King admired the older preacher’s rhyming, rhythmic phrases, and he doodled similar phrases of his own in his notebooks. He absorbed the lessons of white professors who encouraged him to preach with calm, cool intellect, but he never forgot the audiences to whom he’d one day be preaching, and he never forgot that the Gospel could be used for social change. King told Barbour the revolution would have to be a nonviolent one if the minority were to have a chance of success. “Just a matter of arithmetic,” he said.
