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January 22 - February 14, 2021
Peden bolted upright with an idea. “Nesbitt, I think I have your man,” he said. He was thinking of a young man of impeccable habits, just coming out of the finest schools, the son of a wealthy, established pastor. Peden knew the family well enough to be aware that the young man was in Atlanta on vacation. So he arranged for Nesbitt to meet Martin Luther King, Jr.
The King whom Nesbitt sought out had been born into a most unusual family, which had risen from the anonymity of slavery to the top of Atlanta’s Negro elite within the short span of three generations, attached to a church named Ebenezer.
One odd white thread ran through the whole of it: insofar as the Kings encountered anything better than obstruction in the white world, it could be traced more often than not to the influence of a most unlikely source, John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller’s impact upon Negro Atlanta can be dated from a Sunday service in June 1882 at the Erie Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, which he attended with his wife and in-laws.
Son of an itinerant salesman of quack medicines, Rockefeller had already come a long way from the fruit and vegetable merchant who had married Laura Spelman.
Only he and a few partners knew that he had invented that very year the secret network of interlocking stock pledges—called a trust—through which he would levy a monopoly fee on the industrial development of the entire country.
The Baptists were descended from the Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Germany, who had rebelled against Martin Luther for not going far enough in his break with the Catholic Church.
Rockefeller himself always loathed the weakness of the poor and the messy obstructions of democracy, but he would cling to the church of the common people. He would cling also to the Spelmans.
All the surprise guests, including young John junior, were called upon to speak, but only Mrs. Spelman offered an address of any length, recalling the days when her Cleveland home was a stop for Sojourner Truth and her runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. The only meals she ever remembered cooking herself had been those served to young Negro runaways, she said proudly. Before the end of the ceremony, the trustees announced that henceforth the college would be called Spelman, after the Rockefeller in-laws.
On his own and through Dr. Henry Morehouse of the Baptist Home Mission Society in New York, Rockefeller began buying up large tracts of land on Atlanta’s West Side. He housed the Spelman students in an old Union Army barracks pending the completion in 1886 of Rockefeller Hall, the first brick building on the new Spelman campus. He gave adjacent lands to two Baptist colleges for Negro men, including a college named after Dr. Morehouse, who became president of the Spelman board.
At the time, no one realized that this strategic acquisition would make the twentieth-century demographics of Atlanta unique among American cities. As the town grew, these holdings caused white developers to avoid most of the southwest quadrant of the city, and the Negro educational complex provided a pool of professional people to expand outward into that territory along stratified class lines. As a result, Atlanta would not develop along the usual pattern of a Negro inner city surrounded by whites. The two races would move outward into their own suburbs.
Although Atlanta University counted among its faculty one of the nation’s finest sociologists, in W. E. B. Du Bois, it was Morehouse College that acquired a special aura of prestige. The “Morehouse man” became a social and civic model, and was conceded the advantage in courtship battles for the highly prized Spelman women. By the mid-1890s, each school had elevated its curriculum above the grade-school equivalencies of Reconstruction and was awarding full-fledged college degrees. Morehouse awarded its first three in 1897. Among its graduates the next year was a Rev. A. D. Williams, who married
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His successes over the next dozen years went against the larger tides of the early progressive era, when Social Darwinism was rising to full strength in American politics. For race relations, this meant a rush backward, as whites in the South and North generally agreed that there were more important things to do in the world than to contend with each other over the status of the Negro, which was then fixed by science as lowly.
significant exercise of the vote. Northerners acquiesced in the renewed hegemony of Southern whites. The reigning idea was that racial quarrels, while accomplishing nothing since the Civil War, had interfered with business, diverted reform campaigns from more productive fields, and hindered America’s new efforts to win a commanding position in the battle for global influence. Indeed, some liberals spoke of racism as the linchpin of the progressive movement, meaning that progress could be made only when white supremacy mooted the race question in politics.
Old pro-abolitionist journals like the Atlantic Monthly published articles on “the universal supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon.”
In Washington, the last Negro congressman was sent home to North Carolina in the spring of 1901. When President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House later that year, Democrats denounced the President on the front pages for nearly a week.
The ugliest side of this mood visited the Williams neighborhood in 1906, in the form of the Atlanta race riot.
The 1906 riot, along with a similar one two years later in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, provoked Atlanta University’s Du Bois to join with white Northern philanthropists to create the NAACP in 1909.
The Bessie [Rockefeller] Strong Building and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Building were completed by 1918, in time for the education of Alberta Williams. Mike King, later known as Martin Luther King, Sr., and still later as Daddy King, met her while she was studying there.
prize almost beyond imagination. Aside from status and mobility, the Model T gave him the means to pursue the most coveted profession open to unschooled Negroes, the ministry. The car allowed him to keep his regular job while seeking Sunday work at tiny churches that might hire any untrained circuit preacher who sounded all right and could get himself to their remote meetinghouses in the country.
After taking some tests at a local school for Negroes, he was stunned to learn that he could be admitted no higher than the fifth grade. He was twenty years old. Suddenly, years of humiliating pain loomed ahead of him, as he realized that he would have to shed his preacher’s dignity to make a fool of himself in classrooms of children, working at night and studying in his sleep, just to finish high school. College—Alberta’s level—lay somewhere beyond that, and marriage was nowhere in sight.
Mike King’s determination was such that he resolved to push his way through the humiliation rather than avoid it.
May 19, 1927. This was front-page news even in the white newspapers. In one of his rare speeches, Rockefeller eulogized the Spelman sisters—his mother and his aunt Lucy—whose estates had paid for the chapel and for whom it was named. The tone of the ceremony was proud and festive, though mindful of racial politics. Every effort was made to foster the notion that Negro education was benign, posing no threat to the social or political order.
Albert Schweitzer to reconcile religious faith with both science and modern historical scholarship. The Christian faith did not require strict adherence to such doctrines as the virgin birth of Jesus, he declared, pointing out that virgin birth was not unique to Christianity or even to religion but was common to many great figures of antiquity—claimed for Pythagoras, Plato, and Augustus Caesar, as well as for Buddha, Lao-tze, Mahavira, and Zoroaster. He also spoke against other elements of doctrine, such as the belief that Jesus’ death was “a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice,” theologically
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Young King, who was still in diapers when Riverside Church was built, had been born in his parents’ bedroom at the Williams home on January 15, 1929. His father named him Michael Luther King, Jr., but everyone called him “M.L.” or “Little Mike.”
What was new to King at Morehouse was not an absence of fear but a willingness to question the fear that was there.
He made the race issue simple: he was right, segregation was wrong, and the hatefulness of white people was a mystery best left to God. His son had grown up with this attitude, but was startled to find that Morehouse people freely undertook to solve the mystery themselves.
recalled a few years later that his first two years of college pushed him steadily into a “state of scepticism,” during which he regretted his church background. He made it clear that this was extremely painful, but it was also liberating. At Morehouse, he wrote, “the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body.”
These pressures, which introverted King in the classroom and at home, never threatened to paralyze him in the company of his new friends. He and McCall spent a lot of time experimenting with some of the tamer sins against Baptist doctrine, such as dancing and card-playing. They would sneak out of church early to play cards.
When Bob Williams, who finished Morehouse at the end of King’s second year, heard some time later that his young friend had decided after all to become a preacher, his first reaction was to laugh out loud in disbelief.
Whites were using the epithet with greater frequency then, as increased racial hostility was merely one of many new rumblings when the whole world began to adjust to the meaning of the great war. Amid runaway inflation and fears of a return to the Depression, economic warfare broke out into a chaos of general labor strikes, company goon squads, and emergency government programs.
Mobs assassinated no fewer than six Negro war veterans in a single three-week period that summer. In Georgia’s first multiple lynching since 1918, one of those six veterans died when a group of hooded men pulled him, his wife, and another Negro couple out of a car near Monroe, lined the four of them up in front of a ditch, and fired a barrage that left a reported 180 bullet holes in one of the four corpses.
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.
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 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.
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
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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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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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
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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
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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.
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.
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
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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.
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
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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,’
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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.
