The Seminarian

by Patrick Parr

  He followed it up with a more meaningful jab—the kind only he could deliver: “By the way you told me two years ago you would be married by the next summer. Apparently you are still meeting these girls who are one-time wreckers.” The reference to “two years ago” is especially noteworthy: it corresponds exactly to the moment in the fall of 1950 when ML turned to Whit in distress over his relationship with Betty Moitz.

  The two men continued to correspond through ML’s years at Boston, and when the Montgomery bus boycott started and King became a national figure with the weight of an entire movement on his young shoulders, he visited Whit in person at his ever-growing church in Niagara Falls, New York. It was around the summer of 1956, and Dr. King had traveled alone to once again confide in Whit about his responsibilities and his doubts. He’d already received death threats by phone, and a bomb had blown up the front porch of his home. Now speaking family man to family man, ML told his friend he wasn’t even sure if the Lord wanted him to perpetuate the boycott. Whit understood his spiritual concerns—he’d always understood. Although his young friend had changed so much since their years at Crozer, Whit still had no trouble lending support and care.3

  The next day, ML preached at Whit’s church, the sermon title echoing the uncertainty of ML’s situation: “Going Forward by Going Backward.” He reminded Whit’s congregation of Luke 2:41–52, in which a twelve-year-old Jesus separated himself from his parents and remained behind at the Temple in Jerusalem for several days. According to Whit, ML’s message was for the parents in the congregation—that when it came to their children sometimes they needed to look behind them for the values they’d lost sight of in order to move forward again. Since it was Men’s Day at Whitaker’s church, ML would have mainly been targeting fathers. At the time, ML had just become a father himself—eight-month-old daughter Yolanda was at home with Coretta, his wife of three years—and he of course was still contending with his own father, who hoped ML would step away from all the danger surrounding him in Montgomery.4

  In 1962, it was Whitaker who wrote to ML for advice. Whit had been considering a move into academia, as a “college minister at one of the Southern State Colleges.” It would mean a complete shift in lifestyle—a shift he was unsure would be wise. “I am wondering,” he wrote to ML, “whether or not I have the personality and some of the skills that such a work would require. I think I would enjoy doing the work, but only if I could feel that I could measure up to reasonable expectations.”5

  Less than two weeks later, ML replied to Whit, extending the sort of support his friend had always given him. He wrote that Whit would be “exceptional” at a college. “Your background, training, and general commitment would serve to give you real qualifications for such a responsibility. . . . The present-day students are in need of guidance more than ever before.” Whit would ultimately decide not to make the change, after all, instead accepting the pastorship of Zion Baptist Church in Portsmouth, Virginia.

  Horace Edward Whitaker lived to be ninety-four years old, passing away in 2012.

  Betty Moitz and ML went their separate ways after May 1951. “He sent me pages to type of his [Boston University] dissertation,” Betty recalls, “and McCall checked in to make sure I was still up for it.” But that was the extent of their relationship. Betty married, and soon she was like the rest of America, watching ML grow into a global icon.6

  The last known message ML received from the Moitz family was actually from Miss Hannah, Betty’s mother and Crozer’s cook. In December 1960, Hannah and Betty attended a morning service at Philadelphia’s Unitarian Church of Germantown, where ML preached one of his time-tested, oft-repeated sermons, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” Before going into his sermon, ML told the congregation how fond he was of the Philadelphia area: “I never feel like a stranger when I return because I lived in this community some three years. . . . I met many, many people in this area, and I feel that I have some real genuine friends in Philadelphia. So it is always a rewarding experience to come back to this area.”7

  ML went on to preach to Miss Hannah, Betty, and the rest of the congregation about the length, breadth, and height of life—of our inward, outward, and upward reach toward ourselves, others, and God, respectively. Miss Hannah was so inspired by his words that she sent him a Christmas card:

  So sorry we had to miss talking with you. Since we were with our good neighbor, we had a problem getting home in the storm. You did give us a wonderful message. I must say I never heard a sermon that gave me so much to live by. Just wish I could hear more like them. I wish I could meet your lovely wife and family—God bless you all!

  Much love, Hannah R. M. & Betty!8

  By this point, of course, King had found Coretta Scott, and the two shared a far more powerful love that deserves its own book. As a married father in a public battle for racial equality, it makes sense that he would not want to dwell on a long-ago relationship with a young white woman. In fact, the closest he came to acknowledging it publicly was in a secondhand report attributed to a “close friend” in an article written by New York Post journalist Ted Poston, which was later quoted in Lerone Bennett’s 1964 King biography What Manner of Man. Even this account is muted. “She liked me and I found myself liking her,” ML supposedly told his friend. “But finally I had to tell her resolutely that my plans for the future did not include marriage to a white woman.”9

  Though he may have attempted to downplay the relationship’s significance, there are certainly signs of its influence in Dr. King’s later work. In April 1961, he had this to say to a group of graduating seminarians at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

  The church can make it clear that all of the talk about intermarriage and all of the fears that come into being on the subject are groundless fears. Properly speaking, individuals marry, not races. And people, in the final analysis, in a democracy must have the freedom to marry anybody they want to marry. And so no state should have laws prohibiting this.10

  This was still a highly controversial opinion in 1961, when seventeen states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books—including Kentucky, where King delivered the speech. It was not until the Supreme Court’s unanimous Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967 that all intermarriage laws were declared unconstitutional.*1 But for King, it had never been enough to simply tolerate another race—one needed to love unconditionally.

  That’s how Betty remembers ML, as a man who “was a hero not only to black people [but] to all people.”11 For a time, happily married with children of her own, Betty too seemed to play down the intensity of her relationship with King, claiming in a 1998 documentary that it was she who put an end to talk of getting married, and that ML was more angry than brokenhearted that society wouldn’t allow their relationship to go forward.12 But now, when Betty looks back on her time with ML, she can appreciate the genuine love and affection they shared. “Our romance was short and sweet,” she says.

  In 1958, King wrote a letter to Rev. J. Pius Barbour to tell him about his new book Stride Toward Freedom. He recommended that Barbour especially read the chapter titled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in which he outlines the development of his nonviolent philosophy. Though the chapter doesn’t discuss Rev. Barbour specifically, it does mention ML’s studies at Crozer, and focuses on the sorts of complex philosophical issues he and Barbour used to enjoy debating. That’s why ML added, “I wrote that chapter for you.”13

  Whenever you see an interview in which Martin Luther King Jr. ably defends his ideas in the face of vehement opposition, you can thank Rev. Barbour for teaching him to hold his own in a heated debate. Even after ML left Crozer, Rev. Barbour never hesitated to restart their war of words. In a December 1954 letter, very shortly after his young pupil decided to become pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Barbour told ML how he felt about the decision to go back south to preach: “You need not tell me about Dexter; I know Montgomery and its superficial intellectuality. A plant-hand in the North has
more WORLD WISDOM than a college Pres. in the SOUTH. . . . Something wrong with SOUTHERN INTELLECTUALITY. I know what it is: it does not have the atmosphere that breeds profundity . . . all abstraction.”14

  ML may have disagreed with Rev. Barbour’s unfiltered northern bias, but he always appreciated that his mentor was willing to speak openly and think deeply. In the same 1958 letter in which he told Barbour about his book, ML wrote that he missed the reverend’s provocative editorials in National Baptist Voice magazine. “The present Voice is so shallow that I unconsciously find myself throwing it in the waste basket when it arrives.”15

  Another of Barbour’s published provocations stands out as particularly relevant today. Ira De Augustine Reid’s survey The Negro Baptist Ministry—the same project for which ML did fieldwork during his time at Crozer—includes a passage from Rev. J. Pius Barbour titled “A Defense of the Negro Preacher” that still carries a defiant sting in the twenty-first century:

  The white liberals must stop sipping tea with well-to-do Negroes and drawing the conclusion that the Masses are doing all right. THE MASSES ARE NOT DOING ALL RIGHT. They are scuffling and scuffling like everything . . . cheated at the grocery store; laid off suddenly; harassed by prejudiced bosses; double-crossed by prejudiced labor leaders—the poor Negro worker has to fight tooth and toe nail to exist.”16

  A day after King was assassinated in 1968, Rev. Barbour was interviewed by the local Chester paper. Barbour, deeply affected, recalled ML as a young man in his parlor, debating the issues of life. He missed that man, full of energy and curiosity. At such a tragic moment, Barbour could have chosen to inflate King’s reputation as an icon even more. But he didn’t. Instead, he remembered ML as someone we all could relate to. “He was a great historian, and he had no delusions about greatness. He was just Martin Luther King, preacher.”17

  Rev. Barbour himself passed away in 1974.

  Perhaps we all need to thank Marcus Garvey Wood for entering room 52 in the fall of 1948 and quieting the rumbling anger of Lucius Z. Hall—his gun aimed directly at a frozen ML. Without Wood’s intervention, the civil rights movement might have turned out quite differently.

  Because he commuted to Woodbury, New Jersey, every weekend to preach, Wood was always somewhat disconnected from social life at Crozer. But he had friends like ML, Mac, and Whit, who visited him in Woodbury, and after graduation, he and King stayed in touch. Wood, too, became active in the civil rights movement as pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Baltimore, and his letters to ML offered full-throated support for King’s work—along with some weighty biblical imagery. Take, for instance, this letter Wood wrote in February 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott:

  It was one of the happiest moments of my life when I read a few weeks ago of the wonderful work you are doing for your people in the South. I wish I were there to help you. You are becoming as a prophet of this day and age and I hope you will see it through. Be like Isaiah of old [and] walk the streets barefooted until the waters of hate roll back to the ocean of eternity.18

  At Crozer, he had laughed as ML compared himself to fiery Old Testament prophets like Isaiah. Now Wood was the one making the comparisons:

  I know you are preaching like mad now. You have thrown Crozer aside and you have found the real God and you can tell the world now that he is a God who moves in a mysterious way. That he will be your battle ax in the time of war and preserve you from your enemy.19

  Wood bore witness as his young friend became an almost mythic figure, but no matter how much King’s legend grew, Wood would never forget that nineteen-year-old kid who had entered Crozer with big ambitions but no real idea how to accomplish them. “We never thought, except from what King kept telling us,” he said decades later, “that he was going to become immortal.”20

  In 2011, when the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was unveiled on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Wood was asked to comment on the dramatic pose chosen for King’s statue. Although Wood had compared ML to ancient prophets and listened to ML’s gargantuan hopes and dreams, he still felt torn that the statue failed to capture his friend as a normal human being. “I looked at the picture, and I’m trying to decide whether or not it was the best one they could have used to represent the King that I knew who started out just a young boy.”21

  Rev. Marcus Garvey Wood in 2017. Courtesy of Rev. Marcus G. Wood, Co-pastor, Providence Baptist Church, Baltimore, MD

  Wood also pondered what direction King’s activism might have taken had he not been murdered. He credited his friend with transforming American attitudes about race, and argued that twenty-first century Americans were facing a different form of discrimination. “We changed from segregation by color to segregation by economics,” said Wood. “And if King had lived, he would have had to tackle the economic side.”22

  For seven years of ML’s life, it was Walter Raleigh McCall who helped push him out of his comfort zone—yet history has been unkind to Mac, and his influence on ML has largely been forgotten. In almost all of the stories shared by former Crozer students and teachers, no other man—not even ML—was remembered as vividly as he was, but these same acquaintances almost unanimously derided his character. To those who didn’t know him well, he could come off as aggressive, unforgiving, and downright confrontational.

  But for those who pushed through his abrasive attitude, Mac became a friend for life. One man who came to know Mac very well was Snuffy Smith, who recalled with great clarity a moment in the early 1960s, after Smith placed McCall on the Crozer alumni board. When they saw each other again, Smith recalled Mac coming toward him with a cigar in his mouth and wide grin. “Doc! You old honkie! I’m gonna punch you in the eye!” Smith replied, “If you do, you nigger, I’m gonna kick you.”23 Mac then picked Smith up and gave him a kiss on both cheeks.

  After graduation, Mac’s and ML’s paths separated. According to McCall, “We remained friends throughout, but were not as close in terms of being able to share in each other’s experiences as much.” He remembered a moment he had with ML in March 1968, three weeks before King was shot on a second-floor motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. At the time, McCall was director of the School of Religion at Morehouse College, and he was walking down a street in Atlanta near where King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was based. From a distance, he saw ML approaching:

  He was walking down the street coming up to his office, and I noticed that he was coming alone. We greeted each other the way that we normally would. He said, “Mac, where are you going?” I said, “Don’t ask me where am I going but where am I coming from.” [Then] I said, “First of all, you’ve got no business being out here by yourself. Here you’re walking down the street with not a single person with you.” I said, “Fool, don’t you know that you could get your darn head blown off?” And he laughed and we laughed. He said, “Shucks, man, even if I’m with somebody I could get my head blown off.” He said, “Well, you don’t worry about that.” He passed it off lightly.24

  The two men, now full-grown adults, wondered at this chance meeting, memories of the past flooding back. “It was at that time,” McCall continued, “that he said, ‘Man, we’ve got to get together. We haven’t been together in a long time.’ I said, ‘OK, let’s get together. Let’s be in touch.’”

  The two best friends went in opposite directions down the sidewalk. “That was the last time I saw him.”

  There was one other promise that ML had extracted from Mac, and it involved pool. Both men remembered so many nights in the catacombs of Old Main, playing pool and smoking cigarettes until three in the morning. “As a matter of fact,” Mac said. “I was supposed to build him a pool table. . . . Of course, he died before I got a chance to build it for him.”25

  ML, now Dr. King, showing off the pool skills he developed in the catacombs of Crozer’s Old Main during an “anti-slum” campaign in Chicago in February 1966. © Bettmann / Getty Images

  McCall passed away ten years later, in 1978.

  After s
erving as ML’s romantic rival, adviser, and debate partner, Kenneth L. “Snuffy” Smith became a lifelong public advocate of King’s work. Snuffy remained at Crozer for the next four decades, even after the seminary relocated to Rochester, New York.

  When it came to Betty, there were no hard feelings between the two men. By the end of 1953, Snuffy too had married someone else. He and his wife, Esther, shared a commitment to the cause of social justice. “We were both invited to marches during the ’60s,” she recalls.26 In 1964, Snuffy decided to run for a seat in the Pennsylvania state legislature, competing as a Democrat against an opponent who had publicly rejected the idea of passing the Civil Rights Act. Snuffy was something of political unknown, so to bolster his chances, he contacted ML and asked if he could use a picture of him on one of his promotional flyers. ML agreed, and Smith passed them out around town. Unfortunately, he lost narrowly; according to Smith’s recollection, he earned 102,500 votes to his opponent’s 107,500, a margin of 49 percent to 51 percent.27

  After King was assassinated, Professor Smith devoted himself to writing a book about the aspect of ML’s life he knew best. Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., coauthored by Ira Zepp, was published in 1974. It still stands, decades later, as one of the deepest explorations of ML’s theological influences.

  But as committed as Smith was to documenting the philosophical underpinnings of King’s work, he shared J. Pius Barbour and Marcus Wood’s belief that history ought not lose sight of the man behind the message. While working on this book, I found myself returning to comments Smith made to that effect during a lecture in Rochester, New York, in the mid-1980s.