The Seminarian
Page 30
“What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” (sermon), 112–114
What Manner of Man (Bennett), 207
Wheat Street Baptist Church (Atlanta, GA), 6
Whitaker, Horace Edward “Whit,” 21, 31, 40, 48, 127, 149n, 153, 166, 172, 189, 210, 213–215
on “bull sessions,” 168
on George Davis, 88
on J. Pius Barbour, 39
jobs held by, 193
on ML’s relationship with Betty Moitz, 120–121, 151–152, 154
at National Baptist Convention, 145
photographs of, 152, 209
White, D. W., 188
Whitefield, George, 160
“Will Capitalism Survive?” (class paper), 98
Williams, Bert, 195
Williams, Larry, 6, 10, 12, 131
Wilson, Doris, 133
Wood, Marcus Garvey, 22–24, 37, 50, 55, 64n, 128, 143, 193–194, 206, 218–220
on attending a “white seminary,” 20
on ML’s dream of immortality, 59
on ML’s relationship and Betty Moitz, 64, 120, 151, 153
photographs of, 23, 209, 220
World Pacifist Conference, 115–116
writing skills, 29–30, 54–55, 91, 158–159, 160–161, 180–181
Yale University, 165, 167, 173, 175
Zepp, Ira, 223
Notes
*1. King was also called “Martin,” of course, especially during the civil rights movement. As a boy he was known as “Little Mike,” and several Morehouse College classmates called him “Big Mike.” The “Mike” nicknames derived from a mistake made by Dr. Charles Johnson, who delivered King Jr. around noon on January 15, 1929, in the King family home on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. Dr. Johnson filled in “Michael” on his birth certificate after Martin Luther King Sr. requested his son be named after him. Dr. Johnson was a friend of the family, having also delivered King Jr.’s older sister, Christine, and had always called Daddy King “Mike.” Before traveling overseas in 1934, Daddy King saw the mistake while applying for a passport. He had his son’s birth certificate corrected, but along Auburn Avenue the nickname stuck.
Notes
*1. See appendix C, here, for more information on Old Main’s history and a photograph of its Civil War signatures.
*2. The seminary held no classes on Mondays. Chapter 3, here, explains why.
*3. True to this, he was also Crozer’s drama club teacher, instructing the students who acted in the annual vespers holiday concert.
*4. It should be noted, however, that King had already studied the fundamentals of preaching at Morehouse College, under George Kelsey.
Notes
*1. There were very few female seminarians at Crozer during ML’s three years. Several were listed as “unclassified,” which meant they either had not finished their four-year degrees or were not taking enough credits to be enrolled full time (they included Sarah Anne Corbett; Phyllis J. Snoad, wife of Richard Snoad; and Geneva A. Brooks). There were also several female Chinese students participating in Crozer’s “Oriental certificate” program (see here), such as Dorothy Lei Hsu. Only one female divinity student was enrolled full time at the seminary during ML’s time there. Her name was Irene Easter Lovett, and she would have been in her late thirties at the time. Lovett, who would have encountered King primarily in his first and second years, described him to a Chester Times reporter on April 5, 1968, as “a very quiet, meditative individual. As I recall, he didn’t stand out in the group, but was a very solid part of it.” Rev. Dr. Irene Lovett passed away in 2003 at the age of ninety-two.
*2. Enslin’s children also knew about the dumbwaiter used to move food from Old Main’s basement kitchen to the first-floor dining hall. They would sneak inside the dumbwaiter after it arrived in the cafeteria and ride it back down.
*3. Rev. Barbour met his wife, Olee, while attending Morehouse. Olee Littlejohn Barbour had her own stories to share with ML. Not only was she an excellent singer, but she also had been an art student at the Tuskegee Institute under George Washington Carver. Carver showed her how to paint using natural pigments from berries. After gaining experience, Olee Barbour helped sketch many of Carver’s new plant findings in the 1920s.
*4. Marcus Wood commuted to his church in Woodbury every weekend, and ML, Horace Whitaker, and Walter McCall would sometimes travel up there as well to surprise their friend. While at Wood’s church, the trio would head over to the parsonage and empty out the fridge filled with food that local farmers had brought as a donation to the church—yet another manifestation of ML’s ravenous appetite. (Wood, And Grace Will Lead Me Home, 50; Wood, notes from interview by Branch.)
Notes
*1. Though this is ML’s earliest documented appearance in front of an area congregation, the Chester Times noted that the previous week, February 23, he was scheduled to speak to local high school students in the “Frolic Club” of the West Branch YMCA. His talk, titled “It Pays to Be Decent,” was part of a seven-week course moderated by his friend Cyril Pyle. (“Frolic Club to Hear 2nd Talk Tonight,” Chester Times, February 9, 1949.) The West Branch Y was an important community resource for teenagers looking for guidance, and ML would continue to contribute his time there. On April 13, for Holy Week, he’d participate in a YMCA program on “The Personality of Jesus as Revealed in His Words from the Cross,” giving a speech on the meaning of the words “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (“Holy Week Rites Being Held at West Branch ‘Y,’” Chester Times, April 12, 1949.)
Notes
*1. The metaphor of a life’s blueprint may have occurred to ML during his first year at Crozer, when he worked out the beginning of a sermon based around the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. He would have seen this landmark a few times while visiting his sister, Christine, in New York, and he’d read about the life of its architect, John A. Roebling, who after creating the design and plan of construction, fell ill and could not oversee the work. But eventually, when the bridge was completed, Roebling, according to ML, “was taken out in a little boat, propped up with pillows, to a position in the East River beneath the great span. There he lay for a long time in silence with the plans of the bridge before him, looking now at the blueprints and now at the bridge, until it was all gone over. Then he sank back among the pillows with a satisfied smile: ‘It is like the plan.’” (The material is quoted in King, Papers, 6:85, under the title “The House We Are Building.”)
Notes
*1. Fifth Presbyterian Church was renamed Thomas M. Thomas Memorial Presbyterian Church after its founder, who welcomed any and all races and denominations.
*2. The building is still there today, now known as the George Wilson Community Center.
Notes
*1. Years later, ML said of Mac, “He possesses a most radiant personality and the gift of dealing with people of all levels of life. . . . I can say all of these things without reservation because . . . he has been one of my most intimate personal friends.” (From King, Papers, 3:399. ML wrote this in a letter of recommendation for Mac to preach at First African Baptist Church in Savannah, GA.)
Notes
*1. According to Horace Whitaker, Smith was particularly inspired by the sacrifice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who vocally opposed Adolf Hitler and helped his Jewish countrymen escape the Nazi regime, for which he was imprisoned and eventually, on April 9, 1945, executed. (Whitaker, notes from interview by Branch.)
*2. The distinctive tone of the comments is particularly noteworthy because it confirms that the class was taught by Charles Batten, and not by George W. Davis as indicated in King, Papers, 1:359. The comments demonstrate the positivity for which Batten was known, while Davis’s feedback tended to be more muted and to focus more on typos. This matches the information in Crozer’s Annual Catalogue for 1950 and 1951 (vol. 42, no. 1, and vol. 43, no. 1), in which Batten is listed as the professor for Religious Development of Personality.
*3. The fac
t that ML returned to UPenn for another philosophy course makes it clear that he appreciated the fresh academic perspective the school offered, but one shouldn’t assume that he preferred it to Crozer, which had its own allure. Many former seminarians recall fondly how close-knit the faculty, staff, and students were—“one big family.” Jimmy Beshai attended classes at the UPenn at the same time as ML, and he felt extremely fortunate not to have studied there exclusively. “Had I just gone to Penn and lived on campus I would have had a different impression of America, less amiable and less challenging.” (Beshai, correspondence with the author, May 16, 2015.)
*4. Rev. Joseph Kirkland pastored at the Church of the Redeemer in Philadelphia, and died in November 1982. According to his wife, Lydia Kirkland, he did not have particularly fond memories of Crozer, considering it “superficial,” and he wasn’t friendly with anyone on campus except perhaps Mac, whom he remembered for his work as a barber. She also shared one other telling anecdote about his relationship with ML: when King started his “movement” in Atlanta (she may have misspoken and meant Montgomery) her husband called him up and asked, “What’s wrong with you? I thought you believed all white people were basically good.” On April 6, 1968, two days after King was assassinated, Kirkland spoke at a memorial in his honor at Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, telling those gathered to “be calm and pledge ourselves to the cause for which he lived and died.” Kirkland said that whether studying at Crozer or laying down his life for racial equality, ML “was always the same person—humble, quiet and conservative.” (“Dr. King Called Mover of Mankind,” News Journal [Wilmington, DE], April 6, 1968.)
Notes
*1. In a 1956 editorial, Reinhold Niebuhr commented on the nonviolent movement going on in Montgomery: “The local leader is the Reverend Martin Luther King. He scrupulously avoids violence and calls his strategy the ‘way of love.’ It is the most effective way of justice.” Niebuhr, however, disagreed with using the word love as King had framed it. “Love is a motive and not a method. . . . It is justice, rather than love, which becomes relevant whenever one has to deal with conflicting wills and interests. In this case of a race suffering long from the pride and arrogance of another race, one can have little question about the justice of the boycott against the segregated buses, nor of the adequacy of the method by which justice is being achieved.” In typical Niebuhrian fashion, he supported the effort but advocated tempering the romanticism. (Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Way of Nonviolent Resistance,” Christianity and Society 21 [Spring 1956]: 3.)
*2. ML would have known prior to arriving at Boston University that Brightman’s health had taken a turn for the worse. In the April 1950 edition of the Crozer Quarterly, Brightman, a frequent contributor, explained why he’d been delayed in replying to an earlier critique: “Circumstances beyond my control, including the excessive heat of the summer followed by a heart attack that incapacitated me for some time, prevented me from availing myself.” Rest assured, wrote Brightman, he’d finally recovered and would resume his regular teaching duties at Boston U.
*3. See the class schedules in each chapter for term-by-term rundown of ML’s own GPA.
Notes
*1. Of course, not even a Supreme Court decision would settle the issue in the eyes of every American. As recently as 2000, when the citizens of Alabama voted on whether to officially remove the invalidated ban on interracial marriage from the state constitution, the initiative passed by a vote of 60 percent to 40 percent. This means that around 526,000 people—more than two and half times the population of Montgomery—voted to keep the already powerless law on the books. (Somini Sengupta, “November 5-11; Marry at Will,” New York Times, November 12, 2000.)