Parting the Waters (13 page)

King showed little interest in the campus agitation about public affairs. Now a junior, he was spending more and more time in the company of Larry Williams and Walter McCall, studying preachers. It was a tight little trio. As time and practicality seasoned their religious rebellions somewhat, they sought to answer the question of whether the ministry could be cut to the shape of their ambitions. They could be found in the Wheat Street balcony as often as three Sundays a month that year, studying Borders' mannerisms, his organizational style, and above all the high-toned sermons in which he aroused his congregation without merely repeating the homilies of eternal life. Not surprisingly, Borders welcomed their attendance a great deal more than Reverend King appreciated their absence. When Larry Williams, an Ebenezer member, grew so close to Borders over the year that he asked to be apprenticed to him as a Wheat Street assistant, Reverend King took it as proof of intrigue. He asked his son to cut off his friendship with Williams.

M.L. refused, which made his position in the jumble of private belief and family harmony more delicate than ever. Actually, his gropings toward a conscionable brand of preaching made him look beyond Borders toward something much less orthodox, but he could not say so to his father. Reverend King's dissatisfaction was real and close to him personally. In addition, he could not ignore the possibility that any religion vague and secular enough to satisfy him would be too mushy to sustain a church. Reverend King always talked about sustaining the church. M.L. was trying to steer through treacherous psychological waters in many respects. By the end of his junior year, he had given up talk of becoming a lawyer and was noncommittal when asked about his future.

Pressures at home were so severe that King rejoined the Morehouse tobacco program for the summer of 1947. As a fund-raising venture during the war, the college had contracted to supply Connecticut growers with student laborers for the harvest. King had made the trip three years earlier, mostly to get out of Atlanta, but this time it was less of an adventure, more of a work gang. Having been voted one of the two laziest workers before, King now channeled his natural exuberance into playful but determined resistance. There was beer around the barracks at times, and for King the antics culminated abruptly when a policeman accosted him during a nighttime foray. As scrapes go, it was rather civilized; he did not see the inside of a cell. Still, for any young person, let alone Reverend King's son, the mere thought of explaining such an incident at home caused great consternation. Reports were sure to reach his father.

Back in Atlanta, he told some of his closest friends that he had decided to soften the blow by first telling Reverend King what he most wanted to hear: he would follow him into the ministry. The news overjoyed the patriarch, who made a show of weighing the sincerity of his son's intentions but then scheduled M.L. for an immediate trial sermon. He told the news to the Ebenezer congregation in the only acceptable way—that his son had been “called by God to the pulpit.” The younger King's friends knew he was too sensitive to be teased about these circumstances at the time, but later they joked about how it was really the “hot sun of the tobacco field” that had called him.

On the appointed Sunday afternoon, a sizable crowd filed into the church basement, where trial sermons were traditionally held. Then others came, and still more, until Reverend King, in his glory, finally shouted, “It won't hold 'em! It won't hold 'em!” and waved everyone upstairs into the main sanctuary. Young M. L. King did not have the commanding presence of his much larger father in the pulpit, as some noticed, but he already spoke with an authority that made people forget his small stature. Although he talked less of Jesus and used more big words than many of his listeners would have liked, the trial was a great success. The boy was only eighteen, they said, and youngsters always talk more about living a good life than about heaven. Clearly, he was gifted, for he seemed to project his entire being in the expression of his sentiments, the sonorous baritone making music of his convictions. The Ebenezer congregation rose up in celebration. On a word from Reverend King, young M.L. was quickly ordained as a full-fledged minister and made assistant pastor of the church. No one but young King and a few of his Morehouse friends knew that his first pulpit oration had been borrowed from “Life Is What You Make It,” a published sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick of the Riverside Church in New York.

 

The last year at Morehouse was a heady one for King. He and Larry Williams, now assistant pastor to Borders, walked around the campus like young lords. Whenever Borders asked Williams to conduct one of his funerals, Williams would ask King to stand in with him. If the two of them were not preaching sermons, they were marrying and burying people, while still going to classes and doing homework, and basking in fresh admiration from local females. Walter McCall teased his friends for getting carried away at times, but he was on the same path. All three of them felt the honor of being an out-of-town guest preacher at the churches of King's uncle Joel in Shade Grove, South Carolina. King once flew home from his uncle's church, becoming the first member of the family to travel by airplane. He and Williams made the trip so often that they gave each other new nicknames. King became “Shady” and Williams “Grove.” Morehouse students called the two of them “The Wreckers,” in tribute to their reputations as ladies' men. King's friends still saw fit to call him Tweedie, noting the affectation in his habit of closing his sermon folder just as he stepped into the pulpit—so that everyone would know he was preaching without notes. This practice greatly annoyed Reverend King, who wanted his son to preach from a manuscript.

The big news during King's last year at Morehouse came out of Washington. Truman became the first American President to address an NAACP convention, and when the commission he had appointed the previous year released its report, “To Secure These Rights,” most observers expressed shock that Truman allowed publication of an agenda so far in advance of public opinion. The report brought the phrase “civil rights” into common political parlance, replacing “the Negro question.” There was even greater shock the following February, just three days after the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in Delhi, when Truman sent a special civil rights message to Congress asking for a federal anti-lynching law, among other things. Atlanta
Constitution
editor Ralph McGill, the South's most responsible liberal on the race question, attacked the legislation as too radical for the white South, which stimulated the NAACP's Walter White to call McGill a “weasel.” These two men then felt obliged to go through a minuet of apology and redefinition on liberalism's shrinking territory of comfort. At Morehouse, a majority of realists saw the new bill as a desperate effort to revive Truman's reelection hopes in the North. They predicted correctly that the bill would go nowhere, but still there were distant rumblings indicating that the postwar world might become an altogether new age. The new mood was an old battered faith, now buttressed by the goodwill that follows a war and by the harsh realities of a shrinking globe.

King took his first public stands that winter on issues far removed from the dominant ones, beginning with an article for the campus newspaper titled “The Purpose of Education.” Most Morehouse students, he wrote, were in danger of pursuing education as an “instrument of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses.” Properly conceived, he argued, education provides “noble ends rather than a means to an end” and rescues learning from the moral vacuum of “efficiency.” “The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.” As an example of such a creature, he cited no less a figure than former Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, who, King wrote, had a Phi Beta Kappa key and “one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America…yet he contends that I am an inferior being.”

The article was vintage early King—taking a broad swipe at a topic of his own choosing, making provocative connections (in this case linking the selfishness of Morehouse students with the racism of Talmadge), working toward a synthesis of religion and intellect, and struggling against himself to express original ideas while indulging a fondness for platitudes. Education was very much on his mind that year. Now that he had made a career choice, there was indeed a purpose to his own education. He knew that he needed big ideas to go with his big words if he wanted to elevate his ministry above fundamentalism without sinking into permanent skepticism. In this crucial respect, his training had only begun. He wanted to go to seminary, as had Borders, Fosdick, and Johns, among the finest of the preachers he had studied. He wanted to go specifically to a white seminary, so that while answering the burning questions he could also prove to himself what he had always been taught—that he was as good as anyone. Finally, he wanted to get out of Atlanta for a while, and away from Reverend King. By entering the ministry, he had taken a step or two back under his father's control. That year, Reverend King did with his new assistant pastor what he could not have done a year earlier with the politely rebellious student: he made M.L. apologize publicly to the Ebenezer congregation for the sin of going to a YWCA dance with Larry Williams. King also tried but failed to prevent his son from joining a new interracial council of students from Atlanta's white and Negro colleges, arguing that M.L. should stay among his own and not risk “betrayals” from the white students. King thought this was absurd.

Before the school year ended, Morehouse observed a traditional celebration of student oratory that made it unique among Negro colleges. Each academic department, and most clubs and associations, selected an outstanding student to give an annual address to the student body on its behalf. The procession of speeches continued for weeks—one a day at the compulsory chapel services in the basement of Sale Hall—culminating in the Senior Sermon. President Mays and the faculty chose King to speak for his class at that event. Some of his classmates would retain vivid memories of being startled by King's passion and clarity—especially when he declared that “there are moral laws of the universe that man can no more violate with impunity than he can violate its physical laws.”

That spring he applied to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and told first his mother, then his sister, then his brother, and finally his father that he wanted to go there. Reverend King snorted in protest for a few days. Seeing no need of further education, he did not want to lose his son, or his assistant pastor, and he was extremely suspicious of Crozer as a white seminary noted for its liberal leanings in theology. In the end, as always, he not only relented but agreed to foot the bill. Neither he nor his son had any idea of the enormous impact Crozer would have on young King's life, but one of them, at least, was eager to find out.

Christine King and her brother graduated in separate ceremonies at Sisters Chapel in June 1948. She was twenty; he was nineteen. As he preached through the summer and made ready to leave home, King was especially happy that his best friend, Walter McCall, was going to Crozer with him. Together they moved the Mac and Mike show into the great Northland to match wits with the smartest white folks they could find.

Late in the summer, King arrived at Chester, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town outside Philadelphia that was the home of Crozer Theological Seminary. It was 1948, a year of surprises—the Berlin blockade, the first sensational charges against Alger Hiss, Truman's upset victory over Thomas Dewey—but to King and his fellow students nothing would match the first few days on the Crozer campus. Most of them expected an atmosphere of modestly progressive religion, of biblical belief tempered by modern knowledge. Their idea of liberalism was more or less along the line of one white student who arrived with a satchel full of research he hoped would prove his thesis that it was biologically possible for Jonah to have lived three days and nights inside the belly of a whale, as the Bible says he did.

What the students encountered was an atmosphere of unorthodox freethinking that went far beyond the rebellions of youth in that taut era. There were signs of it in the naked children who played outside their home with the full approval of their father, M. Scott Enslin, a New Testament scholar of world renown. Student rumors quickly established that Enslin observed neither Christmas nor Easter, believing them to be historically inaccurate perversions of the religious spirit. Some students labored to control their surprise over such things as the enormous gold cross on the table at the front of the Crozer chapel, a display that would be prohibited in most Baptist churches as idolatrous. And although they might not admit it, nearly all the students were shocked by what was directly beneath the chapel: a recreation room with three pool tables and a shuffleboard court. King, like most of them, thought he was modern to approve of dancing, but he had always shunned pool halls as the lowlife setting for knife fights and shootouts. Now he confronted the reality of a poolroom beneath his seminary chapel. Students in practice preaching class would occasionally hear the heathen clatter of a new rack being broken below.

The Negro students in the entering class had selected Crozer precisely because it was a white school of high reputation. Each one had steeled himself in anticipation of an alien environment, expecting to be one of a handful of Negroes at most, and perhaps the only one. What they found instead was almost as big a surprise as the pool tables. There were ten of them in a class of thirty-two. When Walter McCall arrived later in the year—he had been working to save tuition money—they would make up a full third of the class. Their classmates included three Chinese students, several Indians, a Japanese student who was refined and quite popular, a Negro from Panama, and assorted other foreigners. They were all stirred in among the white students in classes, dormitories, and the cafeteria, where a white student from Mississippi stunned everyone by blessing the food with a prayer that began, “Oh Thou whom we've been led to call Buddha, Yahweh, Christ, Zoroaster…” and on through the pagan deities. No major seminary of any denomination had achieved such a racial mix, and none would do so again, even after the black revolution of the next generation.

The Crozer administration was making valiant efforts to instill egalitarianism among the students. They had removed all the locks from the dormitory doors, for instance, which to the Negro students meant that the Crozer philosophy excluded not only racial separation but also racial security. Students could wander freely in and out of each other's rooms at any hour of the day or night. This arrangement modified notions of physical safety and even private property, so that nearly everything came to depend on community trust. To clean up the students' rooms, Crozer provided a staff of polite and efficient maids who, like the faculty, were all white.

Crozer president Edwin Aubrey, who years earlier had taught Benjamin Mays at the University of Chicago, called the new students together in the chapel early in the year and told them bluntly that they were the largest and least intelligent class he had known at the seminary. He had grudgingly yielded to financial pressure to increase enrollment, he said, but he refused to relax standards of performance. Aubrey correctly predicted that many of the students gathered there soon would be gone—less than half the entering class, including six of the eleven Negroes, would graduate in 1951—but he did not say that he himself was preparing to resign the presidency.

Like Crozer itself, Aubrey was something of a theological anachronism, a bulwark of classical liberalism on increasingly conservative terrain. Religious liberals, having won control of most of the nation's institutions of higher learning twenty-five years earlier, after the Scopes and Fosdick trials, could no longer sustain both academic excellence and mass appeal. Religious thought was becoming vaguer and more secular, no longer commanding the intense public interest that had once put Fosdick on the front page of the
Times
. Religious conservatives, mean-while, had established their own seminaries and were perfecting simpler messages of great popular appeal in a troubled, complex age. King's graduate school career would witness the rise to national prominence of Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale. Against these trends, Crozer failed to compete successfully for students.

Aubrey, a native of England, first held out to make Crozer a small school of elite scholars, and then, facing extinction, tried to hold on to the seminary's liberal image by recruiting an expanded class in 1948 that included an unprecedented number of Negroes and Southern whites together. This experiment put Aubrey under considerable strain, as a number of Crozer trustees already believed that the liberal image was part of the recruitment problem. Aubrey would resign that year and be succeeded by a caretaker president whom the students called “Creeping Jesus” for his habits of walking slow and saying little. The Crozer president during King's third and final year would be a hard-preaching moderate from Wake Forest, Sankey Blanton, who, by raising money and toning down the school's image, would help squeeze out another two decades of life for Crozer. In retrospect, King's class at Crozer was a desperate racial gamble in an isolated pocket of theological history, but to the students it was a culmination of American idealism, at a time when there was much confident talk of conquering poverty and disease, of ending colonialism and establishing an international brotherhood within the empire of liberty.

Two required courses occupied most of King's time during the first year: M. Scott Enslin on the New Testament and James B. Pritchard on the Old. Both teachers were accomplished linguists who used the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts to sort out the historical mysteries within the Bible. Enslin addressed the many contradictory accounts of quotations ascribed to Jesus—such as “he that is not against us is for us” in the Gospel of Mark, as opposed to “he that is not with me is against me” in Matthew—always drawing upon larger lessons about the differing purposes and historical circumstances of the biblical authors. A radical biblical critic in the tradition of Albert Schweitzer, Enslin did not hesitate to dispute what he regarded as historically fanciful biblical statements—declaring, for instance, that Jesus and John the Baptist never met each other. Pritchard taught a similarly unsparing course about the prophets of ancient Judaism. He was just finishing the preparation of
Ancient Near Eastern Texts
, a huge volume that would become a standard reference work. An archeologist and historian of the ancient Near Eastern cultures, Pritchard taught his students that neither Moses nor the great Israelite exodus from Egypt was mentioned anywhere in the contemporary literature of the region—not by the Persians, the Hittites, the Sumerians, or the Egyptians themselves. Pritchard's conclusion, which he shared with four or five of the other leading Western scholars in the field, was that Moses was an uncorroborated historical figure, quite possibly a legendary one, and that the Exodus itself was probably a much smaller and more symbolic event than the one described in the Bible.

The standing joke among the Crozer students who survived these courses was that Pritchard destroyed the biblical image of Moses in the first term and Enslin finished off Jesus in the second. King not only survived but flourished academically as never before. He earned a B—in Pritchard's course, which put him near the top because Pritchard gave out only two grades of A—above him. (The other four Negroes who would graduate with King all received D's.) Pritchard was surprised to find that a Southern Baptist like King adjusted so quickly to Crozer. King was not only undaunted by the subject matter of his course but also socially precocious around professors of musty old subjects. He soon became a regular babysitter for the Pritchard daughters, presenting himself for duty in a suit and tie, carrying a stack of books under his arm.

 

When Walter McCall arrived for the winter term, he found his friend utterly transformed. The indifferent student of the Morehouse years was replaced by one who was utterly absorbed in course work and already earning grades that would make him valedictorian of his class. As the most abrupt and perhaps most pronounced character change in King's life, this transition at Crozer was partly the result of his intense desire to distinguish himself in a white culture. Competing for the first time against white students, many of whom had superior college training, King wanted fervently to prove that he could not only succeed but excel. This desire, and his heavy sense of racial duty, entangled him in a paradox of identity that Du Bois had made famous among Negro intellectuals more than forty years earlier: “One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…” For King, this meant that to represent his race nobly he had to behave more like his idea of white people and less like white people's idea of Negroes. In particular, he was driven to escape the white stereotype of the Negro who was, in his words, “loud and always laughing…dirty and messy.” At Crozer, he was “morbidly conscious” of being late. He dressed more immaculately than ever, and he was “grimly serious” in the classroom. In short, he gave the Tweedie side of himself the appearance of a dedicated scholar.

These concerns hardly made King unique among the Negro students, however, and his sudden excellence was supported by an enthusiasm of much deeper substance. Unlike many of his fellow students, he welcomed the skeptical rigor of Pritchard and Enslin. Crozer's approach to seminary training was to tear down the students' religious belief system and start over, building a body of religious knowledge as rationally as possible, reducing the “leap of faith” to the tiniest arc of reverence. Crozer tried to do for its students what boot camp did for marine recruits, but with a drastically less fixed idea of what the finished product would be. In this difficult process, King enjoyed a large head start over most of his fellow students. Having muscled his way into a state of religious skepticism some years earlier against the combined weight of his heritage and his father's authority, he found Crozer's idea of religion no less liberating than the racially mixed classes, the unlocked dorms, and the white maids. He was on his own, six hundred miles from home, immersed in a world of religious, moral, and historical ideas he knew he loved in a way he could not yet define, with no prior obligation to buy any of it. He became suddenly and permanently fascinated. The floor of his room was soon piled high with books, and he would sometimes read all night.

Among the theologians and philosophers King studied during his first year at Crozer was Walter Rauschenbusch, a German Lutheran-turned-Baptist whose experiences as a minister in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York at the close of the nineteenth century led him to write
Christianity and the Social Crisis
, the publication of which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Social Gospel movement in American churches. (The book was among the few King would ever cite specifically as an influence on his own religious beliefs.) Rauschenbusch rejected the usual religious emphasis on matters of piety, metaphysics, and the supernatural, interpreting Christianity instead as a spirit of brotherhood made manifest in social ethics. He saw the Christian ministry as an extension of the Old Testament prophets, who denounced pride, selfishness, and oppression as transgressions against the divine historical plan, which was to culminate in the Christian ideal of “love perfection” among all people. Rauschenbusch was not the first theologian to see the similarity between the Second Coming and Marx's vision of a classless, stateless society, but he was the first to tie them together boldly as both the essence of biblical religion and the goal of Enlightenment progress. The minister's job, he declared optimistically, is “to apply the teaching functions of the pulpit to the pressing questions of public morality.” Critics denounced him as a utopian or a Communist. But to generations of followers, Rauschenbusch rescued religion from sterile otherworldliness by defining social justice as the closest possible human approximation of God's love.

George W. Davis, the professor who introduced King to Rauschenbusch, was the son of a union activist in the Pittsburgh steel mills. He was also the only strict pacifist on the Crozer faculty, and the strongest admirer of Gandhi. It was Davis' personal copy of
That Strange Little Brown Man of India, Gandhi
that King read in the seminary library, responding positively to its message and to its overtly racial characterization of Gandhi. King never accepted pacifism at Crozer, and in fact wrote a paper attacking A. J. Muste's notion that the atomic bomb had transformed the essential moral questions of war and peace, but he did otherwise adopt Davis as a mentor and faculty adviser, taking nearly one-third of his Crozer courses from him. The pairing made sense, as Davis was the embodiment of Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel, and King, in his own words, “found it easy to fall in line with the liberal tradition” at Crozer. He also warmed to Davis as a kind and accessible man.