Becoming King

by Troy Jackson

  25. Lischer, for instance, deemphasizes the influence of theologians on King’s thinking: “Profound changes in the graduate student’s thinking cannot be attributed to Niebuhr despite the mature King’s need to make it appear that Niebuhr had once made a decisive difference. Such was the dominance of Niebuhr: one was virtually obligated to retroject Niebuhr into one’s intellectual formation and stake out a position in relation to his, which is precisely what King did in his brief 1958 sketch, ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,’ in which he credits Niebuhr for dampening his ‘superficial optimism,’ concerning human nature” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 61). Keith Miller comes to a similar conclusion: “Despite what he wrote in ‘Pilgrimage,’ King arrived at seminary with his most important ideas already intact. Although the African-American church does not appear in ‘Pilgrimage,’ it provided him with the foundation for virtually all the ideas of the essay.” Miller goes on to write: “King did not need the prodding of Niebuhr to awaken from a state of fatuous optimism because he never suffered from such a state. Under segregation blacks in the South confronted collective evil every single day. They did not enjoy the luxury of naïve optimism” (Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 54–55, 59). James Cone also challenges King’s assertions in “Pilgrimage,” noting, “In regard to deepening King’s optimism about the elimination of racism, the political philosophy of integrationism and the faith of the black church were much more important than Hegel or any other white thinker” (Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, 30). King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 90–107. King borrowed portions of “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” regarding his commitment to the social gospel from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Hope of the World and Robert McCracken’s Questions People Ask. King Jr., “The Weaknesses of Liberal Theology I,” 1948, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 78–80.

  26. King Jr., “Sermon Introductions,” November 30, 1948–February 16, 1949, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 83–84. In the case of “Sermon Introductions,” King’s use of Sheen constitutes academic plagiarism. The editors of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project have identified many egregious examples of plagiarism in King’s academic work at Crozer and Boston, including portions of his doctoral dissertation. When King’s plagiarism came to light, the Journal of American History devoted an issue to the topic (78 [June 1991]). King Jr., “The False God of Science,” July 5, 1953, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 130–32. King began his sermon with, “Dr. William Ernest Hecking has said that all life is divided into work and worship; that which we do for ourselves and that which we let the higher than ourselves do.” Fosdick’s sermon begins, “Professor Hocking is right in saying that all man’s life can be reduced to two aspects, work and worship—that which we do ourselves, and what we let the higher than ourselves do to us” (Fosdick, Successful Christian Living, 173–74). King kept an annotated copy of Successful Christian Living in his home study, along with many other collections of sermons by Fosdick and other prominent preachers. For further examination of this topic, see Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 137–54; Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 132–48, 193–97; and Lischer, The Preacher King, 93–118. King Jr., “The False God of Nationalism,” July 12, 1953, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 132–33. King leans on Fosdick’s “Christianity’s Supreme Rival” in developing this sermon. King notes, “If time permitted, I would trace the history of this new religion, unravel the strands that, woven together, have produced it. In its present form it is a modern phenomenon developing from the eighteenth century on, but that it is now dominant in the world is clear.” By comparison, Fosdick wrote, “Were there time, one might trace the history of this dogma, unravel the strands that, woven together, have produced it. In its present form it is a modern phenomenon developing from the eighteenth century on, but that it is now dominant in the world is clear” (Fosdick, Hope of the World, 159). King had a copy of Hope of the World in his home study. King Jr., “First Things First,” August 2, 1953, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 143–46; King Jr., “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” August 9, 1953, ibid., 6: 146–50. King used three paragraph-long sections of Fosdick’s “Righteousness First” (Fosdick, A Great Time to Be Alive, 21–30). For his message on communism, King used several sections of McCracken’s “The Christian Attitude to Communism” (McCracken, Questions People Ask, 164–69). For further consideration of King’s homiletic plagiarism, see Miller, Voice of Deliverance; Lischer, Preacher King; Dyson, I May Not Get There with You; and Warren, King Came Preaching.

  27. Introduction to vol. 2 of Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 12–13.

  28. Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887; Scott to King, April 7, 1952, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 124; King to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952, ibid., 6: 123–26. See also King Jr., “Civilization’s Great Need,” 1949, ibid., 6: 86–88.

  29. King Jr., “Mastering Our Evil Selves,” June 5, 1949, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 94–97; King Jr., “Splinters and Planks,” July 24, 1949, ibid., Papers, 6: 97–99.

  30. King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” August 31, 1952, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 126–28. King continued to challenge racism and call for social change during the summer of 1953. In a sermon on the influence of nationalism, King noted, “In America it is preached by the McCarthys and the Jenners, the advocators of white supremacy, and the America first movements” (King Jr., “The False God of Nationalism,” July 12, 1953, ibid., 6: 132–33). In a later sermon, King declared his allegiance to a socially engaged Christianity: “I happen to be a firm believer in what is called the ‘social gospel.’ Indeed, no one can intelligently care for personal life without caring about genetics and social reform” (King Jr., “Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions,” July 26, 1953, ibid., 6: 139–42). In a sermon assessing communism, King acknowledged their “strong attempt to eliminate racial prejudice. Communism seeks to transcend the superficialities of race and color, and you are able to join the Communist party whatever the color of your skin or the quality of blood in your veins.” Later in the sermon, King lamented: “Slavery could not have existed in America for more than two hundred fifty years if the Church had not sanctioned it. Segregation and discrimination could not exist in America today without the sanction of the Church. I am ashamed and appalled at the fact that Eleven O’Clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in Christian America” (King Jr., “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” August 9, 1953, ibid., 6: 146–50).

  31. Jo Ann Robinson, “Negroes Eat Too,” Montgomery Advertiser, October 13, 1952.

  32. In addition to Vernon Johns, the tenure of Alfred Charles Livingston Arbouin as the pastor of Dexter was cut short when his wife struck up a friendship with a Maxwell Air Force Base soldier while Arbouin attended the 1946 National Baptist Convention. The deacons ended up forcing Arbouin out through the courts, although the whole matter was done in secret (Roberson, Fighting the Good Fight, 75–79; Branch, Parting the Waters, 5–6). Vaughn and Wills, eds., Reflections on our Pastor, 3–4. The Dexter deacon Joseph T. Brooks wrote King’s parents in mid-November in an effort to find out when King Jr. would be home from Boston so that the church could arrange to have him preach as a candidate for their vacant pulpit. Brooks commented, “I have heard so many fine things about him and his ability and possibility, that I am intensely interested in having him down.” King Jr. responded to the letter the next week, noting he would be able to preach at Dexter on the second or third Sunday in January (J. T. Brooks to Martin Luther King Sr., and Alberta Williams King, November 16, 1953; King to J. T. Brooks, November 24, 1953 in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 211, 221).

  3. “Making a Contribution”

  1. For a description of King’s job opportunities, his interest in Dexter, and the history of the congregation, see the introduction to vol. 2 of Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 28–31. Lischer explains why King elected to serve as a pastor rather than pursue a job as a professor: “Ebenezer had taugh
t King that the basic unit of Christianity in the world is the congregation. Although he had absorbed the universal principle of liberalism, when the time came for him to embark upon a career, he turned again to the congregation as the only vehicle of redemption he knew. Perhaps he understood that Christianity was never meant to work in the lecture hall or at the level of abstract principles but, rather, among a community that is joined by race, family, neighborhood, and economics, but whose truest identity transcends all of these” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 74). Branch, Parting the Waters, 105–8.

  2. Montgomery Advertiser, January 24, 1954.

  3. Coretta Scott King claims “Three Dimensions” was the first sermon she heard King preach (Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., 59). King also delivered a sermon with this title in September 1953 while serving at Ebenezer (“King Jr. to End Series of Summer Sermons; Ebenezer,” Atlanta Daily World, September 5, 1953). King borrowed the primary outline of “Three Dimensions” from Phillips Brooks’s sermon “The Symmetry of Life,” found in Brooks, Selected Sermons, 195–206. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 17; King Jr., “The Dimensions of a Complete Life,” January 24, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 150–56.

  4. Nesbitt and Randall to King, March 7, 1954, and King to Pulpit Committee, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, March 10, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 256, 258. James Dombrowski recorded this incident in his diary on February 8, 1954 (Mss 566, Folder 4, Box 15, Dombrowski Papers). Virginia Durr to Marge Frantz, February 1954, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 64.

  5. Alabama Tribune, April 2, 1954.

  6. Jo Ann Robinson to Mayor Gayle, May 21, 1954, in Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, viii.

  7. King Jr., “Going Forward by Going Backward,” April 4, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 159–63. The sermon’s content parallels the body of a sermon he delivered five weeks earlier in Detroit (King Jr., “Rediscovering Lost Values,” ibid., 2: 248–56). King also delivered a version of this sermon on August 16, 1953, at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

  8. King Jr., “Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions,” July 26, 1953, ibid., 6: 139–42. On the inside of the folder containing this sermon, King wrote: “ARYA: Preached at Dexter May 2, 1954.”

  9. King Jr., “Acceptance Address at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” May 2, 1954, ibid., 6: 164–67.

  10. E. D. Nixon, “It Took Guts to Do These Things,” in Wigginton, ed., Refuse to Stand Silently By, 221.

  11. Alabama Tribune, December 18, 1953.

  12. Montgomery Advertiser, April 15, 1954, April 17, 1954, May 2, 1954. The four male officers were Lee E. Jarrett, Walter L. Jarrett, Willie C. Miller, and Arthur G. Worthy. The editorial board of the Alabama Tribune, in its October 1, 1954, issue, praised the City of Montgomery for “taking the lead in Alabama in the area of sound civic progress. It recently placed three Negro women on its police force to bring its number of Negro law enforcement officers up to seven. It is the first Alabama city to employ Negro women for school traffic purposes.”

  13. King Jr., “Mental and Spiritual Slavery,” May 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 167–70.

  14. King Jr., “A Religion of Doing,” July 4, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 170–74. King adapted this quotation from Fosdick’s sermon “There Is No Death,” in which Fosdick wrote: “I plead instead for a church that will be a fountainhead of a better social order. Any church that pretends to care for the souls of people but is not interested in the slums that damn them, the city government that corrupts them, the economic order that cripples them, and international relations that, leading to peace or war, determine the spiritual destiny of innumerable souls—that kind of church, I think, would hear again the Master’s withering words: ‘Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!’” (Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Hope of the World, 25). King, “What Is Man?” July 11, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 174–79.

  15. Wigginton, ed., Refuse to Stand Silently By, 221. See also Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 13–14. Virginia Durr to Mairi and Clark Foreman, September 8, 1954, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 75; Alabama Tribune, September 10, 1954.

  16. King Jr., “God’s Love,” December 23, 1962, ET-40, Martin Luther King Estate Collection. King may have gotten this illustration from Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, 50. King, “God’s Love,” September 5, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 179–81.

  17. King Jr., “Vision of a World Made New,” September 9, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 181–84.

  18. Warlick, “‘Man of the Year’ for ‘54,” 27; Alabama Tribune, July 30, 1954; Montgomery Advertiser, “Colored Section,” November 23, 1954.

  19. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, 37.

  20. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 27, 34.

  21. King Jr., “Recommendations to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the Fiscal Year 1954–1955,” September 5, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 287.

  22. For a critique of King’s model of leadership that draws on his acceptance address at Dexter, see Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 170–95.

  23. Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead, 312; Lischer, The Preacher King, 78.

  24. King Jr., “Recommendations to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the Fiscal Year 1954–1955,” September 5, 1955, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2: 290. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 30.

  25. Coretta Scott King, “Answers, Voter Registration Questionnaire of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Social and Political Action Committee,” October 17, 1954, Folder 15, Box 77, King Papers, 1954–1968, Boston University; Mary Fair Burks, “Social and Political Action Committee, Report 3,” October 31, 1954, Folder 15, Box 77, ibid.

  26. King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 26–27. Lewis Baldwin argues that “some of King’s most profound and inspiring sermons were delivered at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in the year prior to the Rosa Parks incident. He went to Dexter with the notion that sermonizing involved the proclamation of God’s word in relationship to a myriad of human concerns, and with the idea that every sermon should have as its purpose the head-on constructive meeting of some spiritual, social, cultural, or personal problem that puzzles the mind, bears upon the conscience, and interferes with the complete flow of life” (Baldwin, There Is a Balm in Gilead, 288). Likewise, Lischer notes: “King came to his first congregation with a cache of sermon manuscripts he had developed in his college and graduate school days. During his first year he worked very hard at producing and memorizing new manuscripts, which he pointedly left on his chair when he rose to enter the pulpit. He also brought with him a repertoire of poetic verses and longer set pieces already committed to memory and distributed throughout his body of sermons” (Lischer, The Preacher King, 80–81).

  27. Rice, interview by Lumpkin; Underwood, interview by Lumpkin; Gray, Leventhal, Sikora, and Thornton, The Children Coming On, 133.

  28. King Jr., “Propagandizing Christianity,” September 12, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 184–87.

  29. King Jr., “New Wine in New Bottles,” October 17, 1954, in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 192–94.

  30. The glowing memories of King before the boycott by Nixon, Carr, and other Montgomery residents may not have been as pronounced at the time. Although King undoubtedly impressed them, they would always view King through the lens of his civil rights leadership, coloring their earliest recollections. Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch meeting, January 9, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers (NN-Sc). Nixon, interview by Lumpkin. In this interview, Nixon claimed he heard King speak on the second Sunday in August 1955. While King was unanimously elected to the branch’s executive committee at that meeting, there is no indication in the very thorough minutes of the event that King offered any remarks, suggesting Nixon was recalling his response to this January spe
ech (Rosa Parks, minutes, Montgomery branch executive committee meeting, August 14, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers, [NN-Sc]). Johnnie Carr, interview by Steven M. Millner, July 17, 1977, in Garrow, ed. The Walking City, 529. Carr also claims she first heard King in August 1955, but credits the Dexter deacon R. D. Nesbitt with introducing King. In this January meeting, however, King was introduced by Ralph Abernathy. Carr may have remembered King’s June address to the NAACP, when he was introduced by Nesbitt (Rosa Parks, minutes, mass meeting at First CME Church, June 19, 1955, Montgomery NAACP Papers [NN-Sc]).

  31. Montgomery Advertiser, January 12, 1955.

  32. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, “Social and Political Action Committee Digest, Number 2,” January 1955, Folder 15, Box 77, King Papers, Boston University; King Jr., Stride toward Freedom, 34–35.

  33. Alabama Tribune, January 28, 1955.

  34. Virginia Durr to Corliss Lamont, February 9, 1955, in Sullivan, ed., Freedom Writer, 81.

  35. “Negroes’ Most Urgent Needs,” LPR 127, Baskin Papers.

  36. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 49.

  37. The Montgomery Advertiser city editor Joe Azbell devoted a significant portion of his March 1, 1955, editorial to the housing dilemma faced by the city’s African American residents. Noting that some believed “the Negro housing situation will become so critical this year some move will have to be started to open new subdivisions,” Azbell referenced James Holt, the president of the First Federal Savings and Loan Association, who called the housing crisis for blacks in Montgomery the largest housing problem the city faced.” The editor suggested no possible solutions to the problem (Joe Azbell, “City Limits,” Montgomery Advertiser, March 1, 1955). Montgomery Advertiser, March 20, 1955; J. Mills Thornton, “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956,” in Garrow, ed., The Walking City, 336. Thornton examines the demographic and political shifts that occurred in Montgomery in the 1950s. He notes that the “Demographic exploitation of racial tensions promised to counter Birmingham’s exploitation of class tensions and thus to capture support in the eastern wards” where many working-class whites were moving in (335–36). Parks, an ally of Birmingham, defeated the incumbent Cleere, while Gayle returned as mayor. Thornton adds: “The lesson of Parks’s victory appeared to be that, given the new social realities produced by the city’s rapid postwar growth, an East Montgomerian would always defeat a South Montgomerian when the issues remained class oriented. The lesson of Sellers’s victory appeared to be that a vigorous exploitation of racial antipathies could give a South Montgomerian at least a fighting chance of defeating an East Montgomerian. Gayle was, of course, a South Montgomerian. But Gayle’s dilemma was much more complicated than this analysis would imply. First, he was unlikely to abandon a set of beliefs that he had held sincerely for many decades merely because political strategy seemed to dictate this course. Second, developments within the business community rendered it less than certain that a sound strategy actually dictated this course” (337–38).