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March 31, 2022 - January 9, 2023
Although the women had been the driving force behind all of the black community efforts of the last few years, a mass protest
Likewise, the fact that King was a minister, and a Baptist minister, should help to draw the more conservative clergy into what had begun as a secularly led effort.
If one is truly devoted to the religion of Jesus he will seek to rid the earth of social evils. The gospel is social as well as personal.”
King later confessed that he had become “absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of
man and the natural power of human reason.” Niebuhr’s more persuasive realism, however, showed him “the complexity of human motives and the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence.” Clearly Christian love alone could not defeat injustice and achieve social change.
“thought the capitalistic system was predicated on exploitation and prejudice, poverty, and that we wouldn’t solve these problems until we got a new social order.”
of 1950, at the same time that he was debating Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr with Smith, King read extensively on Gandhi in George Davis’s psychology of religion course.
“Since man is so often sinful,” King wrote, “there must be some coercion to keep one man from injuring his fellows.”
King remarked that “when I was in theological school I thought the only way we could solve our problem of segregation was an armed
Personalism, as the name suggested, held that the human personality, i.e. all individual persons, was the ultimate instrinsic value in the world. Some of King’s own strong attraction to that philosophy was rooted in one of its major corollaries: if the dignity and worth of all human personalities was the ultimate value in the world, racial segregation and discrimination were among the world’s ultimate evils.
Some of the experiences that I encountered there made it very difficult for me to believe in the essential goodness of man.”
New England Conservatory of Music, that the women he was meeting in Boston were not the equal of southern ones he had known. Mrs. Powell offered to introduce him to a fellow student at the conservatory, Coretta Scott, an Alabama native who had graduated from Ohio’s Antioch College the previous
The love ethic could work well in direct relationships, but in the larger social setting coercive power was necessary to increase social justice. “Whereas love seeks out the needs of others, justice … is a check (by force, if necessary)
upon ambitions of individuals seeking to overcome their own insecurity at the expense of others.”
And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’… I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
“The oppressed people of the world are rising up. They are revolting against colonialism, imperialism and other systems of oppression,” including American segregation.
“While I will fight him to get out from under his subjugation, I will also try to understand him and I will not try to defeat him,” King said.
And my great prayer is always that God will save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fear of the consequences for his personal life, he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems that we confront.
have been a keen student of Gandhi for many years. However, this business of passive resistance and nonviolence is the gospel of Jesus. I went to Gandhi through Jesus.”
“I have no doubt that by 1963 we will have won the legal battle.” King also denounced “the madness of militarism” and “an economic system which takes necessities from the
King talked about the constant anonymous threats, and how his early morning communication with God six months earlier had enabled him to persevere. That experience, Whitaker sensed, was “the key to how he could endure and face what was the reality of the situation.”
When his flight northward from Atlanta was delayed, the airline gave each passenger a voucher for a free meal in the terminal restaurant. King, the only black person,
was refused a seat in the main room of the Dobbs House restaurant. King resisted the manager’s order to
Then, during a brief late-morning recess, Associated Press reporter Rex Thomas came up to King and handed him a brief teletype story. Datelined Washington, it announced that hours earlier the Supreme Court had affirmed the lower court decision ending bus segregation in Montgomery. In their darkest hour, the protesters had triumphed.
Joseph E. Lowery of Mobile, Theodore Jemison from Baton Rouge, C. K. Steele, who was leading a successful but little-heralded bus protest in Tallahassee, and Fred L. Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, who had founded a new local protest group, the Alabama Christian Movement, when state legal harassment had closed down the NAACP in Alabama several months earlier.
The real goal, however, was not to defeat the white man, but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.
The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community”
and then you know you no longer have a choice, you can’t decide whether to stay in it or get out of it, you must stay in it.
The one to Eisenhower, saying that “a state of terror prevails” in the South, asked him to make a speech advocating compliance with the Brown decision. Nixon was asked to make a tour of the South and familiarize himself with violence against blacks. The message to Brownell asked him to meet with black representatives to discuss possible federal protective actions.
Governor Folsom announced a $2,000 reward for information on the attacks, and many white Montgomerians condemned the violence. The black community was angry at the bombings and fearful that the commission might use the violence as an excuse for permanently halting bus service, thus denying the MIA the victory it had won.
Further dissension developed over the organization’s continued refusal to put Mrs. Parks, a Nixon ally who had lost her seamstress job long before, on the payroll,
Mrs. Parks “is very, very disgruntled with MLK and really quite bitter,” her friend Mrs. Durr wrote, but no incidents were allowed to break the public front of unity.
As this supporter acknowledged, “King’s colleagues felt that he was taking too many bows and enjoying them,” that “he was forgetting that victory … had been the result of collective thought and collective action.”
Also, King received a telegram from the White House informing him that the president would not speak out for desegregation in the manner the Atlanta conference had requested.
That was followed by a Justice Department letter saying that the attorney general would not see them because a meeting would “not be helpful or appropriate.”
Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice that morning saying to me, ‘Preach the gospel, stand up for truth, stand up for righteousness.’ Since that morning I can stand up without fear.
“The oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed.… Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance.… Freedom comes only through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil.”
Less personally, Wilkins also was troubled by King’s emphasis on mass action and his criticism of a purely legal approach to change.
So many movers of this.mpveet. King was a catalyst but he should not.get.full credit
King focused his text on the demand for action by the federal government to protect blacks’ right to vote in the South. No call for a direct role for white labor in the Deep South was included.
At noon on May 17, a smaller than anticipated crowd gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. Although the sponsors’ predictions had ranged from 50,000 to 75,000, estimates of the actual number varied from only 15,000 to 27,000.
“The executive branch of government is all too silent and apathetic,” King stated. His peroration—“Give us the ballot”—supplied the headline for news accounts of the Friday
The elders were not happy. The young minister from the South represented a direct and personal challenge to “the so-called Negro leadership” which had previously received the headlines.
The Pilgrimage notwithstanding, President Eisenhower continued to avoid any meeting with the black leadership. In late May, however, King announced that Vice-President Nixon had formally invited King to a private meeting on June 13.
None of it had anything to do with Livingston’s and Britt’s guilt, and not many were surprised when the all-white jury on May 30 declared the men not guilty, despite their earlier confessions.
The format was a familiar one: answering letters from the troubled and forlorn. In his initial columns, King advised a woman not to marry a man twenty-five years younger, stated that “the primary obligation of the woman is that of motherhood,” and remarked that “almost every minister has the problem of confronting women in his congregation whose interests are not entirely spiritual.”
While King was presenting the report at an evening meeting on October 23, word came that Coretta had just given birth to a son, their second child.
Less than a week later, Roy Wilkins moved to show the young upstarts who was boss. The NAACP announced a two-day meeting in Atlanta to plan its own southern voter registration effort. Though Wilkins invited King to speak briefly at the opening session, the message was clear.
Baker knew that since she was a woman, and not a minister, King and his colleagues would not consider appointing her as executive director.
On April 30 the SCLC executive board met and appointed Tilley executive director and named Baker associate director.
He told one questioner that the “development and use of nuclear weapons of war should be banned” and advised another that gospel music and “rock n’ roll” were “totally incompatible” because rock music “often plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths.” When a woman asked what to do about her husband’s extramarital affair, King told her
