Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Back in Boston, King showed signs of having his mind on things other than his studies. One of his first philosophy papers that fall came back with a grade of D + and covered with acidic comments from the professor, such as “let’s not get wordy,” “obviously,” and “why?”, with circles drawn around numerous grammatical errors. Recovering, King earned three consecutive A’s from the same professor on papers about Descartes, William James, and Mahayana Buddhism. Then, almost as if there were a plan to keep him off balance, old friends descended upon him with worries about his prolonged bachelorhood. His old Crozer friend Horace “Whit” Whitaker chided him in a letter for failing to meet the marriage deadline he had set for himself two years earlier. Whitaker guessed that “one-time wreckers” were still distracting King. A few weeks later, King received a letter from W. T. Handy, Jr., a future Methodist bishop who had left Boston University after King’s first year. “I know you are still galivanting [sic] around Boston, the most eligible and popular bachelor in town,” Handy wrote. “I wonder how you are progressing with my steadying influence gone. Remember M.L., ‘we are expecting great things from you.’ The only element to restrain our expectations from bearing fruit will be M.L. himself. However I know that he will not allow himself or influences to bring failure about him or embarrasment [sic] to his beloved Father and Mother.”

  King’s parents visited Boston that fall. Now that their son was calling home less frequently, and after the summer visit from Coretta Scott, they were distressed enough to seek some answers in person. Both elder Kings immediately noticed the tidiness of the apartment on Massachusetts Avenue, and, knowing neatness to be uncharacteristic of either their son or Philip Lenud, they attributed it to a feminine presence. Their suspicions focused all the more on Coretta Scott, who seemed to be with their son constantly. Reverend King, with his customary bluntness, began asking M.L. about the status of his other girlfriends in her presence, calling them by name. M.L. shrugged them off one by one, but he did not respond to the challenge with a profession of interest in Coretta. Satisfied to have her there among them during teas and meals, he had no wish to press the challenge further. Reverend King did. When he could elicit no statement of intention from his son, he bored in directly on Coretta. He suggested that the career she planned in secular music was hardly fitting for the prospective wife of a Baptist minister. When she said nothing, he switched to a jovial mood and said he figured her romance with M.L. was just a college infatuation anyway, and probably would not last out the year. Again, she did not respond.

  Reverend King abruptly shifted to his Jehovah voice: “Let me ask you very directly. Do you take my son seriously, Coretta?”

  Utterly nonplussed, she tried to make a joke of it. “Why, no, Reverend King,” she said. “Not really.”

  At last he had forced his opening. Good, he said, and he went on to make himself plain in a thunderstorm of words. He was glad Coretta had no serious designs on his son, because the elder Kings knew for a fact that he had already proposed marriage to a number of women in Atlanta and elsewhere. He named some of them. Coretta was merely another one. The elder Kings had not yet given their permission for him to marry, and when they did, the bride would be someone better suited to him than was Coretta Scott. “M.L. has gone out with the daughters of some fine, solid Atlanta families,” said Daddy King. “Folks we’ve known for many years, people we respect, and whose feelings we’d never trample on. I’m talking, Coretta, about people who have much to share and much to offer.”

  This outburst was more than Scott could bear. “I have something to offer, too,” she interjected defiantly.

  Daddy King, giving no sign that her flash of anger had impressed him, continued with a glowing description of Juanita Sellers. “We love that girl,” he said. “I don’t know what M.L. is going to decide. But I’m glad to hear you say you don’t take him seriously, because unless you know my son better than I do, I would advise you not to.”

  All this time M.L. said nothing, much to Scott’s dismay. He drew his mother into another room and told her that he planned to marry the woman his father had just blistered unmercifully. He knew the message would get through. He told Coretta so as he drove her home. The news consoled her, but King wounded her in the next breath by criticizing her for having failed to make a good impression on his father.

  Mrs. King’s message worked on her husband’s nerves. Later during their visit, he was trying to endure polite conversation among the four of them when suddenly it became too much for him. Without warning, he slammed his fist on the table, terrifying the others. “You-all are courting too hard!” he shouted. “What’s this doing to your studies?”

  This shook the words out of his son. “I’m going to get my doctorate,” he said quietly. “And then I’m going to marry Coretta.”

  A moment later, Daddy King slammed the table again. “Now you two had better get married!” he commanded, as though he had just conceived of the idea himself.

  A few weeks after King achieved the painful marriage truce with his father, Professor DeWolf lectured for six hours on the theology of Augustine, the North African bishop who, after nearly thirty years of ribald womanizing, became the first great genius of comprehensive Christian theology. Augustine had made Christianity at least as respectable philosophically as Manicheanism, Neo-Platonism, and astrology, its chief rivals among Mediterranean intellectuals in the early fifth century A.D. His doctrines of church authority helped the Vatican survive the Middle Ages, the eight hundred years that followed the destruction of the Roman Empire. In a January examination, DeWolf asked his class to explain Augustine’s complex theory of evil, in which the great saint sought to reconcile God’s authority over evil with His infinite benevolence. “The problem of evil baffles the theist, not the atheist,” King began. His essay received an A.

  King composed an outline for a sermon entitled “How a Christian Overcomes Evil.” It was a Ladder Sermon of three ascending steps, each divided into parts. “The first step in overcoming evil is to discover what is worst in us,” he wrote, going on to specify the evil in unorthodox fashion as “that sin to which we are most frequently tempted.” This he followed with a call for honesty with oneself, using language overlaid with so many psychological turns as to render it opaque: “The hidden fault must be called by its right name, otherwise we miss seeing our pride under fear of an inferiority complex.” After a second step on using God’s grace to begin combat with the evil, King came to his crucial third step: “Concentrate not on the eradication of evil, but on the cultivation of virtue.” By way of illustration, he contrasted the technique of Ulysses, who fought the temptation of the sirens by putting wax in the ears of his sailors and by strapping himself to the mast of his ship, with that of Orpheus, who resisted those same sirens by playing his harp so beautifully as to make the siren song seem unappealing. King recommended the approach of Orpheus. “Evil is not driven out, but crowded out,” he concluded. “Sensuality is not mastered by saying: ‘I will not sin,’ but through the expulsive power of something good.” Only in this final sentence did King introduce sensuality as the specific sin to which he was directing his method.

  His focus on sensuality added to the mystery of the difficult sentence he wrote about the need for honesty to overcome evil. In that context, “fear of an inferiority complex” could mean fear of being unmasculine, of being unloved, and King could have been warning that such an obsession would lead people to overlook their own pride of conquest. For Augustine, as well as for Niebuhr and Martin Luther and most other theologians of note, human pride was the principal door to sin, including sexual ones. Alternatively, King could have been referring to an inferiority complex in the more common usage of the time, meaning racial inferiority—warning that such a handicap in a Negro could make him blind to his own racial pride, or to the pride that lies beneath all considerations of race. Or, finally, he could have meant some combination of sensuality and race, as they merge into powerful interior forces. In any case, numerous
logical pitfalls worked against King’s formula for combatting such sins. If the harp of Orpheus played the same kind of music as did the alluring sirens, only better, then, King implied, virtue and sensuality were of the same nature. By setting good and evil in a kind of competition, rather than in opposition, King changed the nature of the contest from a tug-of-war into a race. The two forces might move side by side, covering much the same ground, and thus would be in danger of becoming indistinguishable. Perhaps because of the obvious flaws in his formula, King never expanded his outline for “How a Christian Over-comes Evil” into a complete sermon. It remained among his papers as an unfinished outline.

  Professor Brightman died that April after a long illness, leaving King without a faculty adviser. Soon afterward, he shifted his registration from the graduate school’s philosophy department to the School of Theology, and with DeWolf as his new adviser sought to finish his Ph.D. course work within one more school year. He had to petition the faculty to allow him to take a heavy course load pending success on a second round of the required German-language competency test. While King struggled with his German, the outside world rushed through what the movie newsreels would call a “Year of Change.” Stalin died in March. England celebrated the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in June. Eisenhower, the new President, felt so optimistic about the prospects for a truce in Korea that he restored the traditional Easter egg roll for children on the White House lawn. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, the day after King’s wedding.

  King had kept up the meetings of the Dialectical Society through the spring of his engagement. In the bull sessions, he endured more than his share of ribbing for having agreed to submit to the harness of matrimony. It made him stiffer, they said, and several of them grumbled among themselves that Coretta Scott was too “bourgie,” their word for “bourgeois.” Coming from a self-constituted assembly of dialecticians, this criticism was audacious in the extreme, but some of them sensed that she was different. When King’s friends relaxed after their exertions, they preferred women who would jitterbug with them, as had most of his other girlfriends. Scott refused to do so. Her idea of music was strictly classical. When performing, her tastes ran to hoop-skirted formal gowns, and she clasped her hands in front of her at shoulder level, gazing as far off into the clouds as any philosopher. Such affectations provoked some of King’s colleagues at Boston University to think of her as one who “tried too hard,” and to some degree her manner would injure King’s future relations with earthy friends like Walter McCall. There was, however, some countervailing opinion within the male caucus. King’s friends considered her an intelligent, strong-willed woman, skilled in the social graces, “not down with it, but no dummy.” She had a gift for remembering names, always put newcomers at ease, and never failed to be polite —all of which would serve her well as the wife of a minister. Moreover, she was ambitious and fiercely loyal.

  Most of these traits came into play on her wedding day, June 18, 1953. She had planned to have a small private ceremony in the front yard of her parents’ home, not far from Selma, but wound up with what she called the largest wedding in the history of those parts. She fretted intensely that the urbane King clan would look down on her solid country folk as mere farmhands, but at the same time she did not want to appear to be trying to impress them. This was more than enough to knot the stomach of any bride, and Reverend King did not help her nerves by sweeping her and the bridegroom off for a private talk just before the ceremony. It was not too late to back out, he said, strongly advising them not to go through with the ceremony unless they simply could not help it. “I preach because I can’t help myself,” Reverend King declared, “and when you get married you should think of it like that, as something you are impelled to do. Think about this for a few moments and decide if this is the way you feel.” Scott persevered through this bizarre speech and through the bollixed details common to most weddings. Years ahead of her time, she wanted the promise to obey her husband removed from the wedding vows as inequitable, and she was strong enough to get Reverend King to agree. When the reception was finally over and the newlyweds were allowed to escape, King fell exhausted into sleep and she did the driving. Because resorts, motels, and hotels in Alabama were prohibited by law from serving Negroes, they were obliged to spend their wedding night at the closest thing to a public accommodation within reach of Negroes—a funeral parlor, owned by a friend of the Scott family.

  Fully within the King tradition, Coretta Scott King found herself swept immediately into the world of her in-laws. Reverend King baptized her at Ebenezer on the Sunday following the wedding. She and her husband lived in the King home on Boulevard for the remainder of the summer, and Daddy King arranged a teller’s job for her at the Citizens Trust Bank, of which he was a director. At summer’s end, the entire family went to Miami for a historic meeting of the National Baptist Convention. President D. V. Jemison, who had ruled the convention for years without serious opposition, even though he had gone blind and had to be led around by the hand, was retiring on the inducement of a large cash settlement and a special pension. There was much excitement among the preachers over the prospect of a new election. Daddy King’s old Atlanta rival, William Holmes Borders, was running on a ticket headed by Jemison’s vice president and likely successor, but a strong challenge was mounted by Rev. J. H. Jackson, the renowned orator and friend of Daddy King, who in 1939 had broken Atlanta’s color barrier before a mass audience of the World Baptist Alliance. In a spirited campaign, Jackson mobilized the younger preachers by engineering an anti-dictatorial amendment to the NBC constitution, prohibiting self-succession by the president. Daddy King was a floor manager of Jackson, and young King served as a lieutenant. Joel King came down from his new church in Michigan. Most of King’s Negro classmates from Crozer attended, as did some ten thousand other preachers from churches great and small. They would all remember the wild insurgency that elected J. H. Jackson and how they “stayed up all night” to do it, standing on chairs, waving brooms to sweep out the older order.

  After the convention, Coretta Scott King accompanied her husband as he preached his way north to Boston, stopping in Washington and Baltimore for guest sermons. Once settled in their new apartment, King resumed discussions with Professor DeWolf about the Ph.D. dissertation he would write after a final year of course work. In the end, King selected a topic—comparing Paul Tillich’s idea of God with that of Henry Nelson Wieman—that promised credit without substantial risk. Tillich and Wieman led two rival schools at the pinnacle of liberal Protestant theology—Union Seminary and the University of Chicago, respectively—but in the sense most fundamental to DeWolf and King, their ideas of God were virtually identical. Both Tillich and Wieman were Transcendentalists, as opposed to Personalists. To King, therefore, the conclusion of his dissertation was never in doubt: he would criticize both Tillich and Wieman for having ideas of God that were too arid, speculative, and cerebral to answer human yearnings in the province of religion. His dissertation would be an academic exercise for the most part, born of a tactical choice to use Personalism as a tool of criticism rather than a subject. Although DeWolf pressed him at times to spell out his Personalism against all the standard tests of theology, King was wise enough to know that Personalism was better as a creed than as a system.

  King wrote to Tillich, asking whether he knew of other dissertations on the subject King proposed. Tillich replied from sabbatical in Switzerland on September 22, saying that he knew of none. “PS,” he added, “I am very much interested.” Later that year, for some reason, King put the same question to Niebuhr, whose secretary answered for him in the negative. Inasmuch as King already had his protocol clearance from Tillich himself, and as his topic had nothing to do with Niebuhr’s work, it appears that King wrote this second letter solely out of respect for Niebuhr.

  While in correspondence with the masters of theology over his dissertation, King
put out feelers to his contacts on the faculties of Negro colleges, where Morehouse men were heavily represented. On the church side, he already knew which major Baptist pulpits were vacant across the country. That winter, he allotted one month for a job-hunting trip to the South. He planned to talk with Dr. Mays about a possible teaching post at Morehouse, visit other colleges, and preach wherever he could get into a vacant pulpit that interested him. Through his friend Melvin Watson, he obtained an invitation to preach a trial sermon at the First Baptist Church of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and he scheduled a sermon at the chapel of Alabama State College in Montgomery, whose dean was a Morehouse man. All the while, he would work on his father, slowly and deliberately, to make him see that it was best for the son to go out on his own rather than to Ebenezer. With these plans made, and the new Mrs. King left behind in Boston, he set out on December 18 with a fellow member of the Dialectical Society. On the drive south, King talked apprehensively about First Baptist of Chattanooga. It had a reputation as a fastidious congregation, and had recently sent a friend of theirs packing without explanation after what the friend thought was a brilliant trial sermon.