Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  This sort of morally radioactive situation has always given religious institutions a powerful incentive to seek quiet, private solutions in matters of sex and the clergy. When race is added as a third factor—as it was in this case by the fear that a McCall scandal would give ammunition to those who opposed Crozer’s recruitment of Negro students—the combination becomes so unbearably sensitive that discretion and hypocrisy govern almost instinctively. Historically, such avoidance would help explain how some four million mulattoes came into being in the United States with practically no recorded cases of legal or ecclesiastical disgrace ever attached to members of the dominant white culture.

  At Crozer, King came hard to the judgment that the price of a mixed marriage was higher than he was willing to pay for the love of one woman or the dream of the beloved community. He knew that the responsible course was to follow the unwritten family guidelines of the profession: that a minister must marry, that he must marry sooner rather than later, that his choice of a wife was important not only personally but also as it would affect his career, and that he must look for certain objective qualities in prospective mates. Among Negro ministers—who enjoyed enormous advantages over their white counterparts because of the preacher’s greater prestige within the culture, and also because of a relative plenitude of female peers—the selection process seemed elevated at times to a minor affair of state. An underlying sense of urgency strained against a host of practical calculations that were almost political in nature. King told Whitaker he would be married by the end of his first year out of Crozer, even though at the time he had not settled on the bride.

  In the summer of 1951, Reverend King was less happy with his son’s decision to seek a doctorate than he had been three years earlier with his desire to go to Crozer. Seminarians might be overeducated to Daddy King’s way of thinking, but at least they tended to preach in a church, whereas Ph.D.’s tended to teach in a university. This indeed was young King’s plan. “For a number of years I have been desirous of teaching in a college or a school of religion,” he wrote in his application to Boston University. “The teaching of theology should be as scientific, as thorough, and as realistic as any other discipline. In a word, scholarship is my goal.” Reverend King pressed all his objections to the fullest but, as always, relented when young King insisted that he needed further learning. Then the father circled from surrender to generosity, agreeing to pay all his son’s expenses in graduate school. He also gave him a new green Chevrolet for finishing at the top of his Crozer class. The Chevy had “Power Glide,” just like Horace Whitaker’s car that King admired so much.

  It helped somewhat that King decided to pursue his doctorate at Boston University instead of Edinburgh. The decisive factor was the presence at Boston of Edgar S. Brightman, who for years had been the leading exponent of a school of theology known as Personalism. King’s adviser at Crozer, George W. Davis, was a follower of Brightman, as were many other Crozer professors. Even Enslin respected him highly as a religious philosopher. Brightman’s school harked back to the intensely personal God of the Jewish scriptures and to early Christian theologians such as Augustine, who sometimes described God using only a long list of human emotions, modified to remove any objectionable qualities and raised to infinite strength. Led by Brightman, the Personalists had been defending themselves against the drift of theology. Religion, like everything else in the modern age, was succumbing to its envy of science. Most of the advanced schools of theology, feeling less adequate in a time of science’s empirical miracles and permanent, mathematical truths, protected themselves with scaled-down promises and vague imitations of the scientific method. Karl Barth called God the “wholly Other.” Tillich was defining God with his own intricately technical language of symbolism. Henry Nelson Wieman, whom King would compare with Tillich in his Ph.D. dissertation, called God “that something upon which human life is most dependent…that something of supreme value which constitutes the most important condition.” Even Niebuhr told an audience at Yale that Jesus was “a revelation of the mystery of self and of the ultimate mystery of existence.” Theology, which had once ruled all science as well as all being, was resorting to more and more elaborate shrugs. King himself shared this propensity to vagueness on the crucial questions, but, in much the same way that a doubting preacher fell back from the afterlife to morality, he embraced Personalism’s teaching that there was rich, empirical meaning in religious experience.

  In September 1951, King packed the green Chevrolet for the long drive from Atlanta to Boston. The Korean War was in prolonged, bloody stalemate. President Truman had just appeared in the first coast-to-coast television broadcast, addressing the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco. Willie Mays was finishing his first season with the New York Giants, and the telephone company was preparing to introduce direct long-distance dialing in New Jersey. On his way north, King stopped in Brooklyn to preach a guest sermon at Gardner Taylor’s Concord Baptist Church, which was competing with Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist of Harlem for the distinction of being the largest Protestant congregation in the United States. Guest appearances in Taylor’s pulpit were hotly coveted by Negro preachers of any denomination. The honor came to King when he was only twenty-two, on the strength of his preaching reputation and his father’s connections to Taylor as a fellow power in the National Baptist Convention.

  Two days after his Brooklyn sermon, listening to his first Boston University lecture by the master, Edgar S. Brightman, King scribbled across the top page of his notebook: “Hartfort Luccock says that the only proof of immortality is ‘a life worth preserving.’” To the formal Brightman, this amounted to nothing more than a crackerbarrel quip, but King liked it. He also liked Brightman, and would take ten of his fifteen Ph.D. courses from him or his main Personalist protégé on the faculty, L. Harold DeWolf. King almost immediately established a personal bond with Professor DeWolf, a kindly Nebraskan who remained active in the Methodist Church. Before Christmas, DeWolf returned the first of many papers King would write for him, this one entitled “The Personalism of J. M. E. McTaggart Under Criticism.” It earned an A and the comment “excellent, incisive criticism, a superior paper.” King quickly became one of his favorite students.

  At Boston, the collegial atmosphere of a small seminary like Crozer was gone, replaced by the mass bustle of a large urban university. Graduate students often moved in a tireless circuit between class, library, apartment, and off-campus job. Weyman McLaughlin, the Negro student of systematic theology considered closest to King in scholarship ability, worked evenings as a skycap at Logan Airport. He studied late at night by the light inside his closet, so as not to wake his apartment mates.

  King continued to wear tailored suits whenever he stepped out of his apartment, and he worked consciously to develop habits befitting an intellectual. Doodling on the back of a notebook, he practiced increasingly ornate signatures, until the “g” in King looped all the way back to the “M” in Martin. Like many of the other students, he tamped, smoked, and fiddled with a pipe almost constantly, spoke with an air of detached reserve, and developed the far-off look of a philosopher. Technically, King was a philosopher, as he was registered in the philosophy department and planned to seek his degree in the philosophy of religion.

  He took no preaching courses at all, as Crozer had taken him beyond the classroom, but he kept up a lively correspondence on advanced pulpit tradecraft, sometimes complete with stage directions. “In the sermon I used the silent conclusion,” a friend wrote King in 1952, “and it seemed to be quite effective. I used an illustration and when I concluded appeared as if I was to continue[,] then abruptly, ‘Let us pray.’” On his own, King began to create a repertoire of written sermons. Several of his earliest models were inspired by classroom ideas, which he expanded by adding his own illustrations and spiritual twists within one of the classical sermon structures taught by Keighton. From Spinoza’s epistemological theory that there are three levels to knowledge, whic
h can be related to three levels of moral life, King wrote a sermon entitled “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” which he would use throughout his career. Another of his standard sermons, “What Is Man?”, was inspired by his study of the complete works of Niebuhr during his first year at Boston. Niebuhr also inspired “The Answer to a Perplexing Question,” a sermon on the persistence of evil.

  King himself fostered much of what passed for social life among roughly a score of Negro graduate students at Boston University, by organizing what was called the Dialectical Society or Philosophical Club. Graduate students interested in philosophy or religion gathered one evening a week to share a potluck supper and a rarefied discussion about God or knowledge. One student read a formal paper, and the others then jumped in to criticize or support it. The club lasted throughout King’s student life in Boston, becoming so popular that white students dropped in occasionally and Professor DeWolf once delivered the paper for discussion. A rather stiff decorum prevailed early in the evening, as pipe smoke and abstract jargon mingled in the air, but the hard core of participants usually settled into a bull session late at night.

  “Well, I had a big funeral last weekend,” King announced during one of the meetings. “We buried Jim.”

  “Jim who?” someone asked.

  “Jim Crow,” King replied.

  Laughter broke out as the others realized King was joking about the slang name for segregation. “Yeah, we did Jim up real good,” King drawled. “We put him to rest.”

  George Thomas was one of a tiny minority of Negro students who lost interest in the Dialectical Society precisely because Jim Crow and other political matters were relegated to the joke period. With Douglas Moore, his only steadfast ally among the Negro graduate students, Thomas organized what they called “spiritual cell movements” to further the cause of world peace. They fasted together against the Korean War, denounced the atomic bomb at campus rallies, and drove to New York to march against Franco’s Spain. In later years, Moore became a mentor of the Southern student sit-in movement. At Boston, he and Thomas occasionally landed a fellow divinity student for an attempt to integrate a clerks’ union at Sears or for a protest against McCarthyism, but they never landed King himself. He remained aloof, absorbed in course work. At the Dialectical Society, discussions of politics were largely confined to the issue of whether it was wise for them to choose “race-related” topics for papers, theses, and doctoral dissertations. King concurred with the general consensus that to do so might cheapen their work in the eyes of influential Negroes as well as whites. That was realism. The mainstream Negro students considered activists like Thomas and Moore somewhat “up in the clouds,” as one of them wrote King, adding that “the world is not going to be converted overnight.” King left virtually no references to race or politics among his student papers at Boston University. He took some courses from professors who were known as crusaders for racial justice, such as Alan Knight Chalmers and Walter Muelder, but he did most of his work with sympathetic non-activists like DeWolf.

  Students who visited King at his apartment on Massachusetts Avenue, across from the Savoy Ballroom, usually found him surrounded by a stack of books four feet high. Roommate Philip Lenud, a friend from More-house, did the cooking; King washed the dishes. Visitors came to learn that King thought nothing of phoning home and talking for two or three hours at a time—always with the long-distance charges reversed, always with his mother. King told her about everything—his friends and professors, bank overdrafts, lost silverware, preaching assignments, clothes, Dialectical Society meetings, food problems, and girlfriends. Almost always, the conversation worked its way to the subject of courtship, as this was a prime concern not only of mother and son but also of Reverend King, who made no secret of his desire to see his son married soon. He had been uneasy since the previous summer of 1951, when the romance with Juanita Sellers inexplicably had failed to mature.

  King was doing his best to marry. He and Philip Lenud double-dated frequently, and King met other possibilities in the churches where he preached. He had long since invented a coded rating system for eligible women, calling an attractive woman a “doctor” and a stunning one a “constitution,” saying that she was “well-established and amply endowed.” Along with the other Negro students, he was keenly interested in the drama of one student who was “passing” for white at BU. They admired, castigated, and laughed at her endlessly—but always keeping a safe distance, as no one really wanted responsibility for exposing her gambit. Otherwise, King’s bachelor style fit the postwar fashion. He elbowed his male friends in the ribs if a “constitution” went by, collected phone numbers, and began each contact with a promising new lady by trying out his lines. Early in 1952, he called a woman blindly on the recommendation of a friend. After passing along a few of the friend’s compliments as reasons why he had obtained the phone number, King threw out his opening line. “You know every Napoleon has his Waterloo,” he said. “I’m like Napoleon. I’m at my Waterloo, and I’m on my knees.”

  “That’s absurd,” Coretta Scott replied. “You don’t even know me.”

  Unabashed, King continued with the melodrama and poetry, throwing in some comments about his course work that identified him quickly as a man of substance. His come-on crisscrossed between directness and caricature, authority and humor. When Scott did not hang up on him after his opening flourishes, it was only a matter of minutes until he persuaded her to have lunch with him the next day. He picked her up in his Chevrolet and took her to a cafeteria. There he learned that she had grown up on a farm in rural Alabama, daughter of a man who feared whites but who did not shrink from building a fine house with his own hands. By strength and perseverance, Obadiah Scott had accumulated several hundred acres, placing him among the elite yeomen of the poor Negro farmers. His daughters had picked cotton in the fields and scrubbed clothes in a washtub, but they had acquired enough of the family grit to seek their education at a private school in a nearby town, which had been established by Congregationalist missionaries after the Civil War and run ever since as a church school. From there, Coretta Scott had followed her older sister north to Antioch College, and after graduation she had come to Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music on a small scholarship.

  She aspired to become a classical singer, but her prospects were uncertain at best. Even if she possessed the rare talent to make the great leap between the level of a good church soloist and that of a full-time professional, she lacked the financial backing to give her career much of a start. She survived by working alongside the Irish maids at a fashionable Beacon Hill boardinghouse in exchange for room and board. Thus far, her college degree, her social connections among cultured Negroes, and her ladylike comportment—which she could stretch at will into the regal posture of a diva—had brought her little more than the chance to starve at one of the most fashionable addresses in Boston. Suffering from the compounded insecurities of race, poverty, and the competitive world of music, Scott struggled to keep her dignity and her optimism above her acute sense of realism. “The next man I give my photograph to is going to be my husband,” she told herself. Nearly two years older than King, she would turn twenty-five that spring and was already past the prime marrying age of that era. In the absence of a career break or a prosperous suitor, she would soon be obliged to scale back her ambitions.

  King knew all this. It would become one of his stinging jokes to tease her with the remark that she would have wound up picking cotton back in Alabama had he not come along. At their first lunch, however, he praised her looks, especially her long bangs, and launched into discussion of topics from soul food to Rauschenbusch. To Coretta Scott, who had been put off at first sight by King’s lack of height, he seemed to grow as he talked. As he drove her back to the Conservatory, he shocked her again by declaring that she would make him a good wife. “The four things that I look for in a wife are character, intelligence, personality, and beauty,” he told her. “And you have them all. I want to see
you again.” She replied unsteadily that she would have to check her schedule.

  Their courtship became an odd mixture of romance and pragmatism. King spoke in poetic cadences and treated her to elegant evenings of concerts and theater, but he made no secret of the fact that he was consciously selecting a wife and that she and the other women under consideration had to meet certain conditions. With the help of her older sister, Coretta cooked a meal in the King-Lenud apartment that King said “passed” his cooking test. She replied in the affirmative when he asked whether she could bring herself, as a preacher’s wife, to treat the uneducated “Aunt Janes” of a Negro Baptist congregation without condescension. Unexpectedly, she met another test when King asked her to detour through Atlanta that summer to visit him at his home. When she replied offhandedly that she probably would not come, King exploded. “Forget it,” he told her. “Forget the whole thing.” Unlike Juanita Sellers, who had defied King in a similar dispute, Scott reconsidered under the pressure.

  She arrived in Atlanta that August, a few weeks after the Republican Party nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower for President at its Chicago convention—the first ever to be televised. Her first exposure to King’s world—the big church, big house, big city, the elite Negro social clubs and powerful connections—intimidated her. She thought Mrs. King treated her coolly, and Reverend King practically ignored her. To the master of Ebenezer, she was merely another of his son’s many girlfriends, and a country girl to boot. Anyone could claim to be a concert singer, but very few had much to show for it. Reverend King’s aloofness did not surprise her, because she already knew from M.L. and from her Atlanta confidants that the patriarch was determined that his son marry into one of the socially prominent West Side families. She had even heard that M.L. would not be allowed to make such a strategically important choice on his own, that the “final decision” lay with Daddy King. All this was unnerving enough as a rumor, but the reality of meeting the King family was worse—so imposing and yet so friendly, so polite and yet so cold. Not surprisingly, she found that the most human and endearing member of the King world was her boyfriend himself.