by Bruce Feiler
Scholars have shown that King drew heavily on speeches given by others. “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore,” for example, has deep parallels with “Egyptians Dead Upon the Seashore,” a sermon given by nineteenth-century abolitionist Phillips Brooks.
Brooks: The parted waves had swept back upon the [Egyptians]…. All that the escaped people saw was here and there a poor drowned body beaten upon the bank, where they stood with the great flood between them and the land of their long captivity and oppression. It was the end of a frightful period in their history.
King: The parted waves swept back upon the [Egyptians]…. As the Israelites looked back all they could see was here and there a poor drowned body beaten upon the seashore…. It was the end of a frightful moment in their history.
As literary scholar Keith Miller describes in Voice of Deliverance, a book about King’s rhetoric, multiple sections of King’s speech were taken nearly verbatim from other sources, especially Harry Emerson Fosdick, the so-called “Moses of Modernism,” who was the preacher at Riverside Church. King also drew from sermons he gave with his father in Atlanta applying the lessons of Moses to African American life. But King’s chief source, Miller concludes, was not the published works of others but the folk tradition of American slaves, passed down through oral history. “His equation of black America and the Hebrew people revived and updated the slaves’ powerful identification with the Israelites suffering under the yoke of the pharaoh.”
A century after the Underground Railroad, King once more tapped into the long love affair between Americans and Moses. “Many years ago the Negro was thrown into the Egypt of segregation,” King declared at the climax of his speech. “For years it looked like he would never get out of this Egypt. The closed Red Sea always stood before him with discouraging dimensions. There were always those pharaohs with hardened hearts, who, despite the cries of many a Moses, refused to let these people go.” But then, he continued, a new Moses rose up to liberate blacks, and he mentioned an institution that had likely never before been compared to the Hebrew prophet: the Supreme Court. “One day, through a world-shaking decree by the nine justices of the Supreme Court of America,” King said, “the Red Sea was opened, and the forces of justice marched through to the other side.”
The reaction to King’s New York debut was instantaneous. King labeled the evening “one of the greatest experiences of my life.” The dean of the cathedral called the talk the “greatest sermon” he had ever heard. As the country headed into another deadly showdown over race, America had a new prophet on its hands, and a new question to ponder: Was Martin Luther King America’s next Moses?
THE HOUSE ON Auburn Avenue in Atlanta where King was born in 1929 has been turned into a small museum. It has a parlor and a study and is just steps from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Sr., served as pastor and where young “M.L.” found his voice as a leader of God’s New New Israel. Sweet Auburn was one of many middle-class enclaves across the South that blacks in the early twentieth century considered the land of milk and honey. But the laws of the South were promulgated by Jim Crow, not Moses, and blacks once more went looking for a narrative of hope. And once more they turned to the Exodus.
“Fifty years brings us to the border of the Promised Land,” one minister said in 1912. “The Canaan of our citizenship is just before us and is infested with enemies who deny our right to enter.” But fear not, black preachers said; God will hear our suffering and send a Moses to lead the way. As one black pastor recalled, “Our ministers held forth about Moses using the rod to part the waters of the Red Sea. More than once the minister would go on to suggest that there were some ‘Black Moseses’ in the making.”
One of the more vivid black Moseses of the twentieth century was invented by novelist Zora Neale Hurston, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. While a student at Barnard College, Hurston studied ethnography and discovered that Moses had been a preeminent figure in voodoo as well as other religions across the Caribbean and Africa. “The worship of Moses recalls the hard-to-explain fact that wherever the Negro is found,” she wrote in 1937, “there are traditional tales of Moses and his supranatural powers that are not in the Bible.” These reverent tales did not spring up spontaneously, she added. “There is a tradition of Moses as the great father of magic scattered all over Africa and Asia. Perhaps some of his feats recorded in the Pentateuch are the folk beliefs of such a character.” Moses did not become an African American icon because he was featured in the Bible, Hurston suggested; he became a biblical icon after he was featured in African stories.
Hurston flushed out this theme in a 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, featuring Moses as a voodoo priest. The book opens with a DeMille-like statement from the author: “Moses was an old man with a beard. He was the great law-giver. He had some trouble with Pharaoh about some plagues and led the Children of Israel out of Egypt and on to the Promised Land.” That is the common concept of Moses, she said. But unlike DeMille and many other whites, Hurston wasn’t interested in Moses as a figure of authority; she was interested in Moses as a person who breaks the law. Her Moses was a man of confrontation. “All across Africa, America, the West Indies, there are tales of the powers of Moses and great worship of him and his powers,” she wrote. “But it does not flow from the Ten Commandments. It is his rod of power, the terror he showed before all Israel and to Pharaoh.”
In Hurston’s telling, Moses becomes an instrument of black power, the first civil rights activist. He first appears as an Egyptian prince, who earns his reputation as a man of violence and war. But at the crucial moment when he kills the Egyptian overseer for beating a Hebrew slave, Moses changes. “He found a new sympathy for the oppressed of all mankind. He lost his taste for war…. Henceforth he was a man of thought.” Twenty years before Martin Luther King, Jr., Hurston’s Moses becomes a pioneer of nonviolence. He further foreshadows King when, at the moment the pharaoh frees the Israelites, they shout a line from a famed spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!” King would later use these same words to conclude his speech at the March on Washington.
Hurston wasn’t alone in anticipating King. C. L. Franklin, arguably the most influential African American preacher through the 1940s and early ’50s, spoke often of the need for a Moses figure to emerge from the black community. Franklin was known as “the Man with the Million Dollar Voice” and was the father of “the Queen of Soul,” Aretha. He was based in Detroit but traveled widely around the country, and he often brought along his daughter to sing. Franklin was among the first to sell his sermons on records, and one of his more famous was “Moses at the Red Sea.” “In every crisis God raises up a Moses,” he said. “His name may be Moses or his name may be Joshua or his name may be David, or his name, you understand, may be Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass or George Washington Carver, but in every crisis God raises up a Moses, especially where the destiny of his people is concerned.” His message: Blacks should not wait for others to lead the way but should seize their own destiny. “The power of deliverance is in our own possession,” he said. “The man who stands and simply cries will never go over his Red Seas.”
Few men put this message of self-reliance into practice more than Franklin’s spiritual protégé, Martin Luther King, Jr. Throughout his career, King stressed that liberation alone was not the destination for blacks. They must also develop standards of dignity and self-respect. “As we struggle for freedom in America,” he told four thousand people in Montgomery that November, “there is a danger that we will misinterpret freedom. We usually think of freedom from something, but freedom is also to something. It is not only breaking loose from some evil force, but it is reaching up for a higher force. Freedom from evil is slavery to goodness.” And this “slavery to goodness,” he insisted, comes with certain duties—to respect others, to respect yourself, not to strike back, and to practice nonviolence. Freedom, in other words, comes with responsibility. Liberation with se
lf-restraint. Exodus with Sinai. The twin message of America’s founding—revolution paired with constitution—now becomes the watchword of America’s refounding. And once again the language comes from the same source.
“You can’t overemphasize how important Exodus was to us at the time,” said Robert Franklin, one of the leaders of a new generation of African American preachers who grew up during the civil rights era. A native of Illinois (and no relation to C. L.), Franklin is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater in Atlanta, who earned a master’s in divinity from Harvard and a doctorate from Chicago. Though he’s taller, with a broader repertoire of languages (including Arabic), Franklin’s narrow mustache, receding hairline, and easy smile lend him a striking similarity to his hero. A week after I visited him in his office, Franklin was named the tenth president of Morehouse.
“Part of the appeal of Exodus is that the story was often enacted in our church plays and vacation Bible schools,” he continued. “The drama of the pharaoh, of Egypt and all of its political might, just represented for us America. You had leaders, like northern mayor Richard Daley or southern governor George Wallace, who represented for us these pharaoh-like, hard-hearted, unflinching symbols of the biblical text. So when we acted out the story, we brought to it a contemporary emotion.
“And of course the big question,” he added, “was who would get to play Moses, because we all wanted to be him. Number one, that imperfect figure. And number two, that reluctant figure who finally gets pushed onto the stage and says, ‘Okay, dammit, I’ll do this.’”
“So did you ever get to play Moses?” I asked.
“I never played Moses,” he said forlornly. “They were always the older guys who were taller and better-looking!” And with that he laughed a huge Santa Claus laugh.
“But what about Jesus?” I asked. “What role did he play in your worldview?”
“Moses and Jesus were costars in our salvation story,” Franklin said. “Jesus had his highlights—Easter and Christmas. But the rest of the year, we’re in this struggle, and Jesus wasn’t leading people to challenge political authority. Yeah, we need Jesus for personal salvation, and for comforting our pain. He was the suffering servant. But the idea of God coming to the aid of the entire people was a more powerful idea for us, so the rest of the year belonged to Moses.”
“Were you ever concerned that the Exodus happened thirty-two hundred years ago and you were in a struggle now?” I asked. “What if the parallels weren’t true?”
“Yeah, we understood that,” he said. “But there’s no way you can limit this story to one historical era. Charles Long, the great African American scholar, talks about the hundred-year cycle of history, that there’s a great revolution and cataclysm every century—1776, 1861, the 1960s. In this cyclical sense of time, we can reach down into the trove of memories and experiences of our ancestors. And we think of the figures in the biblical story as our ancestors. That is our story. The fact that it’s a Jewish story is kind of irrelevant. It’s our book. Our people. And they’re echoing through the annals of time, trying to offer us lessons.”
That sense of drawing the past into the present was memorably displayed during the March on Washington in August 1963. The stated purpose of the event was to press for civil rights legislation in Congress, but the result was the largest gathering to date in the nation’s capital. It culminated in a series of performances in front of the Lincoln Memorial by Marian Anderson, Bob Dylan, and others, as well as a speech by James Baldwin read by Charlton Heston. (Asked why he was chosen to lead the Hollywood contingent, Heston said it was probably because of his service to the Screen Actors Guild, “or maybe just because I’d gotten all those folks through the Red Sea.”) Describing the crowd of 250,000 people, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson said the scene looked like another Exodus. “It was like the vision of Moses that the children of Israel would march into Canaan.” Organizers distributed song sheets for “Go Down, Moses” and other spirituals.
King’s late-afternoon speech was the highlight of the event. Seven years after he spoke at Saint John the Divine and a few months after his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the thirty-four-year-old preacher had become the voice of civil rights. His talk wove together many of the iconic themes from the 350-year merger of the Hebrew Bible and America. He evoked the Pilgrims: “Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride.” He paid tribute to Lincoln and his use of Psalm 90: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” He linked blacks with the Mother of Exiles: “One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.” He even echoed Lincoln’s phrase that America was “an almost-chosen people” by suggesting that America was a broken-promised land. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution represented “a promise,” King said, “that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note.”
But the climax echoes America’s preeminent symbol of freedom and one of its greatest tributes to the Exodus: the Liberty Bell.
Let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
In what is arguably the most famous speech by an American since the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King fused together Jefferson and Lincoln, Pilgrim and slave, Emma Lazarus and the Old State House bell, to set up his defining message from that “old Negro spiritual” that Zora Neale Hurston had put into the mouths of the Israelites as they set out for the Promised Land: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
I asked Robert Franklin whether he viewed the King era as a sacred time.
“Without a doubt,” he said. “There was enormous optimism, that grew week by week. And on those occasions when the Supreme Court acted, or a local magistrate, we saw that as validation. As God in history, pushing us on, saying, ‘Keep struggling. Don’t lose hope. You’re making progress and I am with you.’ Time was infused with a sense of sacred presence in the air. That we should be good and prepare ourselves for new life, because we were moving toward the Promised Land.
“And the fact that we weren’t sitting behind desks,” he said, “but were walking, making a claim on public space, was important. We were reenacting the Exodus on a smaller scale. But we flipped the script. Whereas many people saw America as the New Israel and the Old World as Egypt, we said, ‘No, America is Egypt, and blacks are the New Israel. We are the Jews.’”
“So if you take your experience and turn it toward the Bible,” I asked, “what theme is most important from Moses’ life?”
“It would be leadership,” he said. “As C. L. Franklin used to say: Absent leadership, people can go on as slaves. You accommodate yourselves. You find those narrow spaces where you experience some measure of liberation. We were doing that, and along came these leaders, like Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, and others. Impatient. Angry. Yet not so consumed with anger that they don’t offer a sense of reconciliation. The kind of leader who says, ‘God is not happy with the arrangement. It must change, and God is on the side of those who are going to change it.’
“A leader,” he con
tinued, “has to articulate that vision, then get people to vote with their feet and start marching. For while the Moses figure embodies the collective aspirations of the whole, he can’t do it alone. For me, the Exodus is a story about how a leader describes the possibility of a better community, then mobilizes the people to achieve it.”
ANDREW YOUNG WORKS today at the top of a bank building in the heart of the city he served as a congressman, a mayor, and a secret weapon behind Atlanta’s securing the 1996 Summer Olympics. Born in New Orleans in 1932, Young graduated from Howard University and later earned a divinity degree from Hartford Theological Seminary. In a nod to his rudderless early years, he describes his graduation from Howard as “not magna cum laude but ‘Oh, thank you, Lordy.’”
While serving as a minister in Alabama in 1957, he read Gandhi and was invited to meet the young star of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Young expected long hours of philosophical and strategic conversations. In his memoir, An Easy Burden, he describes the meeting as an “extreme disappointment”: “Martin was not inclined to discuss anything philosophical. He was more interested in talking about [his new baby]…. He was moody and into his more private self, and he didn’t feel like acting out the role of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Young later realized he had been expecting too much from a casual meeting and learned to appreciate King’s sometimes brooding, sometimes clownish, private side. Eventually Young moved to Atlanta and became one of King’s chief deputies. He was jesting with his friend from the parking lot of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the night King was assassinated in April 1968.
