King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

three p’s of oratory: proving, painting, and persuading. He taught structure, too. The “ladder sermon” built one argument atop another. The “jewel sermon” considered one idea from multiple perspectives. The “skyrocket sermon” began with a bang followed by a cascade of smaller ideas.

“I guess it must have been a gift from God,” his mother once said of her son’s talent. “I don’t think anybody taught him. Can you be taught to preach? I didn’t think you could.” Yet Crozer helped. At Crozer, King read Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, Nietzsche, and, during the Christmas holidays of 1949, Marx.

The books helped King overcome some of the doubts raised from his reading of Nietzsche. Gandhi showed King that “the love ethic of Jesus

collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months.”

Using a Greek word from the New Testament that theologians often employed, King referred to that loving spirit as agape, a love that offered understanding and goodwill to all, a force that made no distinction between friends and enemies, that encouraged love of everyone because God loved everyone. Agape, he said, offered the kind of power to fuel a nonviolent movement for justice. “When we love on the...

Barbour argued that society would never accept an interracial marriage, even if Pennsylvania law allowed it, and that King’s decision would wreck his career regardless of whether he lived in the North or the South. King argued that perhaps love was more important than society’s prejudiced views or one man’s career ambitions. As she listened, Betty understood how little support King would receive from family and friends if they were to wed.

the morning of his graduation, he phoned Barbour to say that several women were planning to attend the graduation ceremony, each one expecting to be introduced to King’s parents as his fiancée. King asked Barbour to sit with them in the hopes that others would think they were members of Barbour’s congregation.

Still, Barbour said, King was deeply saddened by his breakup with Betty Moitz. Barbour described him as “a man of a broken heart,” adding: “He never recovered.”

EARNED A bachelor of arts degree in divinity from Crozer and graduated as valedictorian, winning a $1,200 scholarship for graduate study.

In the fall of 1951, King took the car from Atlanta to Boston, where he enrolled at Boston University in pursuit of a doctorate.

King chose BU, in large part, for the chance to study with Edgar S. Brightman, known for his philosophical understanding of the idea of a personal God,

But Juanita wanted assurance that they would live in Atlanta when M.L. finished his studies, and M.L. would not guarantee it.

conservatory classmate of Weston’s named Coretta Scott.

She pointed out in that initial phone call that he was getting awfully carried away about a woman he had never met.

At that point in their lives, Coretta had more experience than Martin as an activist. Martin, Belafonte said, “stepped into her space.”

African American minister, theologian, and mystic Howard Thurman, who served as dean of the school’s Marsh Chapel from 1953 to 1965.

Thurman spoke often of his 1935 trip to India and his meeting with Gandhi, who reportedly told Thurman, “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”

One can only wonder if Thurman and King, as they watched the World Series, reflected on the connections between Gandhi and Robinson. If any Black public figure in America embodied the principles of Gandhi, it was the Dodgers’ second baseman, a proud, hypercompetitive athlete who had vowed to endure the racist insults of white fans and opposing ballplayers and had done so without appearing meek.

For his doctoral dissertation, King compared the conceptions of God presented by two theologians: Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. King criticized both Tillich and Wieman for their distance from personalism. Tillich ascribed personality only to beings, not to God, while Wieman described God in relatively depersonalized terms, as an “integrating process.” King rejected both ideas, saying human fellowship with God could only occur when both parties to the relationship possessed...

Personalism stresses that every human being shares the image of God. In the view of King and other personalists, every act of injustice to...

King’s dissertation attracted little attention until 1990, when scholars at Stanford University announced that substantial portions had been plagiarized.

In many cases, he copied verbatim from his source onto his note cards without creating a citation.

He was especially weak when it came to citing secondary sources.

He was a young dandy working to become a scholar, as his leadership of the Philosophical Club suggests. But he was only twenty-two years old when he entered the doctoral program. “Was the King of Crozer and BU actually a rather immature and insecure young man?” asks Garrow. “Was he a talented young preacher with no particular aptitude for scholarly creativity?” King’s indiscretions, regardless of their cause, should have been caught. His advisers should have noticed King’s heavy reliance on a Boston University dissertation written three years earlier by a student named Jack Boozer.

cited it only a few times while copying more than fifty sentences and relying heavily on its structure.

Boozer and King had the same dissertation adviser, L. Harold DeWolf, yet DeWolf made few comments on King’s first draft while praising the writer’s “convincing...

Churches in New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Alabama expressed interest in hiring him as a pastor, thanks in part to his father’s reputation among preachers, M.L.’s own growing reputation, and his strong academic record.

Of course, he also had a standing offer to join his father at Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta.

His brother, A.D., after marrying at age nineteen and starting a family, had already joined the church as an assistant pastor. Now Daddy King had visions of a dynasty. He even sweetened the deal. Knowing that his son remained interested in an academic career, the elder King spoke to Benjamin Mays about letting M.L. teach part-time at Morehouse.

When the church’s leaders finally fired him and began the search for a new minister, they approached King, as well as King’s friend Walter McCall and his former Morehouse classmate Samuel McKinney.

Martin felt a sense of duty. “The South, after all, was our home,” he wrote. “Despite its shortcomings, we loved it as home, and had a real desire to do something about the problems we felt so keenly as youngsters.”

asked God if he would follow me into the South,” McKinney recalled with a chuckle, “but He said He’d only follow me to Cincinnati.”

New NAACP branches opened all over the country after World War II, often led by Black veterans and Pullman porters. Many white Americans, repulsed by the Holocaust, became more attuned to issues of racism. As the United States fought the Cold War with the Soviet Union, seeking to gain political and military influence around the world, American leaders sought to present themselves as the champions of global freedom. But the country’s treatment of its Black population undercut that position.

Montgomery was less than a third the size of Atlanta, though growing fast. Among the city’s 120,000 residents in 1955, about 63 percent were white and 37 percent were Black.

In 1820, about 42,000 enslaved Black people resided in Alabama. Forty years later, that number had multiplied by more than ten, to about 435,000, or about half of the state’s total population.

sense of complacency that settled in, especially among members of the Black middle class, irritated Johns. They talked about how activism in the Black community could push the federal government into service in the fight for justice. They talked about mobilizing churches in the campaign.

“How long do you think it will be before we can make a move?” Ralph Abernathy asked. King may have been thinking about his personal life as much as social and political affairs when he answered. He may have been thinking about starting a family, finishing his dissertation, and establishing his leadership with a new congregation. Or he may simply have been thinking about the slow rate of social and political change he’d seen in the first twenty-four years of his life, in the North and South. “Not for a long time,” he said. “At least several years.”

He was wrong. Montgomery would soon erupt in protest, and King and Abernathy would help lead it.

King’s trial sermon proved a hit. He was every bit as smart as Vernon Johns, every bit as eloquent, every bit as passionate, but smoother, and w...

before he could get there, the rules of engagement changed. On May 17, while King was still in Boston, the U.S. Supreme Court, reaching a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board, struck down school segregation as unconstitutional. Separate educational facilities, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “are inherently unequal.” Jim Crow had been issued a death sentence, although it remained far from the grave.

After saying he wanted a job that would place him on the front lines of the fight against segregation, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been granted his wish.

He continued to deliver newspapers while waiting for business to improve, and he enjoyed leisurely lunches with one of his allies in the growing movement for racial justice in Montgomery, Rosa Parks, a local seamstress. Parks and Gray had met through the NAACP, where Parks was a longtime activist,

working on voter rights and complaints of police brutality, among other things.

Gray may have thought he was helping to prepare Parks, but Parks seemed to be preparing Gray, too.

And we are not wrong… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong,

justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Later, King would call December 5, 1955, “the day of days.”

It was the day, at the age of twenty-six, that King found his voice, preaching a mixture of political agitation and gospel, making the radical seem reasonable, perhaps inevitable. The world would change. All men would be free. Their time had come. He promised.

his “courage to be” followed by anxiety, his hope followed by fear of letting people down.

Crenshaw told the protesters their demands would be impossible to meet under state and local laws. That response may have “inadvertently radicalized King and the MIA,” the Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy writes, compelling them to demand more than they had originally sought.