Parting the Waters (14 page)

Not all Crozer professors carried their modern biblical criticism into liberal politics. Enslin, most prominently, made no secret of his disdain for Rauschenbusch and the entire Social Gospel movement. To Enslin, as to Albert Schweitzer, the Sermon on the Mount teachings that Rauschenbusch considered the essence of religion were intended only as an “interim ethic” pending the imminent establishment of a heavenly order that Jesus expected but that never came. Thus he dismissed the exaltation of the humble in the Sermon on the Mount, along with the trouble-some blanket condemnations of worldly attachments. Those teachings were irrelevant to ordinary human affairs, he said, and the concerns of the Social Gospel were essentially political squabbles far beneath religion's proper focus on the nature of ultimate reality. Enslin's criticisms were brilliant and acidic, his behavior eccentric, and his private beliefs well concealed. He alone appeared to understand them, and students puzzled as to why such a man always attended at least three Baptist church services a week, where he was obliged to listen to banalities that he would not tolerate for an instant on the campus. The faculty considered him its leading Tory in politics, and most students thought of him as something of a bigot. In his letter recommending valedictorian King to graduate schools, Enslin would express surprise that a colored man from the South had done so well at Crozer.

Crozer students were more divided than the faculty in their social beliefs. The great racial experiment of 1948 dismayed some of the new white students as much as it gratified the Negro ones. An undercurrent of tension shortened some meals in the cafeteria, and the open-door dormitories led to inevitable difficulties that occasionally flared up into hostility. Forgiveness was the school's specific reaction and racial harmony its recommended prescription. Fully in keeping with the approved Crozer attitude, King expressed the belief that love and reason could bring out in all people a basic goodness that was deeper than racial hatreds or personal animosities. All but one of his graduating Negro classmates generally agreed with him. The exception, Joseph Kirkland, was the only Northerner among them and also the only preacher's son other than King. Streetwise and tough, Kirkland had rebelled against his authoritarian, intellectual father—holder of three Ph.D.'s, pastor of Philadelphia's largest Negro Baptist church—at an early age, becoming a numbers runner and bootleg whiskey dealer in the ghetto underworld. His idea of the Social Gospel was to drag Crozer professors into boozy strip joints, exposing them directly to the common folk they normally analyzed from a distance. Kirkland believed that the Social Gospelers were naïve about the social chasms within each race. He teased the Southerners for being so impressed by the racial integration in the North generally—reminding them that such policies did not extend a single foot off the campus into downtown Chester. He teased King in particular for being sheltered. At Crozer, King was the only Negro and one of the very few students of any race who did not have to work at an outside job to support his studies. King “works with his checkbook,” laughed Kirkland, who was rather proud of himself for having spurned his own father's support. When King first visited Kirkland's room and objected to the beer kept there in coolers, saying that they all had “the burdens of the Negro race” on their shoulders, Kirkland replied, “So what?”

 

King's oratory was among his chief distinctions at Crozer. His peers so admired his preaching technique that they packed the chapel whenever he delivered the regular Thursday student sermon, and kibitzers drifted into practice preaching classes when King was at the podium. A generation later, some of the white students who remembered very little else about King would remember the text, theme, and impact of specific King practice sermons. There was a chapel sermon on the text “They have a zeal, but not according to knowledge,” for example, and a talk to the women's group of a white Baptist church on the theme of Christianity and communism. King perfected minute details of showmanship, such as tucking away his notes at the podium in a manner just unsubtle enough to be noticed, and his general style was extremely formal. He called his orations “religious lectures” instead of sermons, in fact, but the conflict inside him over such issues as knowledge versus zeal—with all their underpinnings of race, class, and theology—generated enough heat to make his sermons interesting. At Crozer, practice preaching courses brought King some of his best grades and highest approval. During the three seminary years, he took no fewer than nine courses related to the art of pulpit oratory.

His homiletics professor, Robert Keighton, brought to the classroom a preoccupation with style and the classical form of argument, which suited King perfectly. A “high” Baptist—accused by some of the “low” or “snake stomping” Baptists on campus of being an Episcopalian at heart—Keighton favored understatement, dry humor, tightly structured presentations, and a liberal sprinkling of illustrative quotations from poets and playwrights. He had organized, and still coached, the Crozer drama club. In class, Keighton remarked that he wished he knew his Bible as well as he knew Shakespeare, and it was rumored among the students that he had been offered a curatorship at the Shakespeare Museum in England. Keighton's taste in more modern poets ran to W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, but as a concession to the romantic yearnings of preachers, he introduced King to some of the English-language poets he would quote throughout his public career, among them James Russell Lowell and William Cullen Bryant. Perhaps less fortunately, he also introduced the rhetoric of Saint Augustine, who was given to dramatic pairings of night-and-day clichés (“muddied the clear spring of friendship with the dirt of physical desire and clouded over its brightness with the dark hell of lust”), especially when speaking of sin or evil. Keighton, like Augustine, emphasized that a large part of religion was public persuasion, as can occur when speakers of the highest gifts address the most difficult questions. King came to accept the shorthand description of oratory as “the three P's”: proving, painting, and persuasion, aimed to win over successively the mind, imagination, and heart.

In lectures dealing with the preacher's tradecraft, Keighton taught that a preacher should first prepare an outline based on one of the proven sermon structures. There was the Ladder Sermon, the Jewel Sermon, the Skyrocket Sermon, the Twin Sermon, the Surprise Package Sermon, and many others. The Ladder Sermon climbed through arguments of increasing power toward the conclusion the preacher hoped to make convincing. The Jewel Sermon held up a single idea from many different angles, as a jeweler might examine a precious stone. The Skyrocket Sermon usually began with a gripping human interest story leading to a cosmic spiritual lesson, followed by a shower of derivative lessons falling back to earth among the congregation. Keighton's method was to lecture on such methods and then direct his students to try them. More than a few students left Crozer because of stage fright in Keighton's homiletics. King thrived on both the setting and the pressure. Keighton's homiletics imposed order and style on his childhood desire to use big words, in an art form he had studied all his life.

Preaching class was the laboratory of the seminary. It was also a vital part of campus social life, because public speaking exposed each student's personality and facilitated friendships to a degree far beyond the likely results of coffee hours or other social conventions. The Negro students shared much merriment in contrasting Keighton's archly formal structures with their own homemade preaching formulas. Keighton might have his Ladder Sermon, they joked, but they had Rabbit in the Bushes, by which they meant that if they felt the crowd stir, they should repeat the theme, just as a hunter shoots into the shaking bush on the assumption that a rabbit might be there. Keighton might have his Classification Sermon, but they had Three Points in the Palm of a Hand. King and Walter McCall liked nothing better than sneaking in to hear their Negro classmates preach in real churches off campus. Both of them were accomplished mimics. To the mortification of the classmate, McCall would shout out a countrified parody of what they had heard, full of emotional fireworks about Jesus as the Holy Spirit incarnate, and then King would deliver the “correct” versions in equally exaggerated spiels of Enslin's rational historicism, speaking of Jesus as a gifted Jewish prophet with a lot of personal problems.

With Horace “Whit” Whitaker, a Southern Negro who was generally considered the second-best preacher in the class, King and McCall spent many evenings at the home of Rev. J. Pious Barbour, a local pastor who had been the first Morehouse graduate to attend Crozer. Barbour was a raconteur and amateur philosopher of some renown, and the influx of Negro students at Crozer in 1948 gave him a steady audience for his favorite pastime, Socratic dialogues, which he hosted after sumptuous home-cooked meals prepared by Mrs. Barbour. Boasting of himself as “the deepest theologian in the Baptist Church,” Barbour sometimes slipped into outright nonsense, as in his quotation-laden warnings against letting a Catholic priest into one's house, but he was never dull. He enjoyed making the students uncomfortable with the latest ideas about almost anything. “Tillich is all wet,” he later wrote King. “There is no ‘being itself'…Kant proved that.” Barbour welcomed the mental jousting as a relief from his less stimulating duties in the church. The students turned his ample hospitality into a social mainstay, taking dates there for extended evenings that allowed them to enjoy the good food and show off their learning before young ladies who were impressed enough or patient enough to listen.

One of King's dates that first year was Juanita Sellers, an Atlantan whom he had known since high school. Attractive, poised, and intelligent, she was doing graduate work at Columbia University along with Christine King and a few other friends from Spelman. Sellers had grown up in the new elite West Side of Negro Atlanta, daughter of the city's most prominent Negro mortician. Her social standing was such that when people carped about “social climbing” when she and her group of friends all pledged the Delta sorority at Columbia, they replied airily that such a motive was impossible for them because they had nowhere to climb. This attitude, in addition to her other qualities, made her precisely the sort of woman Daddy King was anxious for his son to marry. There was some rejoicing in Atlanta, therefore, when King visited Sellers in New York several times that year and invited her to spend weekends at Crozer. Sellers and Christine King traveled down to the seminary together, spending more than one evening with King and his friends at the feet of Pious Barbour.

During his first summer vacation from Crozer, while serving again as more or less the full-time pastor at Ebenezer, King saw Sellers enough to spark a rumor that their longstanding friendship was turning into a romance. While entertaining her one afternoon in the King home on Boulevard, he announced suddenly that there was someone he wanted her to meet. He urged her to brush her hair and freshen her makeup that very moment, to look her best. Without further explanation he escorted her to the Liberty Baptist Church, not far from Ebenezer. There King rang the doorbell at the church office and was invited in for tea with the pastor. It was all very pleasant, though churchy and formal. Afterward, King thanked Sellers for obliging him and said no more about the visit. It took a somewhat perplexed Sellers several days to find out from Christine King that the visit had been an exercise in ministerial diplomacy. King's previous steady girlfriend had been an “East Sider” and a member of the Liberty church. By calling on her pastor in the company of Sellers, King was announcing his change of heart and implicitly offering him an opportunity to object. Moreover, the visit was a courtesy to the Liberty pastor, so that he would be well informed if the previous girlfriend asked him as her pastoral counsellor what had become of King, as was entirely possible. These and a thousand other calculations made up the preacher's code, in which King was an advanced student.

 

Daddy King looked proudly on his son's mastery of the political and social graces, but the moral standards he absorbed at Crozer were another matter entirely. By the second year, King was so imbued with the Social Gospel that he dared to drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and play pool openly in the presence of his father, whenever Reverend King visited Crozer. He went so far as to usher his father into the poolroom beneath the chapel, inviting him to play, trying to act as though it were perfectly normal, taking pride in his hard-earned skill as a player. He knew Reverend King would object violently, which he did, but he trusted excessively in the persuasive powers of the liberal Christian teachings that defilement comes only from within (as in Matthew 15:11). When he pointed out to his father that it was not the smoke-filled poolroom itself that was sinful but rather the plan sometimes hatched there to rob the liquor store, Reverend King brushed it aside as a book-learning excuse for sin. In what was to become a permanent pattern of conversation between them, King gently teased his father about being old-fashioned, and Reverend King defended his methods by pointing to his own time-tested success in the world.

The underlying battle of wills was a stalemate, the insurrectionary potential of which was not lost on relatives such as Rev. Joel King. With the senior King, he visited his nephew at Crozer several times, never failing to ask why King permitted M.L. to smoke and play pool while forbidding such vices to everyone else, including Joel, who was a grown man almost old enough to be M.L.'s father. Reverend King seethed under this line of questioning. Joel, for his part, decided he was not getting a satisfactory answer. Finally, after one long drive back to Atlanta from Crozer, he decided to try some of his nephew's boldness himself. As he and Reverend King walked toward the house on Boulevard, Joel lit a cigar. King walked wordlessly ahead of him up the steps to the front door. Then, just as Joel was beginning to think that the crisis had passed, King whirled and crushed the lighted cigar with the back of his hand, sending sparks into his brother's hair and down his suit. Joel King never figured out how M.L. managed to defy Reverend King with impunity.