Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Niebuhr did not go quite that far, although he did later admit to an unfashionable respect for Augustine as a man who “saw very clearly that it was not the mind which governed the self, but the self which governed the mind.” What Niebuhr did was to invent his own distinction between the character of people acting in large social groups as opposed to their character as individual people. Human nature was such that individuals could respond to reason, to the call of justice, and even to the love perfection of the religious spirit, but nations, corporations, labor unions, and other large social groups would always be selfish. Society, Niebuhr argued, responded substantively only to power, which meant that all the forces of piety, education, charity, reform, and evangelism could never hope to eliminate injustice without dirtying themselves in power conflicts. He ridiculed, for example, the notion that moral suasion would ever bring fundamental economic and political rights to the American Negro in Detroit or anywhere else. “However large the number of individual white men who…will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so. Upon that point one may speak with a dogmatism which all history justifies.”

  Having committed heresy against the Social Gospel, and against the doctrine of progress itself, Niebuhr turned upon the Marxists, whose ideas had influenced him profoundly since his ministry in Detroit. Acknowledging that the Marxists understood the need for power to establish justice, he attacked them for pretending to have discovered a science of history even though Marx offered only an “apocalyptic vision” of triumph over selfishness and oppression, “in the style of great drama and classical religion.” Believing unreservedly in their false science, Niebuhr wrote, Marxists fell easily into blind tolerance of the injustice inherent in their creed, which, “charged with both egotism and vindictiveness,” proclaimed it the destiny of Marxists to speak for the poor and to exact vengeance upon the non-poor. According to Niebuhr, the inevitable result was a naïve credulity as well as “a policy of force and fear.”* He denounced Stalin’s “policy of ‘liquidating’ foes”—in a book published in 1932, years before most observers in the United States realized that such a policy really existed.

  Moral Man and Immoral Society created a sensation in intellectual circles, transforming Niebuhr into a stark iconoclast. Mainstream liberals, such as the editor of the Christian Century, were disturbed by the Marxist themes that remained in his work, while Marxists hated him for criticizing Stalin. One Communist reviewer, after denouncing Niebuhr for spreading “the sauce of Christianity” on his political analysis, decided that he was “worse than a thug.” Horrified Social Gospel reviewers implied that Niebuhr’s emphasis on sin made him a traitor to progress, or even a fundamentalist. That same emphasis might have endeared him to religious conservatives, but they could not bring themselves to compliment a man who routinely questioned the literal truth of the Bible and who criticized Franklin Roosevelt as too conservative.

  By the time King read Moral Man and Immoral Society in the fall of 1950, Niebuhr was transformed yet again and had risen in stature to become a weighty public figure. During the intervening eighteen years, Hitler had changed Niebuhr’s theory of immoral society and implacable evil from a theologian’s semantic invention to the most hotly debated topic on the globe. Niebuhr worked personally to help intellectuals escape from Germany, bringing Paul Tillich to teach with him at Union, and he founded Christianity and Crisis during World War II, primarily to counteract the influence of the American pacifists he once had led. After the war, he joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and other prominent liberal politicians in creating Americans for Democratic Action, whose purpose was to promote anti-communism among liberals—a theme that would help put John Kennedy in the White House. In the Cold War, as in the war against the Nazis, Niebuhr’s thought to some degree followed his fame.

  In the book, King came fresh upon the earlier Niebuhr—a great theologian with an inner drive very much like his own, who had shocked the religious world in 1932 and now King in 1950 by declaring that the evil in the world was bigger than either the Social Gospel or Marxism. Both creeds hoped to see the meek inherit the earth, said Niebuhr, but the spiritual forces were too shy or too pure to fight the harsh world of evil, and the materialistic forces were too mechanical or too conspiratorial to allow the humanity which justice needs to breathe. The Social Gospel avoided the grit of politics; Marxism abhorred the church and all forms of idealism. To Niebuhr, they represented together the overriding tragedy of the age—“modern man’s loss of confidence in moral forces.” By “moral,” he meant the mediating unscientific realm of justice, which combines love and politics, spiritualism and realism. Morality was a compromise of religion and politics, necessitated by the special character of the immoral society.

  This talk of morality pushed a number of buttons inside King. Morality was the preacher’s traditional fallback position. In moments of religious doubt, which King had experienced and always would, a preacher who could not talk about salvation could always talk about the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. If racial justice was not God’s cause, it was at least a moral one. It did not bother King a great deal to hear religious conservatives say that the Social Gospel was too secular to be religious, but it was quite another matter to hear Niebuhr say that the Social Gospel did not touch the evil in the world and was therefore not moral. Hitherto, King and his Negro friends at Crozer had been able to drift along toward their degrees, thinking that if they performed as well as whites in school, preached the Social Gospel, helped as many Negroes as possible to rise to full skills behind them, and all the while encouraged the racial enlightenment of progressive white people, then they could make a contribution toward social justice whether or not their religious qualms subsided. If Niebuhr was correct, however, any Social Gospel preacher was necessarily a charlatan, and the Negroes among them were spiritual profiteers, enjoying the immense rewards of the Negro pulpit while dispensing a false doctrine of hope. Such a prospect deeply disturbed King, who already felt guilty about his privileges compared with the other Negro students at Crozer. Daddy King’s unabashed pursuit of success embarrassed him, and he would always be extremely sensitive about money. The shocking implication of Niebuhr’s book was that Daddy King was correct in his emphasis on sin and honest in his belief that the minister should try as hard as anyone else to get ahead. By this light, the Social Gospel offered King little more than the chance to become a hypocrite.

  Niebuhr was turning against a strain of political and religious idealism that had been building since the epiphany of Count Leo Tolstoy, whose eyes had locked on three familiar words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Resist not evil.” “Why had I always sought for some ulterior motive?” asked Tolstoy. “‘Resist not evil’ means never resist, never oppose violence; or, in other words, never do anything contrary to the law of love.” In his old age, the great Russian novelist was transformed into the intellectual father of modern pacifism. His book The Kingdom of God Is Within You had a profound influence on young Mohandas Gandhi when he was a student in England. Toward the end of Tolstoy’s life, Gandhi corresponded with him and named his first commune, in South Africa, Tolstoy Farm.

  In his book, Niebuhr attacked pacifists and idealists for their assumption that Gandhi had invented an approach that allowed religious people to be politically effective while avoiding the corruptions of the world. For Niebuhr, Gandhi had abandoned Tolstoy the moment he began to resist the color laws in South Africa. Gandhi’s strikes, marches, boycotts, and demonstrations were all forms of coercion, which, though nonviolent, were contrary to the explicit meaning of “Resist not evil.” Niebuhr applauded what Gandhi was doing but not the sentimental interpretations that placed Gandhians above the ethical conflicts of ordinary mortals. For Niebuhr, such a belief was dangerously self-righteous as well as unfounded.

  While Gandhi’s methods were political and promised only a slight chance of improvement
in the world, Niebuhr said bluntly, they belonged to “a type of coercion which offers the largest opportunities for a harmonious relationship with the moral and rational factors in social life…. This means that non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors.” Niebuhr amplified this gleam of hope as it might apply to the cause of the American Negro. If Gandhi’s methods were somehow adapted to American conditions and then employed in a difficult, protracted campaign, they could make headway toward justice even against the selfish forces of the immoral society. After making several suggestions as to how a Negro nonviolent movement might proceed, Niebuhr concluded that “there is no problem of political life to which religious imagination can make a larger contribution.”

  Like Niebuhr, King allowed his religious and political thoughts to run along the same moral edge. Questions about the existence and nature of God seemed to merge with a simpler, more existential question: Is the universe friendly? Although Niebuhr distinguished sharply between the realms of love, perfection, and God on the one hand and justice, reality, and man on the other, he tried with his theory of moral man and immoral society to place them along a single continuum. As King would paraphrase him in a student paper, “Justice is never discontinuously related to love. Justice is a negative application of love…. Justice is a check (by force, if necessary) upon ambitions of individuals seeking to overcome their own insecurity at the expense of others. Justice is love’s message for the collective mind.”

  For King, another immediate attraction in Niebuhr’s book was its tension. Niebuhr combined an evangelical liberal’s passion for the Sermon on the Mount with a skeptic’s insistence on the cussedness of human nature. While giving free rein to his own internal battle on these issues, Niebuhr saw far more promise in Gandhi than most religious liberals, and he honed the Gandhian method to its most defensible combination of religion and politics. Both the linkage and the tension appealed to King, whose own small world had been a blend of opposites—serenity and ambition, knowledge and zeal, church and state, Negro and white. His most heartfelt speeches would always pit the sunny skies of justice against the midnight storms of oppression, in warring Augustinian phrases. Implicitly, a step toward or away from justice could affect his present judgment about whether the universe was friendly and therefore about the nature of God. Even as a student, King believed that religion was alive only at its edges, and that doubt was as important as belief. In a paper obviously influenced by Hegel and Niebuhr, King wrote that “if a position implies a negation, and a negation a position, then faith carries disbelief with it, theism, atheism, and if one member of the pair comes to be doubted the result may be disastrous to religion itself.”

  In later years, King never tried to stem the rivers of ink that described him as a Gandhian. Part of his acquiescence was a product of public relations, as he knew that within the American mass market there was a certain exotic comfort in the idea of a Gandhian Negro. King mentioned buying a half-dozen books about Gandhi in a single evening, but he never bothered to name or describe any of them. He almost never spoke of Gandhi personally, and his comments about Gandhism were never different than his thoughts about nonviolence in general. By contrast, he invoked Niebuhr in every one of his own major books, always with a sketch of Moral Man and Immoral Society. He confessed that he became “enamored” of Niebuhr, who “left me in a state of confusion.”

  “Niebuhr’s great contribution to contemporary theology,” King wrote, “is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians.” This meant a great deal to King, but doubtless very little to most of his readers. He said little more in public. In private, however, he came to describe Niebuhr as a prime influence upon his life, and Gandhian nonviolence as “merely a Niebuhrian stratagem of power.” King devoted much of his remaining graduate school career to the study of Niebuhr, who touched him on all his tender points, from pacifism and race to sin.

  On November 25, 1950, three days after King took his final exam in American Church History 153 (in which he was asked to discuss the evangelical campaigns between 1500 and 1760 to spread Christianity among American Indians), the Communist Chinese Army entered the Korean War in mass wave attacks. This intervention raised fears that the conflict would spread into a new world war, only six years after Hitler’s defeat, and in the United States the new Chinese enemy fueled a hatred of communism as a global, inhuman conspiracy. The Justice Department, apparently spurred by Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s outrage over a peace petition drawn up in Sweden, obtained a criminal indictment against W. E. B. Du Bois for circulating the petition in the United States without having registered as an agent of the Soviet Union. The New York Times vaguely identified Du Bois as “an author widely known in connection with Negro movements,” but the eighty-two-year-old founder of the NAACP and The Crisis was arraigned in handcuffs and faced trial more or less anonymously. Harry Belafonte—then an unknown New York actor of twenty-four, some two years older than King—was among those walking a scraggly picket line outside the courthouse. Belafonte had become enamored of Du Bois, and awakened to politics, by reading some of the Du Bois books that Negro sailors passed around during World War II. The Du Bois indictment pitched the NAACP into convulsions, even after a federal judge dismissed the case. Roy Wilkins straddled the issue by engineering one NAACP resolution condemning the indictment as an affront to Negroes, and others that warned Negroes of “so-called peace organizations” and empowered NAACP chapters to conduct internal purges against Communist infiltration.

  Wars, conspiracies, and witch-hunts little affected the pace of student life at Crozer. Scott Enslin’s teachings about the historical Jesus still shocked the incoming freshmen, who still pretended to be pool sharks as they brutalized the three tables under the chapel. One of the student leaders who helped them adjust to the Crozer atmosphere as it affected faith and recreation was M. L. King, who served that year as president of the student body. Mike and Mac still played pool until three o’clock on many mornings, often joined now by a new white friend named Snuffy. Professor Kenneth Lee “Snuffy” Smith, a Virginia Baptist, had just returned from graduate study at Duke to join the Crozer faculty. He was about McCall’s age, just five years older than King, and so short that even King at five feet seven inches towered over him by half a foot. It was Smith who taught Niebuhr in one of his courses, and noticed the impact upon King. King wanted to read more Niebuhr, but the pace of his studies left him little time.

  In the middle of the year, King grew fond of Professor Smith’s steady girlfriend, Betty, the daughter of a German immigrant woman who served as the cook for the Crozer cafeteria. At first, the incipient competition between the two male friends—student and teacher, Negro and white—was absorbed in banter and professions of goodwill. After all, Smith had just returned from Duke on fire with the spirit of the Social Gospel, and the living of that creed ruled out jealousy. Nevertheless, an ugly tension deadened the camaraderie around the pool table soon after King openly began pursuing Betty. When he won her over, tempers flared.

  King’s friends nervously enjoyed the story of the seminary love triangle until he ruined it for them by turning serious. He said he had fallen in love, and that Betty was in love with him. Friends tried to make jokes about whose theological and racial liberalism was being most sorely tested—his, Smith’s, or Betty’s—but nothing worked. King was not laughing, and in time no one else was either. Making no secret of his distress over what to do, King asked for advice. Kirkland said bluntly that he should know better than to consort with the daughter of a mere cook, Negro or white. Marcus Wood cautioned him more diplomatically about the difficulties of finding a church that wanted a racially mixed family in the parsonage. Whitaker, older and
perhaps wiser than the others, let King talk himself out. He listened as King resolved several times over the next few months to marry Betty, railing out in anger at the cruel and silly forces in life that were keeping two people from doing what they most wanted to do. Late one night, his clothes rumpled from an evening of romance on the campus grounds, King knocked on Whitaker’s window, wanting to talk again. Whitaker led him through questions that were familiar by now, and King finally broke down. He could take whatever Daddy King might say, he told Whitaker, but he could not face the pain it would cause his mother.

  King forced himself to retreat, and struggled against bitterness. Even as he did, a crude, literal trial of flesh and spirit threatened his best friend, Walter McCall, whose girlfriend charged him with bastardy. When all attempts to mollify her failed and it appeared that court could not be averted, a mortified McCall had to make a pained, confidential approach to a Crozer professor, asking him to testify that he was a seminary student in good standing, of such character and promise to the clergy as to make it extremely unlikely that he was the father of the child, or that he would abandon the child if he was. The professor so testified, and the court ruled in favor of McCall. The ethical ramifications of the case for McCall and for Crozer dictated that everything be handled as quietly and as delicately as possible. Snuffy Smith, among the few liberal professors who knew of it, seized on the not-guilty verdict, believing that it cleared everyone. Inasmuch as McCall all but acknowledged paternity in a later letter to King, however, the verdict may have meant, on the contrary, that Crozer’s reputation for religious authority helped convince the court of a lie, thereby allowing McCall to escape his responsibilities to the woman and to his child.