Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  King’s oratory was among his chief distinctions at Crozer. His peers so admired his preaching technique that they packed the chapel whenever he delivered the regular Thursday student sermon, and kibitzers drifted into practice preaching classes when King was at the podium. A generation later, some of the white students who remembered very little else about King would remember the text, theme, and impact of specific King practice sermons. There was a chapel sermon on the text “They have a zeal, but not according to knowledge,” for example, and a talk to the women’s group of a white Baptist church on the theme of Christianity and communism. King perfected minute details of showmanship, such as tucking away his notes at the podium in a manner just unsubtle enough to be noticed, and his general style was extremely formal. He called his orations “religious lectures” instead of sermons, in fact, but the conflict inside him over such issues as knowledge versus zeal—with all their underpinnings of race, class, and theology—generated enough heat to make his sermons interesting. At Crozer, practice preaching courses brought King some of his best grades and highest approval. During the three seminary years, he took no fewer than nine courses related to the art of pulpit oratory.

  His homiletics professor, Robert Keighton, brought to the classroom a preoccupation with style and the classical form of argument, which suited King perfectly. A “high” Baptist—accused by some of the “low” or “snake stomping” Baptists on campus of being an Episcopalian at heart—Keighton favored understatement, dry humor, tightly structured presentations, and a liberal sprinkling of illustrative quotations from poets and playwrights. He had organized, and still coached, the Crozer drama club. In class, Keighton remarked that he wished he knew his Bible as well as he knew Shakespeare, and it was rumored among the students that he had been offered a curatorship at the Shakespeare Museum in England. Keighton’s taste in more modern poets ran to W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, but as a concession to the romantic yearnings of preachers, he introduced King to some of the English-language poets he would quote throughout his public career, among them James Russell Lowell and William Cullen Bryant. Perhaps less fortunately, he also introduced the rhetoric of Saint Augustine, who was given to dramatic pairings of night-and-day clichés (“muddied the clear spring of friendship with the dirt of physical desire and clouded over its brightness with the dark hell of lust”), especially when speaking of sin or evil. Keighton, like Augustine, emphasized that a large part of religion was public persuasion, as can occur when speakers of the highest gifts address the most difficult questions. King came to accept the shorthand description of oratory as “the three P’s”: proving, painting, and persuasion, aimed to win over successively the mind, imagination, and heart.

  In lectures dealing with the preacher’s tradecraft, Keighton taught that a preacher should first prepare an outline based on one of the proven sermon structures. There was the Ladder Sermon, the Jewel Sermon, the Skyrocket Sermon, the Twin Sermon, the Surprise Package Sermon, and many others. The Ladder Sermon climbed through arguments of increasing power toward the conclusion the preacher hoped to make convincing. The Jewel Sermon held up a single idea from many different angles, as a jeweler might examine a precious stone. The Skyrocket Sermon usually began with a gripping human interest story leading to a cosmic spiritual lesson, followed by a shower of derivative lessons falling back to earth among the congregation. Keighton’s method was to lecture on such methods and then direct his students to try them. More than a few students left Crozer because of stage fright in Keighton’s homiletics. King thrived on both the setting and the pressure. Keighton’s homiletics imposed order and style on his childhood desire to use big words, in an art form he had studied all his life.

  Preaching class was the laboratory of the seminary. It was also a vital part of campus social life, because public speaking exposed each student’s personality and facilitated friendships to a degree far beyond the likely results of coffee hours or other social conventions. The Negro students shared much merriment in contrasting Keighton’s archly formal structures with their own homemade preaching formulas. Keighton might have his Ladder Sermon, they joked, but they had Rabbit in the Bushes, by which they meant that if they felt the crowd stir, they should repeat the theme, just as a hunter shoots into the shaking bush on the assumption that a rabbit might be there. Keighton might have his Classification Sermon, but they had Three Points in the Palm of a Hand. King and Walter McCall liked nothing better than sneaking in to hear their Negro classmates preach in real churches off campus. Both of them were accomplished mimics. To the mortification of the classmate, McCall would shout out a countrified parody of what they had heard, full of emotional fireworks about Jesus as the Holy Spirit incarnate, and then King would deliver the “correct” versions in equally exaggerated spiels of Enslin’s rational historicism, speaking of Jesus as a gifted Jewish prophet with a lot of personal problems.

  With Horace “Whit” Whitaker, a Southern Negro who was generally considered the second-best preacher in the class, King and McCall spent many evenings at the home of Rev. J. Pious Barbour, a local pastor who had been the first Morehouse graduate to attend Crozer. Barbour was a raconteur and amateur philosopher of some renown, and the influx of Negro students at Crozer in 1948 gave him a steady audience for his favorite pastime, Socratic dialogues, which he hosted after sumptuous home-cooked meals prepared by Mrs. Barbour. Boasting of himself as “the deepest theologian in the Baptist Church,” Barbour sometimes slipped into outright nonsense, as in his quotation-laden warnings against letting a Catholic priest into one’s house, but he was never dull. He enjoyed making the students uncomfortable with the latest ideas about almost anything. “Tillich is all wet,” he later wrote King. “There is no ‘being itself’…Kant proved that.” Barbour welcomed the mental jousting as a relief from his less stimulating duties in the church. The students turned his ample hospitality into a social mainstay, taking dates there for extended evenings that allowed them to enjoy the good food and show off their learning before young ladies who were impressed enough or patient enough to listen.

  One of King’s dates that first year was Juanita Sellers, an Atlantan whom he had known since high school. Attractive, poised, and intelligent, she was doing graduate work at Columbia University along with Christine King and a few other friends from Spelman. Sellers had grown up in the new elite West Side of Negro Atlanta, daughter of the city’s most prominent Negro mortician. Her social standing was such that when people carped about “social climbing” when she and her group of friends all pledged the Delta sorority at Columbia, they replied airily that such a motive was impossible for them because they had nowhere to climb. This attitude, in addition to her other qualities, made her precisely the sort of woman Daddy King was anxious for his son to marry. There was some rejoicing in Atlanta, therefore, when King visited Sellers in New York several times that year and invited her to spend weekends at Crozer. Sellers and Christine King traveled down to the seminary together, spending more than one evening with King and his friends at the feet of Pious Barbour.

  During his first summer vacation from Crozer, while serving again as more or less the full-time pastor at Ebenezer, King saw Sellers enough to spark a rumor that their longstanding friendship was turning into a romance. While entertaining her one afternoon in the King home on Boulevard, he announced suddenly that there was someone he wanted her to meet. He urged her to brush her hair and freshen her makeup that very moment, to look her best. Without further explanation he escorted her to the Liberty Baptist Church, not far from Ebenezer. There King rang the doorbell at the church office and was invited in for tea with the pastor. It was all very pleasant, though churchy and formal. Afterward, King thanked Sellers for obliging him and said no more about the visit. It took a somewhat perplexed Sellers several days to find out from Christine King that the visit had been an exercise in ministerial diplomacy. King’s previous steady girlfriend had been an “East Sider” and a member of the Liberty church. By calling on her pastor in the compa
ny of Sellers, King was announcing his change of heart and implicitly offering him an opportunity to object. Moreover, the visit was a courtesy to the Liberty pastor, so that he would be well informed if the previous girlfriend asked him as her pastoral counsellor what had become of King, as was entirely possible. These and a thousand other calculations made up the preacher’s code, in which King was an advanced student.

  Daddy King looked proudly on his son’s mastery of the political and social graces, but the moral standards he absorbed at Crozer were another matter entirely. By the second year, King was so imbued with the Social Gospel that he dared to drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and play pool openly in the presence of his father, whenever Reverend King visited Crozer. He went so far as to usher his father into the poolroom beneath the chapel, inviting him to play, trying to act as though it were perfectly normal, taking pride in his hard-earned skill as a player. He knew Reverend King would object violently, which he did, but he trusted excessively in the persuasive powers of the liberal Christian teachings that defilement comes only from within (as in Matthew 15:11). When he pointed out to his father that it was not the smoke-filled poolroom itself that was sinful but rather the plan sometimes hatched there to rob the liquor store, Reverend King brushed it aside as a book-learning excuse for sin. In what was to become a permanent pattern of conversation between them, King gently teased his father about being old-fashioned, and Reverend King defended his methods by pointing to his own time-tested success in the world.

  The underlying battle of wills was a stalemate, the insurrectionary potential of which was not lost on relatives such as Rev. Joel King. With the senior King, he visited his nephew at Crozer several times, never failing to ask why King permitted M.L. to smoke and play pool while forbidding such vices to everyone else, including Joel, who was a grown man almost old enough to be M.L.’s father. Reverend King seethed under this line of questioning. Joel, for his part, decided he was not getting a satisfactory answer. Finally, after one long drive back to Atlanta from Crozer, he decided to try some of his nephew’s boldness himself. As he and Reverend King walked toward the house on Boulevard, Joel lit a cigar. King walked wordlessly ahead of him up the steps to the front door. Then, just as Joel was beginning to think that the crisis had passed, King whirled and crushed the lighted cigar with the back of his hand, sending sparks into his brother’s hair and down his suit. Joel King never figured out how M.L. managed to defy Reverend King with impunity.

  Between father and son, ideological differences erupted again during the Christmas holidays of 1949, when young King decided to divide his time between preaching at Ebenezer and studying the works of Karl Marx at home. Communism was a subject of feverish public interest at the time, with the second Alger Hiss trial under way in New York and a Communist government celebrating its recent victory in China. Harry Emerson Fosdick had preached a widely publicized sermon at New York’s Riverside Church earlier that year in which he argued that the Communist movement had stolen two dormant aspects of traditional Christian appeal: the psychology of conversion, and the Social Gospel’s commitment to the oppressed. King read The Communist Manifesto and some interpretations of Marx and Lenin before framing an objection to communism that would serve him the rest of his life. In a suitably erudite but pat phrase, he came to reject communism because of its “historical materialism and ethical relativism,” meaning Marx’s doctrine that economic forces alone determine the path of history and Lenin’s teaching that what was good in politics was to be defined continuously by the vanguard party according to the needs of the revolution. King objected that these cold, scientific doctrines left no room for moral forces to act in history, or for moral standards to rise above the Machiavellian, tyrannical tendencies of politics.

  To Reverend King, M.L.’s fancy phrases were no better than quibblings over alien notions. No good preacher needed to read a lot of books to decide that communism was un-Christian, he declared, fulminating against having all that Communist propaganda in his house. This would remain a sore point. For the younger King, it was all the more difficult because some of his most faithful intellectual mentors constantly urged him in the opposite direction. Melvin Watson, chairman of the More-house School of Religion, was one of a generation of Negro intellectuals—many of them stalwart Baptist preachers—who quietly amassed expertise on Communist doctrine because of explicit Soviet promises on race and the downtrodden. “The Communist theorists were definitely not materialistic after the fashion of the Greek atomists,” wrote Watson, after listening to King preach against communism at Ebenezer. “Marx’s…variety of materialism is very difficult to refute and is a very disturbing phenomenon.” Watson sent King a number of sophisticated but avuncular critiques, always with the cheery salutation “Dear Little In-Coming Doctor!” He urged King not to be discouraged by the Ebenezer congregation’s response to his lecture on dialectics. “Some people did sleep,” Watson noted, “but some would have slept regardless of the theme.”

  The elder King took a new approach when he delivered his son for his final year at Crozer. No longer the stern figure who recoiled from the pool tables and departed as quickly as possible, Daddy King arrived in his finest three-piece suit, a gold watch chain dangling from his vest pocket, and made his presence known—shaking hands gregariously, complimenting the professors on their learning and the students on their prospects, telling everyone how proud he was that M.L. was finishing up his Bachelor of Divinity degree and would be joining him permanently at Ebenezer the next year. The seminarian himself stoically endured this performance, later telling his friends that his father was prone to exaggeration. He did not intend to join Ebenezer at the end of the year, nor any other church. Early that fall he wrote an open letter to the Ebenezer congregation, thanking the members for their support the previous summer “in the absence of our pastor,” stressing the fact that his father was still master of the church. He also sat down with his adviser and favorite Social Gospel professor, George Davis, to discuss the first-rank graduate schools at which he might obtain a doctorate in the philosophy of religion. His first choice was Yale, Davis’ own school. By November, he had applied to Yale, to Boston University, and to the Divinity School at Edinburgh University in Scotland. Yale turned him down in spite of his exemplary record at Crozer, but the other two schools accepted him before the Christmas holidays. This left King with a decision to make, and also with the familiar task of discussing with his mother how best to tell his father.

  King already was aiming for further graduate study when he first read Reinhold Niebuhr during his last year at Crozer. The experience did not change his plans, but it appears to have changed nearly everything else, including his fundamental outlook on religion. Before Niebuhr, King wanted to pursue his doctorate for reasons of pleasure, inertia, and prestige. He had enjoyed Crozer beyond all expectation. He wanted to keep studying, especially since his future and its inevitable clash with Reverend King’s agenda was not yet resolved in his mind. He wanted a doctorate because it would place him in rarefied company. (Drawn to distinguished titles, he and his friends wrote letters to each other playfully appending long strings of advanced degrees to each other’s names, in the manner of British scholastics.) After Niebuhr, King experienced for the first time a loss of confidence in his own chosen ideas rather than inherited ones. The Social Gospel lost a good deal of its glow for him almost overnight, and he never again fell so completely under the spell of any school of thought, including Niebuhr’s. Although the Niebuhr influence went to the heart of the public and private King and affected him more deeply than did any modern figure, including Gandhi, the connection between King and Niebuhr would be obscured by complicated twists of time, race, and popular imagery.

  The publication of Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society in 1932, when King was three, marked the beginning of the end of classical liberalism in American theology. Niebuhr had come to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1928, by way of Yale Divinity School and a thirteen-year min
istry in Detroit, having achieved considerable fame as a champion of the auto workers and Negro migrants struggling to survive in Henry Ford’s town after World War I. He was also an internationally prominent pacifist who had served several terms as president of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.* For that reason, Moral Man and Immoral Society caused a howl of betrayal among practically all nonfundamentalists interested in religion, because Niebuhr attacked the Social Gospel’s premise that the steady advance of reason and goodwill in the modern age was capable of eradicating social evils. His chief target was the eminent John Dewey, the last American philosopher to have a large popular following. Niebuhr ridiculed Dewey’s notion that ignorance was the principal cause of injustice, stating instead that it was “our predatory self-interest.” There was no evidence, said Niebuhr, that human beings became less selfish or less predatory as they became better educated. War, cruelty, and injustice survived because people were by nature sinful.

  Niebuhr accused the liberal world of being “in perfect flight from the Christian doctrine of sin.” Intellectuals winced at the sound of the word itself, and modern theologians expressed shock that one of their idols was debunking the central idea of progressive history. To admit evil as a permanent aspect of the human character, as Niebuhr did, was to confound the theologian again with the question of what kind of God would permit such suffering, and why, and to cast doubt on the prevailing intellectual notions about the meaning of history. Such an idea threw Christians back to hard realists like St. Augustine, who believed that each person had to choose “love of God in contempt of one’s self,” or to Martin Luther, who held that man was a craven sinner in desperate need of divine grace.