christine; his brother, AD; his mother, Alberta; and, of course, Martin Sr., who’d ended up truly impressed (and somewhat perplexed) by his son’s development at Crozer. “ML was moving forward into a modern, advanced sort of ministry requirin
g lengthy and dedicated study,” Daddy King remembered. “I admired his mind’s receptivity and the genuine passion he had for learning.”41

  It was a day of honors for ML. First his divinity degree, then the J. Lewis Crozer Fellowship, and as the icing on the cake, the Pearl Ruth Plafker Memorial Award, described in the Crozer catalog as follows:

  An award of fifty dollars is made annually by Dr. Nathan V. Plafker in memory of his wife, to that student of the senior class who, in the judgment of the faculty, has maintained throughout his course in the Seminary a good academic record, and who has, by his character and cooperation, made a distinct contribution to the community life of the campus.42

  It was Nathan Plafker who had helped introduce ML to on-air preaching through his radio station project (which he’d also initiated in honor of his wife, Pearl). Now he was recognizing ML’s academic accomplishments at Crozer with a fifty-dollar check. The award served as a rough equivalent to the title valedictorian, which wasn’t mentioned in any of the Crozer literature of the time, but as the award description indicates, it took into account not only a student’s grades but also his “distinct contribution to the community.” We may never know if ML had the highest GPA in his class,*3 but we do know that with impressive grades, his service as Devotions Committee chairman and student body president, and his regular work as a preacher in the Chester and Philadelphia community, he stood well above his classmates as the most all-around impressive student at Crozer.

  Commencement ended with a few more gift exchanges. As was a tradition, the graduating class gave their own fifty-dollar donation to the seminary, a tangible display of their appreciation. And Crozer sent each graduate off with a collection of books courtesy of the “American Baptist Publication Society of Philadelphia as a nucleus for a personal library.”43 The students headed back to Old Main, where it had all started, and had one last lunch together in the dining hall.

  After eating, it was time for photos. ML posed with the entire graduating class and the two international students who had completed the Oriental certificate program, En-Chin Lin and Makoto Sakurabayashi. Though the group’s paths were diverging, they would remain bonded by their shared experiences at Crozer. Sakurabayashi, for one, would continue to feel a connection to ML despite time and distance; seven years later, when was back in Japan, he wrote a kind letter to King after learning that he’d been stabbed with a letter opener in Harlem.44

  ML’s graduation photo. Though the only available version of the image is blurry and faces are difficult to make out, it depicts, from left to right: (front row) James J. Greene, En-Chin Lin, Makoto Sakurabayashi, Wendell A. Maloch, Marcus G. Wood; (back row) Joseph T. Kirkland, Eugene H. Drew, Martin Luther King Jr., Horace E. Whitaker, Cyril Pyle, Edwin A. Brooks, Walter R. McCall. Courtesy of Rev. Marcus G. Wood, Co-pastor, Providence Baptist Church, Baltimore, MD

  ML had entered Crozer Theological Seminary as a man of the South—sheltered and guarded by an influential family, raised in a segregated community where neighbors looked out for one another. He’d come to Crozer in hopes of expanding his horizons, and found that the school was the ideal environment for doing just that. It wasn’t always easy; as fellow seminarian Francis Stewart put it, the experience had been “a constant bombardment of shock treatment for all of us. . . . Some . . . just couldn’t take it.” But ML bore up under every onslaught. He’d had guns pointed at him, sand thrown into his food. He’d accepted demystified, humanized views of Moses and Jesus Christ, absorbing Crozer’s white intellectualism without abandoning his black roots. He’d preached at northern churches in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, and experienced the differences between congregations there and back home in Atlanta. He’d written dozens of new sermons reflecting his broadening perspective, and he’d listened to the powerful and stormy voices of J. Pius Barbour and Mordecai Johnson, both sparking his interest in the methods of Mahatma Gandhi.

  He’d fallen in love with a white woman and been left brokenhearted by society’s disapproval, yet the peaceful soul who had counseled him to end things, Horace Whitaker, became a lifelong friend. His old friend Walter McCall had helped him to open up—even sparking his first foray into civil rights litigation. And when he needed time away from social concerns or liberal philosophy, he’d been able to walk deep into the Ship Creek Woods and commune with nature.

  At Crozer, ML’s spiritual self had awakened, but he would continue to pursue religion with a sense of hope mingled with melancholy. He still wanted to feel the Holy Spirit, and at twenty-two, he’d not yet experienced an unmistakable religious epiphany. In a paper he wrote for George Davis five weeks before graduation, ML shared a bit of his tightly controlled uncertainty:

  I do remember moments that I have been awe awakened; there have been times that I have been carried out of myself by something greater . . . and to that something I gave myself. Has this great something been God? Maybe after all I have been religious for a number of years, and am now only becoming aware of it.45

  A summer of preaching down at Ebenezer awaited, and in September a new chapter at Boston University would begin. Thanks to his development at Crozer, ML had started to realize his desire to give himself to a greater cause—a cause he hoped God would help him see.

  Epilogue

  Beyond Crozer

  “I am convinced that for men who love the risks of faith and the divine adventure, who can live hard and like it, the ministry presents the noblest and most rewarding of careers. The task is especially difficult in these days, and it is a good thing for the ministry and for the Christian church that the task is so challenging, and that it taxes every power of manhood. Nothing is to be gained by making the entrance into the ministry easy.”

  —Martin Luther King Jr.1

  Not much of ML’s Crozer is still around today. In 1970, the seminary merged with Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, New York, giving up the Chester campus. The silver maple trees that survived the storm of 1950 have long since been cleared out for a parking lot, and for a while Old Main was turned into an extension of the Crozer-Keystone Medical Center. But the hospital has moved out, and as of this writing the Old Main building is locked up and in a state of limbo.

  In January 2016, Dr. James Beshai—“Jimmy from Egypt”—allowed me to drive him from his home in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, to the former Crozer campus. Even though Jimmy was pushing ninety years old, his memory has remained incredibly sharp. We entered Old Main together, and soon enough Jimmy was pointing out the location of the chapel, the kitchen, his classrooms, and his dorm room. “Right here”—Jimmy indicated a doorway at the north end of the second floor. “This was where I lived.” Although it gave me chills to watch Jimmy recall so clearly his time living only a couple doors down from King, I was less impressed by the overall condition of the building. Truth be told, time has not treated the Crozer legacy well.

  The exterior of Old Main still has the power to connect visitors with its long and storied past. Its stone facade hasn’t changed, and surrounding it are a few more of the original buildings, such as Pearl Hall. There’s even a sign in front indicating that a man named Martin Luther King Jr. lived inside Old Main from 1948 to 1951. But once you push open the front doors, there is very little to be discovered. In the chapel, the original wooden ceiling design remains, along with a few stained-glass windows. Up in the cupola are the signatures of the wounded Civil War veterans—the ghosts of Old Main. But ML’s room 52 is nothing more than a six-by-eight-foot blue-carpeted office that’s now used as disorganized storage space. ML’s ticking heater is still there, but that’s all.

  Old Main and Pearl Hall from a distance, late August 2014. Photo by the author

  When I shared my disappointment with Jimmy on our ride back to his home, he agreed, believing Old Main should be transformed into a center for social justice. We brainstormed ideas about what such a center might include. Classes and lectures on social activism and the principles of nonviolence could be held on the first floor, wh
ere the chapel used to be. On the second floor, visitors could take a trip back in time to 1950, entering a restored version of ML’s dorm room, with a collection of books to peruse, and a radio room like the one Robert Keighton set up, with King’s sermons available for listening. Such a center would be a far greater tribute to King’s legacy than yet another highway bearing his name. The more we can learn about the institution where King began to develop his philosophy, the easier it is to understand that philosophy and put it into practice ourselves.

  But understanding the influence of Crozer depends on more than re-creating its physical details. More important are the people he connected with during his years in the seminary, many of whom continued to touch his life in the eventful years that followed.

  Horace Edward Whitaker remained King’s friend, mentor, and confidant, a living reminder of the value of integrity. After graduation, the two men kept in touch through letters, and a quick peek into the contents shows the depth of their friendship. In a letter Whit wrote to ML in October 1952, he even got in a few playful jests: “Your mother said you had taken all of her pots and pans and cut-outs for Boston. I can imagine that is some apartment you are keeping. You can’t wash dishes or can you?”2