Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

The Negro church, legal in some respects before the Negro family, became more solvent than the local undertaker.

served not only as a place of worship but also as a bulletin board to a people who owned no organs of communication, a credit union to those without banks, and even a kind of people’s court.

“the preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.”

As a rule, the preachers had no use for church democracy. They considered themselves called by God to the role of Moses, a combination of ruler and prophet, and they believed that the congregation behaved best when its members, like the children of Israel, obeyed as children.

and wrote out a sermon of his own, “Transfigured Moments,” which in 1926 became

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associating with those who provided them? He accused them of persisting in the white man’s view of slavery—that labor was demeaning—when Negroes should know that it was oppression, not labor, that demeaned them.

obsessed with this insulation because he believed Negroes went so far as to follow the lead of the white newspapers, objectifying Negroes—especially the victims of police violence—as a faceless category apart from them.

for a moment and then directed her to post a new sermon title for the following Sunday: “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery.”

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.

Williams, whose accomplishments at the Ebenezer church were making him a community leader, became the first president of the Atlanta chapter.

just as the people who lived near Ebenezer were his constituents at home. They should be recognized, respected, and cultivated, not only by Williams himself but by his entire household. This was social justice and a family enterprise together, God’s business and their business.

no preacher can prosper long by fleecing his people,

Harry Emerson Fosdick controversy,

“the Jesse James of the theological world.”

“black” and “negro” (the latter traceable to the earliest slave traders, who were Spanish and Portuguese) were widely disparaged because the slavemasters had preferred them, and also because their literal meaning excluded hundreds of thousands of mulattoes, whose color was not black. “Colored” was thought to be more inclusively accurate, but among other drawbacks it failed to distinguish the former slaves from Orientals and Indians. Moreover, the term “colored” implied that whites were not colored, or that coloring was a property added somehow to basic human qualities. Alternatively, some argued for the word “African,” but this only raised a continuing dispute as to whether the term referred to race or the place of origin. By the late nineteenth century, the term “Negro” came to be widely accepted, after newspapers in New Orleans mounted a campaign to capitalize the first letter. (White newspapers were slow to adopt this dignifying practice. The New York Times did not begin to capitalize “Negro” until 1950.) The name question was never settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

In Depression Atlanta, roughly two-thirds of all adult Negro males were unemployed,

“my present anti-capitalistic feelings.”

Once complimented on the honor of being Harvard’s first Negro Ph.D., Du Bois is said to have icily replied, “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s.”

NBC, and Gulf Oil, the program’s sponsor. Network officials stated that they were helpless to interfere, citing Rogers’ First Amendment rights, but two weeks later NBC Radio censored all mention of race, segregation, or lynching from a show about the twenty-fifth anniversary of the NAACP. Wilkins cranked up the telegrams again, but NBC found a way out of the crossfire: Will Rogers switched to the more acceptable term “darky,” and shows dealing with the NAACP ceased to be heard on NBC.

Even TV has racist roots.

January 1934 Crisis, in which he turned the entire NAACP philosophy on its head. Negroes should face the fact that they would die segregated, he declared, in spite of all justice and their best efforts. Therefore, to hate segregation was inevitably to hate themselves, and it would be far better to embrace voluntary segregation in schools, colleges, businesses—both for reasons of psychic well-being and to build concentrated strength for later fights.

sophisticated white Americans took it for granted that the Civil War sprang from causes that had little if anything to do with race.

not even Hattie McDaniel, who played “Mammy” in the film, was allowed to join.

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.

thought of race behavior as a subcategory of all social behavior. They tried to reduce racial fear from a taboo to a branch of knowledge, penetrable by logic.

Walter Chivers, his adviser and primary teacher in the department, conceived of racism in vaguely Marxist terms as a necessary byproduct of an economic system that benefited whites.

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.

The minister’s job, he declared optimistically, is “to apply the teaching functions of the pulpit to the pressing questions of public morality.”

James Russell Lowell and William Cullen Bryant.

“the three P’s”: proving, painting, and persuasion,

There was the Ladder Sermon, the Jewel Sermon, the Skyrocket Sermon, the Twin Sermon, the Surprise Package Sermon, and many others.

Niebuhr influence went to the heart of the public and private King and affected him more deeply than did any modern figure, including Gandhi,

“our predatory self-interest.”

There was no evidence, said Niebuhr, that human beings became less selfish or less predatory as they became better educated. War, cruelty, and injustice survived because people were by nature sinful.

admit evil as a permanent aspect of the human character,

it was not the mind which governed the self, but the self which governed the mind.”

distinction between the character of people acting in large social groups as opposed to their character as individual people.

individuals could respond to reason, to the call of justice, and even to the love perfection of the religious spirit, but nations, corporations, labor unions, and othe...

Marx offered only an “apocalyptic vision” of triumph over selfishness and oppression, “in the style of great drama and classical religion.”

Niebuhr worked personally to help intellectuals escape from Germany, bringing Paul Tillich to teach with him at Union,

The Social Gospel avoided the grit of politics; Marxism abhorred the church and all forms of idealism. To Niebuhr, they represented together the overriding tragedy of the age—“modern man’s loss of confidence in moral forces.” By “moral,” he meant the mediating unscientific realm of justice, which combines love and politics, spiritualism and realism. Morality was a compromise of religion and politics, necessitated by the special character of the immoral society.

Toward the end of Tolstoy’s life, Gandhi corresponded with him and named his first commune, in South Africa, Tolstoy Farm.

non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors.” Niebuhr amplified this gleam of hope as it might apply to

the cause of the American Negro. If Gandhi’s methods were somehow adapted to American conditions and then employed in a difficult, protracted campaign, they could make headway toward justice even against the selfish forces of the immoral society.

Niebuhr concluded that “there is no problem of political life to which religious imagination can ...

Niebuhr combined an evangelical liberal’s passion for the Sermon on the Mount with a skeptic’s insistence on the cussedness of human nature.

Even as a student, King believed that religion was alive only at its edges, and that doubt was as important as belief.

In later years, King never tried to stem the rivers of ink that described him as a Gandhian. Part of his acquiescence was a product of public relations, as he knew that within the American mass market there was a certain exotic comfort in the idea of a Gandhian Negro. King mentioned buying a half-dozen books about Gandhi in a single evening, but he never bothered to name or describe any of them. He almost never spoke of Gandhi personally, and his comments about Gandhism were never different than his thoughts about nonviolence in general. By contrast, he invoked Niebuhr in every one of his own major books, always with a sketch of Moral Man and Immoral Society. He confessed that he became “enamored” of Niebuhr, who “left me in a state of confusion.”

Historically, such avoidance would help explain how some four million mulattoes came into being in the United States with practically no recorded cases of legal or ecclesiastical disgrace ever attached to members of the dominant white culture.

he embraced Personalism’s teaching that there was rich, empirical meaning in religious experience.