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on Sundays he went to Black churches and preached to worshippers for whom Moses was as real and relevant as Abraham Lincoln. Exodus was not only understandable to his church audiences; it was underway.
“When we love on the agape level,” he wrote years later, “we love men not because we like them … but because God loves them.”
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, not an impersonal deity lacking human characteristics. “In the broadest sense,” Brightman wrote, “personalism is the belief that conscious personality is both the supreme value and the supreme reality in the universe.” To personalists, God is seen as a loving parent, God’s children as subjects of compassion. The universe is made up of persons, and all personalities are made in the image of God. The influence of personalism would support King’s
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Coretta, having attended the progressive and integrated Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, thought she would have the edge on this well-bred young man when it came to passion for social reform.
She was the second of three children born to Obadiah and Bernice McMurry Scott in Perry County, Alabama, where Black people outnumbered whites by about three to one, but white voters outnumbered Black voters by thirty to one.
Her studies were funded in part with a so-called Jim Crow Scholarship from the state of Alabama, which denied entry to Black students at most of its tax-supported colleges and universities. In providing the scholarships and sending students out of state, Alabama sought to avoid legal challenges to its system of segregated education.
Capitalism may be on its deathbed, King wrote in the letter, but social systems often managed to survive for long stretches while in such conditions.
Years later, Martin Luther King Jr. would write that “when a mother has to work she does violence to motherhood by depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection.”
Martin informed Coretta that he expected to be treated like the head of the family. He would follow the comment with a laugh, saying he knew that marriage was a partnership. But that didn’t mean it was a partnership between equals in his view, according to Coretta.
Martin had, all through his life, an ambivalent attitude toward the role of women. On the one hand, he believed that women are just as intelligent and capable as men and that they should hold positions of authority and influence. But when it came to his own situation, he thought in terms of his wife being a homemaker and a mother for his children.
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.
King’s dissertation attracted little attention until 1990, when scholars at Stanford University announced that substantial portions had been plagiarized.
King’s plagiarism was part of the process by which he found his own voice, according to Clayborne Carson, the former director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, where the plagiarism was discovered.
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.
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.
In 1901, white delegates in Alabama drafted a new constitution that locked in the second-class status of Black people, prohibited interracial marriage, and mandated segregated schools.
“Treading the tight-rope of Jim Crow from birth to death, from almost our first knowledge of life to our last conscious thought … is a major mental acrobatic feat,” wrote Rosa Parks,
Montgomery’s Black neighborhoods were small, humble, and removed from the center of commerce. Most Black Montgomery residents relied on white Montgomery residents for their income and traveled by bus to their jobs in white neighborhoods.
“Montgomery was an easygoing town; it could even have been described as a peaceful town,” King said. “But the peace was achieved at a cost of human servitude.”
Buses in the South were rolling theaters of degradation, with daily dramas acted out for all to see. Jim Crow laws kept Black and white people apart in schools, shops, and restaurants, yet shared buses were all but unavoidable for Black and white working-class people.
With those ten seats reserved for white passengers and ten in the back for Black passengers, that left sixteen seats in the middle that shifted as people boarded the bus. Accordingly, bus drivers had the power to order Black passengers out of the middle seats to make way for white passengers.
Four days after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board, Robinson wrote a letter of warning to Gayle. Black people accounted for about three-fourths of all bus passengers in Montgomery, she said. If they were to boycott, they could put the bus company out of business.
the activists weren’t sure if Colvin, at age fifteen, could handle the pressure.
he asked if she felt tired. “Well, my body may be a bit tired,” she said, “but for many years now my soul has been tired. Now my soul is resting. So I don’t mind if my body is tired, because my soul is free.”
King went to his study and closed the door. Usually, he spent fifteen hours writing and rehearsing a sermon. Now he had twenty minutes to prepare for what he would later call the “most decisive” speech of his life.
King would have to be bold enough to encourage the people to suffer for their freedom, moderate enough to keep their fervor under control, and optimistic enough to make everyone believe they could succeed. He needed to embolden without embittering. “Could the militant and the moderate be combined in a single speech?” he wondered. It was a question he would ask in various forms for the rest of his life.
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.
King expressed surprise that the city would not agree to a compromise, given the modest demands. But city officials and bus company officials pushed back. Jack Crenshaw, the bus company’s attorney, blamed the poor treatment of passengers on a handful of rude drivers.
The city still wouldn’t budge. “What they are after is the destruction of our social fabric,” said the mayor, Tacky Gayle. When Gayle called on a white pastor to speak, the pastor lectured King, saying ministers should abstain from political acts. King became angry. “I can see no conflict between our devotion to Jesus Christ and our present action,” he responded. “In fact I see a necessary relationship. 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.”
It had become clear to both sides that they were fighting about more than bus seats now.
They also organized a massive and sophisticated carpool operation. The MIA raised money to pay drivers, purchase gas, and buy auto insurance. Georgia Gilmore and Inez Ricks formed clubs that competed to see which group could sell more baked goods in support of the boycotters. Rufus Lewis let the transportation committee use his place, the Citizens’ Club, as the carpool’s command center. Walking to and from work became a daily display of pride, an expression of freedom. The carpools reminded the protesters of their communal strength.
At every opportunity, King reminded his followers of the moral beauty of their protest. Their fight, he said, was not only for fairness. It was for the future. It was for redemption. It was to make America a better and more loving country for all people. It was for God.
Proctor knew other Black ministers with talent and courage, he said, but they didn’t have Vernon Johns and Daddy King to clear a path or Rosa Parks to light the way or the national news media to amplify their words. King, with his radical social message absorbed from the Old Testament prophets and his insistence on the power of love as exemplified by Jesus, had turned out to be the right man at the right time.
city officials held firm. They spread rumors about King, saying he was lining his own pockets with money raised for the boycott. They whispered that outside agitators, possibly communists, were the real forces behind the campaign.
That, he said, is when God spoke to him. “Rationality left me,” he said. “Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice that morning saying to me: Preach the Gospel, stand up for the truth, stand up for righteousness.” From that moment on, King said, he possessed no fear. He would not back down. He would die if he had to, he said, but he would not turn back, and neither would the people of Montgomery.
“During the bus boycott I was tested by fire,” Coretta would recall years later, “and I came to understand that I was not a breakable figurine.”
The day after the blast at King’s house, dynamite exploded at the home of E. D. Nixon.
Gayle and Sellers also spoke, declaring they would never accept integration. “If any Negro wants desegregation,” Sellers said, “then let him go where there is desegregation. And let me say what I have said before: I will not sell my southern birthright for any number of Negro votes.”
The local White Citizens’ Council organized the meeting and circulated a leaflet that began: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, sling shots and knives.”
“The experience in Montgomery did more to clarify my thinking on the question of nonviolence than all of the books that I had read,” King wrote a few years later. “Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.”
As King invoked Gandhi with greater frequency, the national media seized on that element of the story. The protesters’ adherence to pacifism added moral clarity.
the court probably would have shut down the MIA’s carpool system. But on November 13, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Browder, affirming the lower court and thereby outlawing segregation on intrastate transportation.
After 381 days, the bus boycott was over, and so was the national illusion that Black Americans were willing to abide by the nation’s crushing racial order.
the Black psychologist Kenneth Clark, who knew the King family personally, would become convinced that Martin Luther King Jr.’s approach to nonviolent resistance and love of one’s enemies grew in part from his desire for “self-protection” from his father.
Because the bus boycott had successfully brought together disparate elements of the community, King and Abernathy wanted to focus on transportation issues. At first, the organization was to be called the Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration. Later, it would become the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Eventually, white businessmen, concerned that the attacks were hindering commerce, urged city officials to stop the violence.
In Rustin’s experience, two unfortunate things happened when interracial organizations formed: white communists joined, and Black leaders lost control. In the SCLC, white supporters would remain behind the scenes. The SCLC would stress Christian love even as it fought aggressively for equality. It would strive not to defeat white oppressors but to bring reconciliation.
He even managed to upbraid much of his audience without being punished for it, stinging northern liberals, challenging the superficiality of their efforts, and complaining that they were “so bent on seeing all sides” that they often took no side at all.
“It is hardly a moral act,” read the article, “to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure …
Armstrong called Eisenhower “two-faced,” and had harsher words for Arkansas governor Orval Faubus. Though he wasn’t happy about it, Eisenhower did, eventually, send federal troops to Little Rock to enforce the integration order. Armstrong’s unexpectedly sharp remarks, according to The Chicago Defender, had the “explosive effect of an H-bomb.”
