APOSTLE TO THE AMERICANS: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.’S USES OF THE
APOSTLE PAUL DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
BY
CHADWICK J. HARPER
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DAVIDSON COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF
HISTORY IN FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE KENDRICK K.
KELLEY PROGRAM IN HISTORICAL STUDIES
APRIL 8, 2013, DAVIDSON, NORTH CAROLINA
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: “I have become all things to all men”—The Enthralling and Elusive
Martin Luther King, Jr.……...…………………………………………………….1
CHAPTER 1: “I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee”—Becoming
King.…….……………………………………………………………….……….14
CHAPTER 2: “I heard a voice saying to me”—A Vision, An Epistle, and
Agape..…………………………………………………………………………...31
CHAPTER 3: “I Bear in My Body the Marks of the Lord Jesus”—King’s Suffering and
Paul’s Pain……………………………….………………………………………57
CHAPTER 4: “Ambassador in Chains”—Martin Luther King Jr.’s Epistle From
Birmingham City Jail.……………………………………………….………...…68
CHAPTER 5: “All Fall Short”- Sin, Despair, and the Death of the
Dreamer ………….………………………………………………………………89
CONCLUSION: Who Was the Dreamer, and What Was the
Dream?….………………………………………………………………………104
BIBLIOGRAPHY...………………………………………………….…………………115
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Almost 50 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. told America about the Dream.
This year, I have been able to explore one perspective on King and the Dream thanks to
the friends and family of Kendrick Kelley. Their generosity honors the memory of
Kendrick Kelley, a Davidson man who died serving our country in the Vietnam War.
The sacrifices made by Kendrick Kelley and others like him protect our freedoms and
provide us the chance to chase the Dream.
I am also indebted to Dean Will Terry, another Davidson man whose generosity
has marked my life. Without Dean Terry, I would not have come to Davidson, and I
would not have become who I am today (though he shouldn’t have to take all the blame).
Dr. Mike Guasco has generously given guidance to my project every step of the
way. Dr. Guasco is a talented historian, but the fact that he put up with me for over a
year shows that he is also a good and patient man. Dr. Daniel Aldridge gave me the
benefit of his expertise throughout this entire project, and I am grateful for his help.
Though I was never fortunate enough to have a class with Dr. Robin Barnes, his copyediting skills prevented a host of errors. I decided to be a history major mostly because
of Dr. John Wertheimer—any good writing in this thesis is due to his instruction, and the
rest of it shows that even the best professors can only do so much.
I am also indebted to Dr. Elizabeth Mills for encouraging an anxious and insecure
freshman to keep reading and keep writing. I should also thank Dr. Anne Wills for
introducing me to the study of African-American religious traditions and for living out
her faith in a compassionate and understanding way. I am also grateful to Dr. Andrew
Lustig for patiently answering my questions while encouraging me to keep asking them.
Preaching at Lake Forest Church this summer gave me a new appreciation for King’s
transcendent power as a preacher, and for that opportunity and much more, I will always
be grateful to Michael Flake and the people of Lake Forest.
I am grateful to the fine folks at the Atlanta University Center Robert W.
Woodruff Library for helping me search through the Morehouse College Martin Luther
King, Jr. Collection. I also appreciate the welcome I received from the archivists at King
Library and Archive at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
To my fellow Kelley Scholars (Anne, Sarah, Claire, and Will)—thank you and
congratulations! I’d say more, but you’ve all had to read more than enough of my
writing.
I owe an enormous thank-you to my friends for their support throughout this
process and over the past four years. I also want to thank my family. Words are not
enough, but know that I thank God for y’all.
Lastly, I am grateful for Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the men and women who
shared the Dream. By remembering their faith, their hope, and their love, we can live the
Dream.
-CJH
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall
know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these
three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:12-13
1
INTRODUCTION
“I HAVE BECOME ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN”—THE
ENTHRALLING AND ELUSIVE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
“I’m sorry, you don’t know me.” Marin Luther King Jr. first spoke these words to
a journalist who chastised King for criticizing the United States’ violence in the Vietnam
War. King retold the story of that encounter and repeated this admonition from the pulpit
of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in a sermon he preached only five days
before he died.1 King, had he lived, might have said the same thing to historians;
scholars have struggled to define and describe King ever since an assassin in Memphis
murdered the man and gave birth to the myth. David Levering Lewis wrote the first
academic biography of King, King: A Biography,2 and served as the Martin Luther King
Jr., Professor of History at Rutgers University, but even Lewis confessed, “Who he was
simply escaped me.”3 Judging from the hundreds of articles and dozens of books
produced by other historians, Lewis is one of many scholars enthralled and eluded by
King. Nearly a half-century after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. remains one of
American history’s most enigmatic and elusive figures.
King’s elusive nature stems his clever employment of multiple personas.
Historian Jonathan Rieder lists King’s roles as preacher, prophet, apostle, ambassador,
1
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” Delivered at the
National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu (accessed
September 20, 2012). *Hereafter all of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s documents will simply list “King” as the
author. Also, while I have chosen to give only basic citation information for online documents, more
detailed information for all online sources is available in the bibliography.
2
David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography, 2nd ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1978)- originally published in 1969.
3
David Levering Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King, Jr.,” The Journal of American
History 78, no. 1 (June 1991): 81-84.
2
and translator, among others. A supremely talented performer, King played many parts
and cleverly combined a host of voices into a chorus. King’s multiplicity of identities,
the seamless way he slid between them, and the manifold ways in which he blended them
together led Rieder to label him the “Chameleon King.”4
Thousands of miles away and hundreds of years before King, a likeminded
minister wrote, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I
might save some.”5 The similarities between the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther King,
Jr. extended beyond their ability to communicate the same message in different ways to
different people. In addition to this multi-vocality, both men espoused a barrier-breaking
gospel in order to reconcile groups across boundaries of class, creed, and race.6 Like
King, Paul followed in his father’s footsteps to become a member of the religious elite,
led a diverse and often contentious movement, served as an itinerant minister, suffered
persecution, was frequently imprisoned, penned epistles while in jail, and died a martyr’s
death. Paul lived and died trying to bring Jews and non-Jews (or Gentiles) into
communion with God and community with each other. Therefore Paul preached a
4
Jonathan Rieder, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin
Luther King, Jr., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008),1-2.
5
1 Corinthians 9:22, New International Version- Generally through the course of this thesis, I have
used the English Standard Version when attempting to communicate the substance of a given scriptural
passage to the reader, especially when the King James Version’s language obscures its meaning. I have
used the King James Version when I have felt that the language of the King James Version influenced
King’s own language, or when King quotes directly from the King James Version. Here, I made use of the
New International Version because the language of this version more clearly communicates Paul’s
emphasis on adapting his gospel to suit his audiences. Various versions have been used on an occasional
basis throughout this thesis, and the version used is marked using the following set of abbreviations:
English Standard Version (ESV), King James Version (KJV), New International Version (NIV).
6
Scott W. Hoffman, “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,”
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Introspection 10, no. 2 (Summer, 2000):126.
3
message of redemption to the end of reconciliation: Jesus died so that human beings
could be reconciled to God and to one another.7
Martin Luther King, Jr. used Paul throughout his quest to build the Beloved
Community,8 but in spite of King’s many multi-layered uses of Paul, historians have
largely ignored King’s relationship to Paul. To break that silence, this thesis will explore
instances in the Civil Rights Movement9 in which King constructed and deployed a
Pauline persona, interpreted and imitated Paul, and connected his own project of
reconciliation10 to the work of the Apostle Paul. When the Montgomery Bus Boycott
transformed King from a promising twenty-six year-old minister into the leading voice of
the Civil Rights Movement, King used Paul’s precedent as a visionary leader to support
7
Who's Who in the New Testament, Routledge, s.v. "Paul."
8
King’s vision of the Beloved Community is a concept I will return to throughout this thesis.
Josiah Royce, a philosopher and theologian who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation, coined the term,
but King made the term famous (see The King Center’s “The King Philosophy,”
http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy). King developed the concept beginning early in his career.
In 1957, King proclaimed that “[t]he aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community.
The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation.” See King,
“The Birth of a New Nation,” Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, April 7,
1957. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu (accessed April 3, 2013). In 1959, King spoke of the Beloved
Community as the goal of nonviolence, saying, “when you follow this way…a new friendship and
reconciliation exists between the people who have been the oppressors and the oppressed“ and that “the
way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.” See “Palm Sunday
Sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi,” Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, March
22,1959, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., (hereafter simply The King Papers), ed. Clayborne Carson
(Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2005), Vol. V, 145-157. King’s ultimate goal was the
Beloved Community: “the objective that we seek...the end of that objective is a truly brotherly society, the
creation of the beloved community.” See King for Christian Century (Chicago: Christian Century, July 13,
1966). The Beloved Community was the end goal of King’s project, and he committed to nonviolent
resistance because he believed that nonviolence resolved conflict while reconciling enemies.
9
“The Civil Rights Movement” is a troublesome term insofar as it suggests a false picture of “the
Civil Rights Movement” as a monolithic entity. In a sense, there were many movements within the Civil
Rights Movement, and I do not intend to downplay the diversity and (at times) discord within the
movement through the use of this term. Rather, I use the term “Civil Rights Movement” simply to
demarcate a certain time period (for the purposes of this thesis, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to
King’s death in Memphis) and to refer broadly to the various groups working for equal rights for AfricanAmericans.
10
In the sermon, “Loving Your Enemies,” King gave one definition of reconciliation, saying,
“Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again.” See King, Strength to Love, (New York:
Pocket Books, 1964), 43.
4
his own authority. King developed and deployed a Pauline persona during the
Montgomery Movement in his preaching, and he fueled the bus boycott with a
particularly Pauline idea of love. When King endured persecution and pain, he looked to
Paul as an example of how he might embrace suffering and use his scars to advance his
cause. When he found himself locked in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, King wrote
a Pauline epistle from prison in which he argued for the supremacy of the Law of Love
and connected the Civil Rights Movement to the story of the early Church. Toward the
end of his life, facing his personal and public failures, King drew on Paul to reconcile his
double life as a saint and a sinner. In Paul, King found a source of inspiration for his
movement and for himself, and through reinterpreting Paul, King developed the message
of love and reconciliation that history remembers as the Dream.
Investigating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s uses of the Apostle Paul during the Civil
Rights Movement will help us better understand King’s vision of reconciliation.
Stereoscopic sight allows human eyes to combine two perspectives into a single image
that has greater depth and breadth than either perspective provides on its own; with this
thesis, I hope to give another perspective on King so that by viewing him from another
vantage point, we might gain a more complete picture of the Dreamer and his Dream.
*
*
*
Like an ancient ruin covered by a thousand years of dirt and dust, the man who
lived and breathed and died as Martin Luther King, Jr. has been buried beneath a mound
of mythology. Historians constantly reimagine and reinterpret King’s memory, and some
historians create new Kings to serve their causes. Michael Kazin attempts to unlock the
meaning of the 1960s by returning to the heart of King’s identity as a “[r]adical
5
democrat.” For Kazin, King’s movement spawned the civil rights fights of all other
subsequent groups, from the women’s movement to the current struggle of gay and
lesbian Americans. Kazin pits these King-inspired reformers against conservative leaders
like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and others who represent a countermovement
against the progress of the 1960s.11 Like Kazin, Timothy B. Tyson finds in King an ally,
though Tyson describes King as “another southern preacher” instead of as a radical
reformer. Tyson contends that King’s memory has been twisted and tortured to the point
that he has become “a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus…a benign vessel that can be
filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion may dictate.” Yet in spite of the
many manipulations of King’s memory, Tyson believes that King still speaks as a
powerful prophet if we will listen to the real King and not the neutered versions offered
to us by politicians. According to Tyson, because King condemned the Vietnam War, he
would condemn the war in Iraq as immoral and impractical.12 Kazin and Tyson are more
explicit in their reasons for reimagining King than most scholars, but their arguments
demonstrate the power of appealing to King’s memory for current causes.
Students of King debate his theology as well as his politics, and much of the battle
consists of identifying the sources behind King’s work. Many historians consider King’s
philosophical foundation the thinkers he studied at Crozer Theological Seminary and
Boston University, figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Mahatma Gandhi, Reinhold Niebuhr,
11
Michael Kazin, “Martin Luther King Jr., and the Meanings of the 1960s,” The American
Historical Review 114, no. 4 (October 2009): 987-989.
12
Timothy B. Tyson, “Martin Luther King and the Southern Dream of Freedom,” Southern
Cultures 11, no. 4, (Winter 2005): 97-106.
6
and Paul Tillich.13 In addition to these thinkers, Warren E. Steinkraus highlights the
importance of the doctrine of Personalism to King. According to Steinkraus, Personalism
taught King that individuals’ lives have inherent value, an idea which led King to
nonviolence.14 Like Steinkraus, John Rathbun sees the sources of King’s theology as the
Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch,15 the Neo-orthodoxy of Paul Tillich and
Reinhold Niebuhr, the doctrine of Personalism, and Gandhi.16 Whether these men ignore
the historical role of the black church17 in shaping King because of their own prejudice or
because King presented a whitewashed intellectual history remains unclear, but the fact is
13
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was an enormously influential German thinker whose doctrine
of nihilism and announcement that “God is dead” both challenged King’s faith. See Biographical
Dictionary of 20th Century Philosophers, s.v. "Nietzsche, Friedrich.” Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
pioneered tactics of nonviolent social change in South Africa and India, and his philosophy of satyagraha
(“holding fast to the truth”) and his tactics informed and inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.’s project in many
vital ways. See The Columbia Encyclopedia, s.v. "Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand.” Reinhold Niebuhr
(1892-1971) began his career with a profound social concern, but his socialist ideas and optimism were
tempered by the horrors of the Second World War, leading Niebuhr to preach “conservative realism,” a
paradigm that acknowledged the deep sinfulness of humanity and the moral tragedies of life in a fallen
world. King found Niebuhr challenging and insightful, but maintained a more hopeful view of humanity (at
least until the final years of his career). See The Columbia Encyclopedia, s.v. "Niebuhr, Reinhold." Paul
Tillich (1886-1965) was an influential American thinker and philosopher whose concept of a more remote
God pushed King to defend his belief in Personalism. Tillich prioritized faith over salvation, believing that
faith should be the ultimate concern for humans, and it may be that this idea informed King’s own
conception of salvation, especially in his later years (for more on King’s developing understanding of
salvation, see Chapter 4). For more on Tillich, see The Columbia Encyclopedia, s.v. "Tillich, Paul
Johannes.”
14
Warren E. Steinkraus, “Martin Luther King’s Personalism and Non-Violence,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 34, no. 1 (January-March, 1973): 97-103.
15
For a survey of Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel, see J. Phillip Wogaman, Christian
Ethics: A Historical Introduction, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 210-216. For the
purposes of this thesis, the Social Gospel can be described as an early 20 th century movement in liberal
Protestantism that emphasized the systemic nature of sin and the societal aspects of salvation, leading to a
particular concern with economic structures and a tendency toward Christian socialism with a focus on
programs of social outreach and improvement. In this construction, sin is selfishness and sharing is part of
God’s work of salvation.
16
John W. Rathbun, “Martin Luther King: The Theology of Social Action,” American Quarterly
20, no. 1 (Spring, 1968): 38-53.
17
I do not use the term “the black church” to imply that African-Americans are religiously
homogenous. I use it to refer to the various faith traditions that emerged from African-Americans’ shared
experiences as enslaved and marginalized people and therefore shared certain theological emphases and
practical similarities. I will explore the black church’s influence on King in Chapter 2.
7
that scholars long attributed King’s ideas to these thinkers while ignoring King’s deep
roots in the black church.
Only in recent years have scholars followed the lead of James Cone and others
who trace the roots of King’s theology to the black church. Cone argues that the black
church helped King see the Gospel’s “true meaning as God’s liberation of the oppressed
from bondage.”18 While Cone does not totally dismiss the impact of Tillich, Niebuhr,
Gandhi, Thoreau,19 and Rauschenbusch, he maintains that King was first, last, and always
“a product of the black church tradition.”20 Vincent Gordon Harding likewise argues that
King’s civil rights work grew out of his work as a minister. Harding writes of King, “he
held a vision for all America, often calling the black movement more than a quest for
rights—a struggle ‘to redeem the soul of America.’” Harding contends that King’s vision
stretched far beyond civil rights, and that King’s memory has been manipulated “into the
relatively safe categories of ‘civil rights leader,’ ‘great orator,’” and “harmless dreamer of
black and white children on the hillside.”21 In Harding’s eyes, such manipulation
18
James Cone, “Black Theology in American Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 53, no. 4, (December 1985): 755-756- Given Cone’s status as the father of black liberation
theology, this understanding of King is unsurprising, but it should not and cannot be dismissed, especially
given Cone’s extensive research into King’s life and thought. For additional works by Cone on King, see
“Martin and Malcolm on Nonviolence and Violence,” Phylon (1960-) 49, no. ¾, (2001): 173-183, and
Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992).
19
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American writer and thinker whose experiences with
and essay on “Civil Disobedience” influenced King’s understanding of the law and individual conscience.
For more on Thoreau, see Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, s.v. "Thoreau, Henry David.”
20
21
Cone, “Black Theology in American Religion,” 761.
Vincent Gordon Harding, “Beyond Amnesia: Martin Luther King. Jr., and the Future of
America,” The Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (Sep. 1987): 469-473. It should be noted that Harding
worked with Dr. King frequently and even drafted the sermon “Why I Am Opposed to the War In
Vietnam” which King gave at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. See Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get
There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr., (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 67-69. It is worth
noting that King preferred Harding’s draft to a version composed by Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones.
King felt that the initial draft was too conservative, and he reminded his speech-writers, “I’m a minister of
8
amounts to a second assassination of King, and understanding the broadness of King’s
dream (what Cone calls its “universality and eternality”) is key to discovering the real
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Keith D. Miller also argues that King’s project grew out of his religious beliefs
and his calling as a minister. While many scholars and historians have focused on the
famous thinkers King mentioned in his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,”22 Miller asserts that
King constructed this intellectual pilgrimage to legitimize himself in the eyes of white
audiences. Like Cone, Miller sees King primarily as a product of the black church.23
Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran maintain that though “[t]he world saw him as a
marching protest leader…Martin Luther King, Jr., was first and foremost a preacher.”24
Likewise, Michael Eric Dyson understands King’s project as a fundamentally religious
one. When discussing King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, Dyson contends that
King’s anti-war stance represented “King’s valiant attempt to escape the moral ghetto and
claim the full stature of the title he loved best: Baptist preacher.”25 The discourse
God before I’m a civil rights leader. This is about morality, not politics.” See Rieder, The Word of The Lord
is Upon Me, 261. Harding later said, “I am convinced that Martin’s faith in the precious, embracing,
amazing love of God was rewarded…Several years after his death I saw my friend in a dream. ‘It’s all
right, Vincent. It is well with my soul.’ Somehow that message seemed large enough for me, for all of us,
forever.” See A Knock At Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King,
Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran, (New York: Warner Books, 2000), 190.
22
King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Christian Century, April 13, 1960, http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu (accessed April 6, 2013)-in fairness to other scholars, King crafted a compelling
narrative where the aforementioned thinkers led him to arrive at nonviolence. Miller’s case that King
mediated these sources through mainline white Protestant preachers, however, is even more compelling.
See Keith D. Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King Jr., and Its Sources, 2nd
edition (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998), especially 56-65.
23
Miller, Voice of Deliverance, 12, as well as Miller, “Composing Martin Luther King Jr.,” PMLA
105, no. 1, (Jan. 1990): 70-82.
24
A Knock At Midnight, ed. Carson and Holloran, Introduction, vii.
25
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 50.
9
surrounding King’s theological roots and composition underscores King’s complexity,
but many scholars agree on the vital role of the black church in shaping his thinking and
the importance of ministry to King’s identity.
While most scholars treat King with sympathy and respect (so much so that King
scholar Adam Fairclough complains that King biographies tend toward hagiography),26
they disagree over the rationale behind King’s tactic of nonviolence. Some, like
Fairclough, see King as a calculating and realistic leader who adapted his nonviolent
tactics to best suit each individual battleground.27 Others criticize King’s nonviolence as
unrealistic and ultimately ineffective. Charles P. Henry complains about King’s
“utopian” vision of the Beloved Community and maintains that King’s unchanging
position of nonviolence reflected a theological position rather than any sort of tactical
insight. In the eyes of Henry and others like him, King’s “political theology…fails as
political ideology.” In making this claim, Henry echoes the opposition of civil rights
leaders like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X who criticized King’s nonviolence as
soft and ineffective.28 Henry’s critique of King reminds us that the movement King led
never functioned as a monolithic whole, and that his tactics and leadership came under
fire from both friend and foe.
26
Adam Fairclough, “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Quest for Nonviolence Social Change,”
Phylon (1960-) 47, no. 1 (1st Qtr., 1986): 1. Hagiography is the study of saints.
27
Fairclough, “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Quest for Nonviolent Social Change,” 1-3. See
also Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and
Martin Luther King, Jr., (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), esp. 6-7, where Fairclough
discusses the tactical thought of the SCLC and its leader, King.
28
Charles P. Henry, “Delivering Daniel: The Dialectic of Ideology and Theology in the Thought
of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Journal of Black Studies 17, no. 3 (Mar., 1987): 329-338- many critics of King
have asserted this, including other members of the Civil Rights Movement, especially those, like
Carmichael and Malcolm X, who were affiliated with Black Power and black nationalism.
10
But in the years since his death, King has achieved a uniquely American sort of
sainthood. In his treatment of King’s canonization, Scott W. Hoffman explains that part
of King’s saintly status derives from King’s use of “biblical personae,” especially the
roles of the Apostle Paul, Moses, and Jesus Christ. While King lived, members of the
movement used the King-as-Christ metaphor. Devout followers of King deployed Kingas-Christ language to express their reverence for King, while some members of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) mocked King as “De Lawd.”
Following King’s death, the Christ metaphor spread rapidly through mass media,29 and
historians have followed the journalistic rough draft of history by reading King as a
Christ-figure. This tendency to read King as a Christ figure features prominently in the
work of David J. Garrow. Garrow entitled his biography of King Bearing the Cross,30
and he parallels Christ’s suffering and sacrifice with King’s.31 Because of King’s
charisma, his occasional use of a Christ-like persona, and his tragic death, King has often
been studied and understood as a Christ figure.
Yet because of the primacy of the Exodus story in African-American religious
culture, the King-as-Moses metaphor generally dominates discussion of King.32 Taylor
29
Hoffman, “Holy Martin,” 124-138- According to Hoffman, some prominent denominations in
the US have recognized King’s saintly status and gone so far as to place King on their calendars of saints.
30
David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1986).
31
David J. Garrow, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Spirit of Leadership” The Journal of
American History 74, no. 2 (Sep. 1987): 444.
32
The Exodus story comes from the biblical Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy. In sum, it describes the story of the liberation of the Children of Israel from slavery in the
land of Egypt. Moses, born a Hebrew but (through a miraculous series of events) raised as an Egyptian
prince, is called by God to persuade Pharaoh to “let my people go.” After Pharaoh sees Moses’s miracles
and Egypt endures ten devastating plagues, the Children of Israel are finally led out of slavery in Egypt
toward the territory God swore to give them—the Promised Land. Moses sees the Promised Land but is not
allowed to enter it, and his successor, Joshua, leads the Israelites in battle to claim the Promised Land. The
11
Branch parallels King with Moses (and by extension, the Civil Rights Movement with the
story of Exodus) in his study of King. Branch’s America During the King Years has
achieved a kind of supremacy among the biographies of King. Branch’s three-volume
work is, strictly speaking, “a history of the civil rights movement” and not a biography,33
but Branch ties the movement together using King as its central character and the Exodus
story as his central motif.34 Considering the importance of the Exodus narrative in
African-American religious life, Branch’s choice to cast King as Moses in a modern
Exodus story makes sense.35 Like Branch, Gary S. Selby highlights the importance of the
Exodus narrative as “the most salient story in the African American cultural tradition” by
depicting King as an American Moses. Selby connects King to Moses more frequently
and more extensively than Branch does,36 but they both tell the same story of a black
Exodus led by King. In a similar vein, Anna Hartnell explores “King’s own image as a
self-fashioned black Moses and his designation of a black American exodus” in an effort
story has been especially powerful in the African-American religious tradition, in large part because
enslaved African-Americans identified with the enslaved Israelites and prayed for God to liberate them as
He had once liberated the Israelites. Likewise, many African-American leaders have been depicted (and
depicted themselves) as Moses-like figures, including Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and King
himself, among others. The story also inspired many traditional African-American spirituals and hymns.
Because this story dominated African-American religion for so long, it proved tremendously useful to King
to compare the plight of blacks to the Children of Israel and his own leadership to that of Moses; others
often made this comparison for him. For more on the Exodus story and its prevalence in the AfricanAmerican religious tradition, see Africa and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, s.v. "EXODUS,"
33
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America During the King Years 1954-63, (New York:
Simon & Schuster Inc., 1998), xii.
34
Branch’s three volumes are titled Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire: America During the King
Years 1963-1968, (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1999), and At Canaan’s Edge: America
During the King Years 1965-1968, (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 2006).
35
Branch does not make any statement of exact equivalency between King and Moses, but in his
framing, he used King-as-Moses and situates the Civil Rights Movement as a modern embodiment of the
Exodus story. See Branch, Parting the Waters, 922.
36
Gary S. Selby, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rhetoric of Freedom: The Exodus Narrative in
America’s Struggle for Civil Rights, (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 2- 172.
12
to uncover the Jewish origins of King’s nonviolence. Unlike Selby and Branch, Hartnell
entertains the possibility of a Pauline King, but ultimately dismisses it because of “the
other-worldly thrust of Pauline Christianity” which contradicted King’s concern for the
here and now.37
Some scholars, however, detect parallels between King and Paul. In The Word of
the Lord is Upon Me Jonathan Rieder explores how King’s “ventriloquism” allowed King
to speak through biblical figures, including the Apostle Paul. Rieder further notes that
King frequently used Paul’s doctrine of diversity in the body of Christ to attack
segregation. Part of King’s power, Rieder argues, rested in his ability to connect his own
work to that of biblical figures. Though Rieder acknowledges the many faces of King,
including that of the Apostle Paul, he spends most of his time comparing King to Moses,
and leaves the Pauline reading of King undeveloped.38 In his investigation of King’s
philosophical foundations, John J. Ansboro finds Pauline influence on King through
King’s study of Anders Nygren, a Swedish bishop and theologian. While at Boston
University, King grappled with Nygren’s work Agape and Eros. Nygren believed that
Paul advocated a gospel of agape love and described agape as self-sacrificing, forgiving,
transformative, and active love. All these elements of agape found their way into King’s
thinking.39
C. Eric Lincoln, a renowned religious scholar, and Louis Lomax, famed
author and journalist, both considered King a “modern day St. Paul,” a man who
37
Anna Hartnell, “Mirroring Moses, Doubling Exodus: Disowning Violence in the JudeoChristianity of Martin Luther King,” Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 20, (January 2006), 60-76.
38
Rieder, The Word of the Lord, 1-232. See Rieder’s use of King-as-Moses on 10, 68, 72, 193194, and 232.
39
John J. Ansboro, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1982), 9-15.
13
approached his work with the same missionary fervor and disregard for boundaries.
James P. Hanigan concludes that King was like “an earlier, wandering Christian preacher,
St. Paul,” who also “kept the faith and finished the race.”40
Scholars have largely limited their discussion of King in relation to Paul to noting
similarities between the lives of the two figures, and the few scholars who do explore
King’s active and intentional uses of the Apostle Paul have left this line of thinking
underdeveloped. Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. used
an apostolic persona and Pauline ideas to power his project of reconciliation. During the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, King pointed to Paul for precedent as a visionary leader,
spoke through Paul in his preaching, and built his nonviolent movement on Paul’s idea of
agape love. When King suffered for his cause, he found inspiration in Paul’s perspective
on suffering, and when King wrote his “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” he played
the part of the imprisoned apostle and linked his movement to the early Church. As his
public and private failures dragged King into despair and depression, he connected his
own humanity to Paul’s, and found solace by reinterpreting Paul’s theology of salvation.
King dreamed of destroying the barriers between Americans of different colors and
creeds so that they might be reconciled to one another and to God. As he followed his
dream from Montgomery to Memphis, King found Paul inspirational and useful, and
investigating King’s uses of Paul reveals elements of King’s Dream that myth and
memory have hidden. But in order to understand the Dream for which King lived and
died, we must return to the place where he was born.
40
James P. Hanigan, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Foundations of Nonviolence (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1984), 42-283.
14
CHAPTER 1
“I AM A PHARISEE, THE SON OF A PHARISEE”—BECOMING KING
Michael Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. His
father, Michael Luther King, Sr., and his mother, Alberta Williams King, brought their
baby boy into the world in the home of Alberta’s father and mother, where the Kings
lived until Alberta’s parents died. Little Mike, as his family called him, was born sixteen
months after his sister Christine and seventeen months before his brother, A.D.41 He
received the name by which history knows him when his father returned home from a
global expedition in August, 1934. In his travels, the elder King visited sites in Germany
where Martin Luther took his stand against the Catholic Church. Inspired by the courage
of his fellow clergyman, King, Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King, Sr. Of
course, the elder King changed his son’s name as well, and thus Martin Luther King, Jr.,
was created.42 From the day his father changed his name to the day an assassin took his
life, Martin Luther King, Jr. maintained multiple identities, making him a fascinating but
enigmatic character for historians. In spite of decades of scholarship, we continue to ask,
“who was Martin Luther King, Jr.?”
In 1965, King reflected on his roots and wrote:
I am many things to many people; Civil Rights leader, agitator, trouble-maker and
orator, but in the quiet recesses of my heart I am fundamentally a clergyman, a
Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage for I am also the son of a
Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a
Baptist preacher.43
41
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, 38-40.
42
Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Word That Moved
America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25.
43
King, “The Un-Christian Christian,” Ebony, August 1965, 77.
15
King inherited a ministry that began with his great-grandfather, Willis Williams, who
attended services and preached at Shiloh Baptist Church in Greene County, Georgia. An
enslaved preacher and exhorter, Williams made his mark by inspiring his son Adam
Daniel (known as A.D.) to pursue a career in ministry.44 A.D. followed his call to
Atlanta. Once there, he took the pastorate of Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1894.45 A.D.
Williams struggled mightily to raise the eight-year-old church into maturity; when he
started his ministry at Ebenezer, he preached to a mere thirteen members, but when he
left the pulpit in 1931, Ebenezer boasted of 400 members. While leading Ebenezer,
Williams studied at and graduated from Morehouse College.46 Like many Morehouse
men, A.D. Williams married a girl from Spelman College: Jennie C. Parks.47 Their
daughter Alberta Christine Williams eventually fell in love with the man known to
history as Daddy King.
Born in 1899, Mike King grew up sharecropping outside Stockbridge, Georgia.
His childhood involved little school and lots of labor. Like his mother, Delia, and his
nine siblings, King learned to fear his father, James. But Mike’s love of his mother
outgrew his fear of his father, and one night when James assaulted Delia in a drunken
rage, Mike fought his father to protect his mother. After this fight, James promised to kill
his son, and Mike escaped to Atlanta. In Atlanta, Mike King worked at a tire plant while
exploring his gift for ministry by preaching at tiny churches throughout the city. During
this time, he set his sights on Alberta Williams. To gain Alberta’s affections, her father’s
44
The King Papers, Vol. I, 3-4.
45
Branch, Parting the Waters, 30.
46
The King Papers, Vol. I, 1–28.
47
Branch, Parting the Waters, 30.
16
approval, and a successful ministry, Mike King pursued his education doggedly. His
hard work paid off, as he eventually graduated from Morehouse and concluded several
years of courting Alberta Williams by marrying her in 1926.48 Driven by the deprivation
and abuse he suffered as a child, Mike King strove to give his children the material
blessings and fatherly love that he had never received.49 He accomplished this through
his extraordinarily successful ministry at Ebenezer Baptist Church; after A.D. Williams
entrusted his daughter to King, he felt comfortable trusting King with his church as well.
Despite his doubters in the congregation at Ebenezer (some of whom thought King too
young, rough-hewn, and inexperienced), King succeeded in building Ebenezer from a
church of 400 members in 1931 to a powerhouse of 4,000 members in 1940. For this, he
received the highest salary of any black preacher in Atlanta.50 In the midst of the Great
Depression, 65 percent of Atlanta’s employable black men had no job, but Daddy King
provided a home for his family on the affluent Auburn Avenue. This neighborhood
contained many of Black Atlanta’s wealthiest homes and most important institutions,
Ebenezer Baptist Church among them.51 Daddy King raised his children in Atlanta’s
African-American upper-crust.
In 1950, while in graduate school at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester,
Pennsylvania, the younger King reflected on his youth and penned his own
48
Branch, Parting the Waters, 34-37. When he arrived in Atlanta, King was twenty years old and
read at a fifth grade level. With a remarkable combination of hard work and humility, he took classes
alongside children and worked his way to a high school equivalency before trying to gain admission to
Morehouse. He failed the admission tests miserably, but he barged into the office of Dr. John Hope,
president of the college, and told him that people were always underestimating him and that all he needed
was a chance. Apparently Hope believed him, as he admitted him to Morehouse that very day.
49
Lewis, King: A Biography, 6-10.
50
Lischer, The Preacher King, 24.
51
Lewis, King: A Biography, 6-10.
17
“Autobiography of Religious Development.” He wrote, “It is quite easy for me to think
of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where
lovely relationships were ever present. It is quite easy for me to think of the universe as
basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting hereditary and environmental
circumstances.” Among these factors, King listed his close relationships with his
siblings, his parents’ solid marriage, his father’s provision, his mother’s attentions, and
the educational opportunities his parents provided him. King also noted that “church has
always been a second home for me. As far back as I can remember I was in church every
Sunday.” So intertwined were family and faith for King that he attributed his act of
joining the church at the age of five to sibling rivalry with his sister. King also revealed
that he lacked any single moment of crisis or conversion. Unlike many black Christians,
King had never experienced a distinct moment in which he felt overwhelmed by the
power and presence of God. Instead, he received his religion from his family and
upbringing.52 Yet King did not receive the tradition unquestioningly; he wrote with some
pride about his break with “the fundamentalist line” of Ebenezer, a trend begun when a
thirteen-year-old King denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus in his Sunday school
class.53 King’s lack of conversion experience and his theologically liberal instincts set
52
In traditional African-American religion, the conversion experience can be traced to a moment
where the convert is struck by the Spirit of God, oftentimes after an extended period of spiritual darkness.
This could come in the form of loneliness, despair, or anxiety about the condition of one’s soul. Then the
individual was overwhelmed by the presence, power, and peace of God; sometimes this took the form of
seeing a vision or hearing a voice, sometimes both. See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible
Institution” in the Antebellum South, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 132-271.
53
King “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” September 12-November 22, 1950,
Chester, PA, The King Papers, Vol. I, 359-363. By “fundamentalist” King meant those Christians who
adhered to traditional and literal interpretations of the Bible, including the virgin birth of Jesus and Jesus’
physical resurrection. See The Columbia Encyclopedia, s.v. "fundamentalism."
18
him apart from his elders at Ebenezer, but nevertheless, Martin Luther King, Jr. was
raised in the church by the church, and arguably, for the church.
Though King enjoyed a blessed childhood, racism touched him at an early age.
At around six years old, one of King’s playmates, a white boy, broke off their friendship
because the boy’s father did not want his son playing with a black child. Distraught,
King went to his parents for answers. His mother reassured King, saying, “You are as
good as anyone.”54 But in spite of his mother’s support and his parents’ instruction that
King had a “duty as a Christian to love” his white neighbors, King claimed that “from
that moment on I was determined to hate every white person.” King later confessed that
his hatred for white people burned unabated until his collegiate experiences with
interracial organizations gave him hope for whites.55 King also witnessed the effects of
racism on his father. One day as King, Jr., rode in his father’s car, a white policeman
stopped the elder King’s vehicle. The lawman began a condescending lecture by
addressing Daddy King as “Boy,” but the elder King interrupted the officer, pointed at his
young son in the seat next to him, and said, “That’s a boy. I’m a man.” Daddy King
showed his son how to maintain his dignity and demand respect in the face of racism.
King, Jr. also recollected a visit to a segregated shoe store where the staff refused to serve
the two Kings unless they moved to the rear of the store. His father stormed out of the
store with his son in tow. The elder King expressed his private frustrations with
segregation through public action; King, Sr. actively campaigned for African-American
civil rights in Atlanta, helped charter the Atlanta Voters’ League, and served on the
54
King, Stride Toward Freedom (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1958) ,18-19.
55
King, “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” The King Papers, Vol. I, 362-363.
19
Board of Trustees at his alma mater, Morehouse College. Furthermore, the elder King
participated in the work of the Republican Party and frequently sponsored events and
programs for Atlanta’s black young people.56 Daddy King’s courage left a lasting mark
on his son. In describing his own call to ministry, King, Jr. stated that his “admiration for
him [King, Sr.] was the great moving factor; He set forth a noble example that I didn’t
mine [sic] following.”57
King58 began following in his father’s footsteps early in life. Though Daddy King
described himself as a simple “backwoods Bible thumper with a gift for a lot of
hollering” and his son became one of the world’s most versatile speakers, it was Daddy
King’s presence in the pulpit that first showed his son the awesome power of words.
King’s mother told a tale in which a six-year-old King warned her, “You just wait and
see. I’m going to get me some big words.”59 By his junior year of high school, King’s
big words won an oratorical contest in Atlanta that qualified him to compete in the
statewide contest in Dublin, Georgia. On the trip back from the contest (which King
won), the bus driver forced King and his teacher to move to the back of the bus to make
room for white passengers. He recalled the incident years later in an interview with Alex
Haley for Playboy:
56
Lewis, King: A Biography, 5-6.
57
King, “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” The King Papers, Vol. I, 363.
58
From this point forward, “King” will only be used to refer to Martin Luther King, Jr.
59
Rieder, The Word of the Lord, 13-14. It is worth noting that King’s earliest public expressions
of religion came through singing hymns and songs at the encouragement of his mother. While the impact
of King, Sr., is perhaps more obvious and more relevant to the particular focus of this thesis, the influence
of Alberta King on her son should not be ignored or underestimated. See Lischer, The Preacher King, 26.
20
That night, Mrs. Bradley and I were on a bus returning to Atlanta, and at a small
town along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white
driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn’t move quickly
enough to suit him, so he began cursing us, calling us “black sons of bitches.” I
intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley finally urged me up, saying we
had to obey the law. And so we stood up in the aisle for the 90 miles to Atlanta.
That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in
my life.60
The words of his speech, entitled “The Negro and the Constitution,” must have
tasted bitterly ironic to King that night. Yet even in his youth, King displayed a knack
for blending civil religion61 and Christian ideology; he had concluded his speech with
soaring rhetoric, declaring that “[m]y heart throbs anew in the hope that inspired by the
example of Lincoln, imbued with the spirit of Christ, they will cast down the last barrier
to perfect freedom.”62 King knew this last barrier well. But from his father’s powerful
preaching, King learned the power of words, and from an early age, King hurled his
words at that “last barrier.”
Though the younger King admired and imitated his father, he also rebelled against
his father. King spent time at the local pool hall, got in a few fistfights there, and joined
in the dance craze known as “the jitterbug.” The fundamentalist father King severely
disapproved of his son’s behavior at first, but he grew to tolerate his son’s shenanigans as
60
“Playboy Interview: Martin Luther King, Jr.,” A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings
and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991),
342-343. Alex Haley interviewed King as well as Malcolm X in a series of groundbreaking Playboy
interviews (Playboy at the time was somewhat more concerned with journalism than it would be later), and
eventually gained fame through his Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), as well as his work tracing his
ancestry that became the book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). See African-American
Writers: A Dictionary, s.v. "Haley, Alex (Alexander Murray Palmer).”
61
My use of this term stems from Robert N. Bellah’s landmark essay, “Civil Religion in America”
(1967) in which Bellah argued that a system of shared beliefs known as civil religion gave “the core
founding values and ideals of the republic…a sacred meaning in and of themselves… and an added
religious dimension by their intertwining with specifically religious motifs, most usually drawn from
biblical archetypes.” See Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, s.v. "civil religion.”
62
King, “The Negro and the Constitution,” May 1944, The King Papers, Vol. I, 109-111.
21
time passed. The more serious split between the Kings resulted from young Martin’s
theological liberalism. But in spite of their theological differences, King followed in his
father’s footsteps to Morehouse College and into ministry. Though he borrowed his first
sermon from the white liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick,63 on February 25, 1948,
the younger King knelt at his father’s feet in front of a crowd of black Baptist preachers
to receive his ordination to the ministry.64 His initiation into the ministry revealed King’s
complicated composition; he spoke a white minister’s words with a black Baptist’s voice.
The young Martin Luther King, Jr., though very much his father’s son, defied easy
categorization.
Like King, the Apostle Paul grew up in a religious home and used multiple
identities, making him similarly difficult to define. Just as King meant many things to
many people, Christians have interpreted and reinterpreted Paul for two millennia. Paul’s
lasting influence on Christianity stems from his mission work within the Mediterranean
world and the thirteen Epistles which bear his name and comprise much of the New
Testament.65 In the context of the black Baptist church in which King was born and
63
Keith D. Miller believes that King, Sr. and other black preachers exerted the strongest influence
on King, but that King found inspiration in the work of white mainline Protestant preachers like Fosdick,
and used their sermons and ideas in order to appeal to broader audiences. See Miller, Voice of Deliverance,
and Miller, “Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Folk Pulpit,” The Journal of American History 78, no. 1
(Jun. 1991): 120-123.
64
65
Lischer, The Preacher King, 27-28.
While thirteen books of the New Testament have traditionally been attributed to Paul, the status
of several of these letters is debated. Bart Ehrman, an eminent New Testament scholar, provides a
breakdown of Paul’s writings that is generally representative of the current scholarly consensus. He lists as
Undisputed Pauline Epistles” the books of Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1
Thessalonians, and Philemon, and then describes the “Deutero-Pauline Epistles” of Ephesians, Colossians,
and 2 Thessalonians as possibly pseudonymous, and the “Pastoral Epistles” of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and
Titus as “probably pseudonymous.” See Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to
the Early Christian Writings, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 293. It seems unlikely that a
fundamentalist like Martin Luther King, Sr., would have questioned Paul’s authorship of any of these
letters. On the other hand, the more theologically liberal and academically inclined Martin Luther King,
Jr., would have likely been exposed to scholarship questioning Paul’s traditional authorship of these letters
22
raised, ministers and teachers presented Paul’s life according to the accounts given in the
New Testament. One can piece together Paul’s story from the Book of Acts and from the
various Pauline letters that include biographical details. Originally, Paul was Saul—this
was his Hebrew name. Born in Tarsus, a Roman provincial capital city near the
Mediterranean Sea in what is today Turkey, Saul grew up in roughly the first decade of
the Christian era. At this time, Tarsus boasted a university, theater, and art school, and
served as a center of learning in the ancient Mediterranean world. As a Roman citizen
living in a Greek culture practicing the Jewish faith, Saul blended contesting and
contradictory identities. Yet Saul’s Jewishness dominated his other identities. Born the
son of a Pharisee and raised as a Pharisee, Saul spent his youth in the synagogue school
studying the Hebrew Scriptures.66 Around the age of thirteen, Saul joined his father in
at Crozer or Boston University. In any case, King deployed Paul’s works without distinguishing between
those that are undisputedly Pauline and those that are questionably Pauline, and for most of his audiences,
this would have sufficed. An Epistle, it should be noted, is “[a]nother designation for a private letter. Some
scholars have differentiated between ‘epistles’ as literary writings in the form of a letter, which were meant
for general distribution, rather than for an individual recipient, and “letters” which were a nonliterary form
of personal correspondence. This differentiation between epistles is not widely held today, however, so that
the terms tend to be used synonymously.” See Ehrman, The New Testament, 504. In this thesis, I will use
the term epistle to refer to both King and Paul’s letters that are intended for a broader audience (rather than
for private communication). I will be working with the definition of Epistle provided by A. Deissmann,
who wrote that a“ letter is something non-literary, a means of communication between persons who are
separated from each other. Confidential and personal in nature, it is intended only for the person or persons
to whom it is addressed, and not at all for the public or any kind of publicity...An Epistle is an artistic
literary form…It has nothing in common with the letter except its form: apart from that one might venture
the paradox that the epistle is the opposite of a real letter. The contents of the epistle are intended for
publicity—they aim at interesting "the public." See A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, 2nd ed.
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927), 218-220. Therefore in my mind, King wrote and received many
letters, but his “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” might be more accurately titled “Epistle from
Birmingham Jail,” and King’s “Paul’s Letter to American Christians” could be called “Paul’s Epistle to
American Christians.”
66
Pharisees belonged to a “Jewish sect, which may have originated during the Maccabean period,
that emphasized strict adherence to the purity laws set forth in the Torah.” See Ehrman, The New
Testament, 509. While some Jews became Hellenized during the Maccabean period, the Pharisees insisted
on obeying God’s Law with no compromise. Because the Law was confusing and unclear on some points,
the Pharisees developed an interpretation of the Law (an oral tradition) which they obeyed in hopes that, by
obeying the oral law, they would be sure to obey the written Law as well. They were attacked in the
Christian gospels and parts of the New Testament (especially the Gospel of Matthew) for being hypocritical
and legalistic, which may have been because they tended to associate only with each other. Their
23
worship in the synagogue, and around the age of eighteen, he left for Jerusalem to study
under Gamaliel, a renowned religious thinker. At roughly this time, Jewish religious
authorities started persecuting Christians for their allegedly blasphemous and heretical
statements. In the Biblical account of Saul’s life, Saul condoned the persecution of
Christians by standing and watching as a crowd stoned Stephen, the first named Christian
martyr.67
Incensed by the heresies of the Christians, Saul set out to Damascus to persecute
the early Christian communities there. According to the Book of Acts, while Saul
traveled on the road to Damascus, a light from heaven blinded him and he heard a voice
saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting;
but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” Thereafter, Saul met
a Christian named Ananias, who baptized him into the faith. Saul then returned to
Jerusalem, where God spoke to him in a vision and commissioned him to share the good
news of Jesus Christ with the Gentiles.68 In pursuit of that mission, Paul (now using his
Greco-Roman name) undertook three missionary journeys that led him all over the
ancient Mediterranean world.69 Paul preached a simple message: God’s unconditional
agape love, embodied in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, meant that human beings could
cliquishness came about in part because Pharisees adhered strictly to purity laws, and only by associating
with one another could they maintain their purity in the eyes of the Law. Ehrman notes that many scholars
believe that the term Pharisee comes from a Persian term for “separated ones.” See Ehrman, The New
Testament, 46-47.
67
Who's Who in the New Testament, Routledge, s.v. "Paul."- Many scholars question the
historicity of the biography provided in the Book of Acts. See Ehrman, The New Testament, 296-300. For
the death of Stephen and Saul’s role in it, see Acts 7:58.
68
69
Who's Who in the New Testament, Routledge, s.v. "Paul."
The Macmillan Encyclopedia, s.v. "Paul, St (c. 3 - c. 64 AD),"
http://www.credoreference.com/entry/move/paul_st_c_3_c_64_ad.
24
be reconciled to God and to one another, and that salvation came through faith in God’s
grace rather than through human works.70 Paul’s message of grace and reconciliation
appealed to some people while so infuriating others that they whipped, stoned, and beat
him. Religious leaders and Roman authorities also imprisoned Paul frequently, and the
Book of Acts’ account of Paul’s life ended with him still imprisoned in Rome. Figures in
the early Church believed that Paul was martyred in Rome, beheaded sometime around
the year 67 AD.71 Arguably, no individual except Jesus had more influence on the
history of Christianity than the Apostle Paul, and one can certainly make a case that Paul
had more influence on Christianity than its namesake. By expanding the early Church
beyond the Jewish community, Paul took what might have remained an odd Jewish
heresy and spread it throughout the Mediterranean world. Furthermore, Paul’s epistles
took on the status of scripture for the early Church and ensured Paul’s story and his
message of love and reconciliation survived to inspire and instruct Christians for
thousands of years.
Paul argued that because of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross, salvation came
through grace given by God rather than through works achieved by humans. Paul’s
changed view of salvation and justification revolutionized his understanding of the Law;
the erstwhile fanatical Pharisee began to preach and teach that “Christ is the end of the
70
For the role of agape love in Paul’s project, see Walter Harrelson, “The Idea of Agape in the
New Testament,” The Journal of Religion 31, no. 3 (Jul., 1951): 169-182. For Pauline agape love as it
influenced King, see Gary Herstein, “The Roycean Roots of the Beloved Community,” The Pluralist 4, no.
2 (SUMMER 2009): 91-107. For the power of reconciliation, see 2 Corinthians 5:18-19- “And all things are
of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of
reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their
trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.” For salvation through faith
rather than works, see Ephesians 2:8-9- “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (KJV).
71
Who's Who in the New Testament, Routledge, s.v. "Paul."
25
Law.” Theologian Krister Stendahl contends that Paul arrived at this conclusion to make
salvation accessible to Gentiles and to bring them into the early Church. He states that
Paul’s burden for the Gentiles functioned as part of his own vision and salvation
experience: conversion and calling were one and the same. From the outset, Paul
understood himself as “the Apostle to and of the Gentiles.”72 According to theologian
Seyoon Kim, Paul’s entire project stemmed from his experience on the road to
Damascus. Kim argues that Paul understood this salvation experience in terms of
reconciliation. He points to Paul’s proclamation that “[a]ll this is from God, who through
Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in
Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against
them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.”73 Like Kim, Curtis Paul De
Young casts Paul as “the leader of the movement for unity among people of all
nations.”74 Similarly, Denise Kimber Buell and Caroline Johnson Hodge believe Paul
aimed to make a family of the human race through the unifying act of Christ’s death and
resurrection.75 Many Christians, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s German eponym,
72
Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” The
Harvard Theological Review 56 (July 1963): 202-204. For Paul’s understanding of Christ as the end of the
Law, see Romans 10:4. For a more extensive exploration of Saul’s conversion and Paul’s understanding of
the Law, see Johnny Awwad, “From Saul to Paul: The Conversion of Paul the Apostle,” Theological
Review 32 (April 2011): 1-14.
73
Seyoon Kim, “2 Cor. 5:11-21 and the Origin of Paul’s Concept of “Reconciliation,”” Novum
Testamentum 39 (October 1997):376-382, esp. 376. The specific text quoted is 2 Corinthians 5:18-19
(ESV). See also Kim, "God reconciled his enemy to himself : the origin of Paul's concept of
reconciliation." Road from Damascus, (1997): 102-124.
74
Curtiss Paul De Young, "The power of reconciliation: from the apostle Paul to Malcolm X."
Cross Currents 57, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 204.
75
Denise Kimber Buell and Caroline Johnson Hodge, “THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION:
THE RHETORIC OF RACE AND ETHNICITY IN PAUL,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (Summer,
2004): 245-247.
26
defined Pauline Christianity as “Law-free Gospel, justification by faith, and the
universality of salvation.”76 Thus the work and words of the Apostle Paul have spoken a
message of grace and reconciliation and sometimes served to unify Christians of all races
in the Body of Christ.77
Other Christians have used Paul for nefarious ends. Nazis in Hitler’s Germany
used one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite verses, Galatians 3:28, to justify
distinctions between and hierarchies among Christians based on racial categories.78 More
familiar to King were the traditional Southern uses of Paul to justify slavery and racism.
In the years prior to the Civil War, proslavery authors cited Paul’s Epistle to Philemon as
“the Pauline Mandate for federal slave law.” Paul sent this letter to Philemon in the care
of Onesimus. Philemon had become a Christian through Paul’s ministry, and in a strange
twist of fate, Onesimus, a slave who had run away from Philemon, met Paul and then
converted to Christianity under Paul’s guidance. So by sending Onesimus back to
Philemon, Paul sent a runaway slave back to his master. Exegesis on Philemon formed a
central battleground in the struggle between proslavery Christians and abolitionist
Christians. Proslavery writers contended that Paul’s act of sending the runaway slave
home to his master set a biblical example for the return of fugitive slaves, and that
abolitionists acted contrary to the mandate of Scripture. Furthermore, advocates of
76
Awwad, “From Saul to Paul,” 13-14. The term “universality of salvation” does not necessarily
mean universal salvation; rather, it indicates that through Jesus Christ’s atoning death on the cross,
salvation became available to any and all people.
77
Paul used this metaphor to describe the Church: “For just as the body is one and has many
members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one
Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of
one Spirit.” 1 Corinthians 12:12-13. Paul continued this metaphor before launching into his exposition of
agape love.
78
Buell and Hodge, “THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION,” 250.
27
slavery interpreted Paul’s commandment for masters to “give unto your servants that
which is just and equal” as a condemnation of slavery’s abuses by evil masters, rather
than a condemnation of the practice of slavery. According to Southern slave-owning
religion, slavery functioned as a positive good and served as part of God’s providential
plan to bring Africans to salvation.79 In the debate over slavery, both defenders of
slavery and abolitionists found in Paul a useful ally, and King frequently encountered old
slavery arguments recycled in the name of segregation. In King’s own time, Sam
Bowers, the head of Mississippi’s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, considered
himself a modern-day Paul and twisted Pauline thought to justify his murderous
campaign of racial terrorism.80 For centuries, Christians of all kinds deployed Paul’s
power to achieve their goals, sometimes for good, and sometimes for evil.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s first encounters with Paul, however, came from the
sermons of his father on the biblical Paul’s work in the early Church. As he progressed
in his studies, King, Jr. encountered different understandings of Pauline Christianity.
From Morehouse, King pursued his calling to ministry to Crozer Theological Seminary,
where he graduated at the top of his class in 1951 (albeit with the aid of plagiarism—
King’s academic career abounded in poor citations and blatant plagiarism).81 He then
went to Boston University, where he met Paul again in the theological ethics of Henry
79
J. Albert Harrill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case
History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion
and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 10 (Summer 2000): 151-172
80
Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997)- Bowers’ organization carried out numerous bombings and infamously murdered
Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in the summer of 1964. See Marsh, God’s Long
Summer, 49-94.
81
“The Student Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Summary Statement on Research,” Martin
Luther King, Jr., Papers Project, The Journal of American History 78, no. 1 (Jun., 1991): 23-31.
28
Nygren. In an essay entitled “Contemporary Continental Theology,” King explored
Nygren’s use of agape love, which King traced back to Paul’s famous “love chapter,” 1
Corinthians 13. As interpreted by Nygren, agape love was divine in origin, unmerited
and transformative; King noted that agape led Christians to “forgive and love their
enemies, because the Grace of God imparts worth to them by the act of loving them.”82
This Pauline concept of agape love later proved vital to King’s work in the Civil Rights
Movement.
While in Boston, King encountered another person destined to play a major role
in his life: Ms. Coretta Scott. King had long fancied himself a ladies’ man—at
Morehouse, he and his pal Larry Williams nicknamed themselves “Robinson and
Stevens” after an Atlanta wrecking crew of that name because of the way they devastated
the girls they romanced.83 But from the start, the young lady from Marion, Alabama
proved to be more than a match for King. In their first interaction, King called Coretta
and tried to flatter her, cooing, “I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms.”
Coretta bluntly replied, “Why, that’s absurd. You haven’t seen me yet.” Born and raised
in Marion, Alabama, the talented Ms. Scott had studied at Antioch College before
enrolling at the New England Conservatory of Music, which brought her to Boston, and
after a time to Martin Luther King, Jr. In spite of her misgivings about him, Coretta
agreed to go on a date with King. At the end of their first date, King, was so impressed
by Coretta that he proposed to her. Coretta did not say yes, but she did not say no, and
82
King, “Contemporary Continental Theology,” September 1951-January 1952? Boston, MA?
The King Papers, Vol. II, 127. Like many others he wrote, King plagiarized much of this paper. On this
paper’s plagiarism specifically, see The King Papers, Vol. II, 113. For more on Paul’s impact on King’s
theology, see The King Papers, Vol. II, 209-210 (sin and salvation), and 405-406 (the love of God).
83
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 193-194.
29
after many more dates and many more proposals, Coretta finally accepted.84 But even as
he courted Coretta, King carried on with other women; over Christmas Break in 1952,
King confessed to Coretta that he had cheated on her while back home in Atlanta. In
spite of King’s infidelity (which continued after the wedding)85 and Daddy King’s desire
for his son to marry a girl from Atlanta’s elite, the pair went forward with their
engagement. Though it took time, King persuaded his father to bless his choice of bride,
and Daddy King officiated the wedding in Coretta’s hometown of Marion, Alabama, on
June 18, 1953.
King had a wife; now he needed a church. As fate would have it, Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, invited King to preach a trial sermon.86 Dexter
had just dismissed the Rev. Vernon Johns because his fiery preaching and bold activism
proved too much for the tastes of its middle-class and rather conservative congregation;
King, the congregation felt, would surely behave better.87 King’s trial sermon, “The
Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” demonstrated his breadth of intellect and
appreciable skills as an orator, and the congregation offered him its pulpit. King accepted
the offer, and he and Coretta came home to the South in 1954. While in Montgomery,
King finished his dissertation, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking
of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” His doctorate distinguished King from the
84
Lewis, King: A Biography, 40-45.
85
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 193-194.
86
Lewis, King: A Biography, 40-47.
87
Michael Kilian, “Vernon Johns: A New Hero For America,” Chicago Tribune, January 16,
1994, http://articles.chicagotribune.com
30
average southern preacher, and his ministry at Dexter appeared to be the start of a very
respectable career.88
The son of a long line of preachers, Martin Luther King, Jr. had faith intertwined
in his DNA. Though he bore scars from life in the segregated South, King also enjoyed
opportunities that few black men his age could even dream of, chief among them the
outstanding education he received. Frequent and extensive plagiarism marked King’s
graduate school years, but he also worked hard to make the most of the opportunities
offered to him. Similarly, King pursued Coretta relentlessly even while cheating on her.
Whether these behaviors represented youthful indiscretions or deep-seated character
flaws, King’s sins had little effect on his success. A well-educated and well-connected
young man, Martin Luther King, Jr. looked ready to follow in his father’s footsteps as a
successful minister. Like King, the Apostle Paul had once been a promising young
member of the religious elite with a respectable pedigree and a fine education. But just
as Paul’s life changed with a vision, so King’s life would be forever altered by a
revelation in Montgomery.
88
Lewis, King: A Biography, 44-47.
31
CHAPTER 2
“I HEARD A VOICE SAYING TO ME”—A VISION, AN EPISTLE, AND AGAPE
It was about midnight in Montgomery, the night silent and dark. Martin Luther
King, Jr., sneaking into his house after another too-long committee meeting, tried to keep
the front door from squeaking and waking Coretta or Yolanda, his barely month-old
daughter. King had been a father for a only few weeks before he had been chosen to
head the Montgomery Improvement Association and lead the boycott of the city’s
segregated busing system. Between his baby and his boycott, King found little rest. His
shoulders sagged and his feet dragged as he crept toward bed. He gingerly lay down,
hoping for a few hours of sleep before duty called. He felt the warmth of his wife next to
him, and for a moment, King could breathe.
The telephone rang, and King snatched it almost instantly. “Nigger,” growled the
voice on the other end, “we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of
this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”
The dial tone droned on for a couple seconds before King realized the voice on the other
end had hung up. King set the phone down and settled back into bed. King had heard
many other threats over the past few weeks, and he tried to convince himself that the
voice was just one more pissed-off redneck with a phonebook. He rolled over, but even
though his body and brain desperately needed rest, he could not sleep. Surrendering to
another sleepless night, King trudged into his kitchen and warmed up some coffee. His
thoughts turned to his baby and his wife, both still asleep. Will they be taken from me?
Will I be taken from them? Nightmarish images streamed through King’s mind:
explosions, fires, funerals…
32
I can’t call on Daddy now. I can’t call on Mama. They can’t do anything for me. No one
can. King paused, listened to his wife and daughter’s sounds of sleep, bowed his head,
and began to pray aloud:
Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right; I think the cause
that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now; I’m
faltering; I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this
because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.
Before he could say another word, he heard a voice say: “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.”89
*
*
*
Every American schoolchild hears the same story of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott: on December 1, 1955, a sweet old lady named Rosa Parks refused to move to
the back of a segregated bus, an offense for which police arrested her. Outrage over
Parks’ arrest sparked the Bus Boycott. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
African-Americans refused to ride the city’s buses from December 5, 1955, until
December 20, 1956, when the US Supreme Court ruled that such segregated busing laws
violated the Constitution and King called for an end to the bus boycott. After over a year
of walking, carpooling, and protesting, King boarded an integrated bus on December 21,
1956, and sat down to celebrate the first victory of the Civil Rights Movement.
American schoolchildren do not learn that Montgomery’s Women’s Political Council had
threatened a boycott as early as May of 1954, and that the city had arrested other women
for breaking the same segregation law that Rosa Parks violated. Those women, however,
lacked Parks’ sterling reputation, and because local civil rights leaders wanted a virtuous
89
King, “Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool,” Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago,
August 27, 1967, from A Knock at Midnight, ed. Carson and Holloran, 159-162.
33
icon for their cause, the other women faded into history’s footnotes.90 Children also do
not learn that King differed from Parks in that Montgomery’s black leaders chose him for
his role as president of the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association
because, as Parks pointed out, “he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work
that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies.”91 King
began the boycott as a twenty-six year-old rookie minister with a newborn baby and a
bright but unremarkable future in ministry. He ended the boycott as the leading voice of
the Civil Rights Movement.
King accomplished this transformation by participating in and claiming the
Pauline tradition of divine commissioning through revelation, resurrecting Paul to speak
to black and white American Christians, and injecting Pauline agape love into the very
veins of the Civil Rights Movement. While King cited many biblical figures in his
sermons and appealed to a wide variety of religious and secular figures as sources of
authority and inspiration, his particular uses of Paul illuminate some of the most vital yet
neglected aspects of King’s ministry. King’s uses of Paul highlight the importance of the
90
“Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956),” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education
Institute, kpp01.stanford.edu (accessed April 2, 2013). King noted that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role
assigned to her by history” because ‘‘her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted,’’ which
made her ‘‘one of the most respected people in the Negro community.” See King, Stride Toward Freedom,
44. Parks had earned this reputation through long years of service to the local NAACP. She had joined the
local chapter of the NAACP in 1943 and served as secretary for a number of years. She also advised the
local NAACP Youth Council, and in the summer of 1955, she attended the Highlander Folk School’s
workshop on “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” See “Parks, Rosa (19132005),” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu
(accessed April 2, 2013). One of the women arrested before Parks, 15 year-old Claudette Colvin, was
arrested on March 2, 1955, and the local NAACP considered using her for a trial case against busing
segregation until questions about Colvin’s character dissuaded them from doing so (she had used offensive
language during her arrest and was an unwed pregnant teenager). See Branch, Parting the Waters, 120-123.
For more on Colvin and other women like her, see Paul Hendrickson, “The Ladies Before Rosa: Let Us
Now Praise Unfamous Women,” Washington Post, April 12, 1998. In that article, Colvin tells another
story, saying that she got pregnant only later in the year and that she used no profanity on the bus. In her
eyes, she was not chosen to be the symbol of the boycott because “I didn't represent the middle class. . . .
They didn't want me involved because of where I lived and what my parents' background was.”
91
Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story, (New York: Dial Books, 1992), 136.
34
black church in King’s ministry, the crucial role of the social gospel in King’s prophetic
critique of American Christianity, and the agape love that sustained King’s philosophy of
nonviolent social change. By examining King’s uses of Paul in the Montgomery
Movement, we can gain new insight into King’s thought and practice as a minister and
civil rights leader, and the ways in which he blended these two vocations into a single
calling. The Dreamer was born in Atlanta, but the Dream was born in Montgomery.
Though King had been a Christian all his life, through his vision in his kitchen in
Montgomery he “discovered then that religion had to become real to me and I had to
know God for myself.”92 King’s kitchen experience represented his conversion from an
inherited and intellectual Christianity to the personal and powerful faith that inspired and
sustained him throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Though he had long lacked the
single moment of crisis and conversion that defined traditional African-American
Christianity, King finally understood the power of a personal relationship with God.93
King claimed that his ministry grew out of this vision, and this understanding of
his project comes through in his sermon to his congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church on January 27, 1957. Though King preached this sermon after the conclusion of
the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the experience on which he reflected occurred in the first
weeks of the Montgomery Movement. Just before King preached this sermon,
segregationists had again resorted to violence, this time by bombing a church and
attempting to dynamite King’s home. In light of this terrorism, King returned to the
vision that inspired and sustained him in his ministry. King told his congregation that
92
93
King, “Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool,”
According to Raboteau, in the moment of conversion in traditional African-American
Christianity, “[p]rofessed doctrine becomes internally real.” Raboteau, Slave Religion, 271.
35
“[e]arly on a sleepless morning in January, 1956, rationality left me. 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.”94 King, who had always viewed faith through the lens
of a cool intellect, found himself blinded by the light; without rationality, King began to
“walk by faith, not by sight.”95 Though he had once scorned the irrational and overly
emotional faith of his fundamentalist forebears, King’s kitchen experience taught him
that sometimes, believing is seeing.
When his revelation came to him, King was sleepless for good reason. King
received as many as thirty and forty death threats a day during the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. These death threats came from segregationists and racists all too eager to
practice the hate they preached.96 Yet in the midst of this suffocating pressure, King
received his vision: communicating the Gospel by standing up for truth and
righteousness, even (or especially) when that meant defying and destroying systems of
oppression. King strove to communicate that revelation to the men and women sitting in
the pews of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He told them that “[s]ince that morning I can
stand up without fear.” King set the example for his people. They could fearlessly
confront their oppressors because God ordained their mission. King proclaimed, “Tell
Montgomery they can keep shooting and I’m going to stand up to them; tell Montgomery
they can keep bombing and I’m going to stand up to them.” His vision gave King the
94
“King Says Vision Told Him to Lead Integration Forces,” Montgomery Advertiser, January 28,
1957, Montgomery, AL. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu (November 11, 2012).
95
2 Corinthians 5:7-“for we walk by faith, not by sight” (ESV). Given how Paul was blinded
during his conversion experience, this language of faith/sight must have been especially meaningful to him.
96
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. by Clayborne Carson, (New York: IPM in
Association with Warner Books, 1998), 76.
36
courage to face threats and violence, and he shared his vision with his audience in hopes
that it would encourage them as it had him.
King then moved from this world to the next by connecting the earthly struggle to
change the segregated South to Christians’ spiritual death and renewal, saying, “The old
Montgomery is passing away and segregation is dying.”97 In this statement, King alluded
to Paul’s writings in Second Corinthians and collapsed sin and segregation into a single
evil entity. He thereby applied Paul’s understanding of sin to segregation, and so Paul’s
declaration that “old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”98
promised not only individual salvation but societal transformation. Unlike the hyperindividualistic concepts of sin and salvation preached by segregationist ministers, for
whom faith was an exclusively personal and private matter,99 King’s understanding of sin
and salvation involved the community. In King’s construction, institutions were just as
capable of and prone to sin as individuals; by the grace of God, institutions could also be
redeemed and transformed. To translate abstract theology into relevant moral teachings,
King reinterpreted Pauline ideas of sin and salvation. This use of Paul enabled King to
criticize segregation not simply as a social reformer, but as a prophet and apostle.
As King himself proclaimed, this ministry came to him in a revelation. In
declaring that this visionary experience inspired his mission, King appealed to and
combined two traditions: Pauline Christianity and African-American Christianity. While
several (sometimes contradictory) accounts of Paul’s vision occur in the New Testament,
97
“King Says Vision Told Him to Lead Integration Forces,” Montgomery Advertiser.
98
2 Corinthians 5:17 (KJV).
99
Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 82-115.
37
Paul’s vision unquestionably led to his ministry.100 Scholars agree that Paul understood
his experience as an encounter with a resurrected Jesus, an experience that gave Paul
apostolic authority.101 Like King’s revelation, Paul’s vision included the experience of
hearing a voice speak to him.102 In the account of Paul’s conversion related in Acts 26,
the vision included a specific commission from Jesus to Paul, as Jesus said, “I have
appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to…the
Gentiles—to whom I am sending you.” While these accounts from Acts do not come
directly from Paul’s hand, some of Paul’s own writings address his conversion
experience. In Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, Paul cited his vision to remind the church
in Galatia that unlike the preaching of his opponents, “the gospel that was preached by
me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I
received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”103 Paul presented his theology as divine
in origin, thereby placing his authority not on human traditions but in his God-given
vision. Using this vision as his source of authority elevated Paul’s gospel above the
messages of his opponents in early Christianity.
100
Who's Who in the New Testament, Routledge, s.v. "Paul.” See Acts 9, 22, and 26, and Galatians
1 for the various account of Paul’s conversion.
101
Ehrman, The New Testament, 300-306. The term “apostle” comes from the Greek word for
“sent,” and it was used to label those an individual commissioned to perform a particular mission or task,
whereas a disciple was merely a “follower, one who is “taught.” See Ehrman, The New Testament, 503504. In some cases, the term “apostle” indicated that an individual personally witnessed Jesus’ ministry or
resurrected life. See Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, s.v. "Apostle.” Certainly, Paul used the
term in this way when he defended his own apostolic authority in 1 Corinthians 15:3-11. By listing all the
other apostles and eyewitnesses to the resurrection, and then highlighting himself as the last person to
whom the resurrected Jesus appeared, Paul claimed apostolic authority and eyewitness credibility. King’s
own claim to the title of apostle elevated him above his opponents in a similar manner.
102
Acts 9, Acts 22, and Acts 26 share similar content and include a voice speaking to Paul, but
they also vary in a number of aspects. See Ehrman, The New Testament, 301, for an exploration of these
discrepancies.
103
Acts 26:16-17, Galatians 1:11-12 (ESV).
38
In citing his vision as a source of authority and inspiration, King echoed the
earlier apostle and supported his own ministry’s legitimacy with Paul’s example.
Furthermore, he gained the same advantages that Paul possessed—by depicting his
mission as flowing from a God-given vision, King raised his gospel above the merely
human gospels preached by his foes. It is worth noting that other African-American
leaders had claimed divine direction via a vision. Jarena Lee, a woman born into slavery
in 1783, became a revivalist among the African Methodists of Philadelphia in the early
1800s by rooting her authority in her revelation. Because of her gender, Lee was not
allowed to occupy a leadership position in the church, but because she cited her visions
and a voice telling her to “[g]o preach the Gospel,” Lee possessed an authority based on
her undeniable inner spiritual experience. To remind her readers that they could not
dismiss her vision without calling into question the words of the Apostle Paul, Lee
described her vision by writing, “There is no language that can describe it, except that
which was heard by St. Paul, when he was caught up to the third heaven, and heard words
which it was not lawful to utter.”104 Such conversion experiences and visions formed an
integral part of traditional African-American Christianity, and they imbued black
exhorters and preachers with an authority directly from God. This God-given authority
104
The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her
Call to Preach the Gospel. Revised and Corrected from the Original Manuscript, Written by Herself.
Philadelphia, Written and Published for the author, 1836. From African American Religious History: A
Documentary Witness, ed. by Milton C. Sernett, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 164172. Lee refers to Paul’s example as related in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4- “It is not expedient for me doubtless
to glory. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years
ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an
one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I
cannot tell: God knoweth;) How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which
it is not lawful for a man to utter” (KJV).
39
gave the ministers a measure of independence from white Christians.105 King’s vision
represented his participation in a practice that African-Americans had long used to break
down power structures that oppressed them. Because Paul had rooted his project in a
visionary experience and use his vision to defend his work, King and other black
Christians could use Paul’s example as a visionary leader to support their own ministries.
While other biblical figures received visions, Paul’s vision appealed to King
because Paul’s vision centered on reaching out to the Gentiles. This aspect of his faith
led Paul’s theology to center on reconciliation, as exemplified in his Second Epistle to the
Corinthians: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave
us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of
reconciliation.”106 Paul’s vision consisted of reconciliation between God and humankind
as well as reconciliation between human beings.107 The vision King claimed in
Montgomery gave him power in part because of Paul’s precedent, and Paul provided
King with a worthy example because of Paul’s heart for reconciliation. Moreover, just as
Paul’s vision led to his conversion, King’s vision represented his conversion from a
rational and intellectual Christianity to a more irrational and personal faith. This vision
105
Raboteau, Slave Religion- on the independence of preacher- 231-239. See also the introduction
to Jarena Lee’s ministry in African-American Religious History, ed. Sernett, 164- “Jarena Lee claimed the
authority of an inner spiritual experience and preached “by inspiration” as an itinerant revivalist…Jarena
Lee had to make her own way, design her own ministry, and rely on spiritual inspiration and authority.”
Other slave exhorters and preachers used the same strategy of authority by revelation. See Sernett’s account
of Richard Allen, the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, whose powerful conversion
experience propelled his ministry- African-American Religious History, ed. Sernett, 139-154.
106
2 Corinthians 5:18-19 (ESV).
107
Who's Who in the New Testament, Routledge, s.v. "Paul.”
40
also gave King a kind of apostolic authority, and just as Paul had used his status as an
apostle, King relied on this authority in his civil rights work.
King used this apostolic identity in his sermon “Paul’s Letter to American
Christians,” which he delivered in the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycott on
November 4, 1956.108 As in many of his sermons, King found inspiration for “Paul’s
Letter” in another minister’s work, on this occasion in the white minister Frederick
Meek’s “Letter to American Christians.”109 Judging from the way in which King marked
up his copy of Meek’s sermon, King clearly saw how he could adjust Meek’s sermon to
meet the needs of the movement. On the third page of King’s copy of “A Letter to
Christians,” King underlined the sentence “[y]our brethren in Christ are found among all
nations.” At the bottom of that page, King began toying with ideas for his own version of
the sermon, scribbling, “[r]emember that your citizenship is twofold—it is true that you
live in the colony of time? . But you must get your orders from the empire of eternity.”
Notably, King omitted the section of Meek’s sermon in which Meek’s Paul marveled
“[a]nd you have no slaves! How do you get your work done?” King likewise removed
Meek’s Paul’s comments on allowing women to speak in church. Where Meek celebrated
the “weapon of peace,” King praised the “weapon of love,” reflecting King’s conception
of the active role of love in the peacemaking process. Toward the end of his copy of the
sermon, King also scratched in the margin, “They tell me there are some among you,
particularly one by the name of McCarthy, who have caused Christians to be afraid to
108
I chose to address King’s vision before this sermon even though the vision was discussed in a
later sermon because the vision itself (though not the sermon discussing it) came before King preached
“Paul’s Letter to American Christians.” I believe this vision was a turning point for King, and so I began
with that pivotal experience even though doing so requires treating sermons in an order that is not strictly
chronological.
109
Rieder, The Word of the Lord, 273-274.
41
speak out against evil. They tell me that even some of the preachers have lost the
prophetic role.” King followed this criticism of preachers who failed to be prophets with
a note that said, “[t]he division in the church appalls me (i.e. Negro and White).” He
continued to sketch out potential talking points, writing, “Those of you who are living the
Christian life may sometimes be persecuted, but don’t worry, for God will give you
power to withstand it. I myself have had a deal of trouble [unclear- likely “along”] the
life for Christ. I was tried for heresy at Jerusalem, etc…” King’s third and final talking
point prefigured his revision of 1 Corinthians 13. He rhapsodized about love, declaring
that love remained “the principle thing—you may have towering skyscrapers, but without
love it is nothing. You may have all knowledge all [unclear] but without love.” There, he
stopped, the idea sufficiently embedded in his mind.110 King appreciated Meek’s creative
concept, but he also saw how he could improve on Meek’s sermon by preaching from the
perspective of a Paul with more empathy for African-Americans. The racial division in
the church, the lack of prophetic preaching, the suffering of Christians, and the desperate
need for America to embrace the weapon of love all drove King to create his own Paul
and preach through this hybridized apostle.
“Paul’s Letter to American Christians” served as one of King’s standard sermons.
He preached “Paul’s Letter to American Christians” no fewer than fifteen times between
1956 and 1962,111 and as early as September 1956, when he delivered it at the National
Baptist Convention in Denver, fellow preacher Joseph Lowery described King’s use of
110
King, personal copy of Meek’s “A Letter to Christians,” After February 21, 1954? Series 2:
Writings by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1947-1968), Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr., Collection,
Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, GA.
111
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” Delivered to the Commission on Ecumenical
Missions and Relations, United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., June 3, 1958, Pittsburgh, PA, http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu (accessed October 18, 2012).
42
the sermon as “riding one of his ponies.”112 The frequency with which King gave this
sermon and the national contexts he used it in demonstrated “Paul’s Letter to American
Christians” centrality to King’s ministry. King also chose to include a version of “Paul’s
Letter to American Christians” in his 1963 book Strength to Love.113 The usefulness of
this sermon evidenced itself in King’s decision to preach it when he did: as King
ascended to the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on November 4, 1956, he faced a
frustrated and fearful crowd. The boycott, nearly a year old, was threatened by the city’s
attempts to shut down the MIA’s carpool through legal injunctions. In this dark time,
King used a Pauline persona to address his congregation specifically and the nation’s
divided Christian communities more generally, delivering a prophetic critique of
American Christianity and encouraging the members of the movement to continue to
fight the good fight.
King began his sermon by introducing the letter as recent discovery from the
island of Ephesus. According to King, the letter included the inscription, “Please read
when the people assemble themselves together and pass on to the other churches.” In this
introduction, King established a Pauline voice and imitated Paul’s epistles, in which Paul
addressed general issues of the faith as well as particular problems facing individual
churches.114 He then described how difficult the task of translation had been, and
112
Rieder, The Word of the Lord, 103.
113
King, Strength to Love, 156-164. Given that King included only 16 of his sermons in Strength
to Love, it is not unreasonable to infer that this sermon was of particular importance to him.
114
See Colossians 4:16. Paul’s letters were read to churches in cities and then passed between
churches in different cities.
43
apologized if “the contents sound strangely Kingian instead of Paulinian.”115 From the
outset of his sermon, King blended his voice with that of the Apostle Paul.
In the beginning of the “letter” itself, King/Paul116 greeted American Christians in
typical Pauline fashion, saying, “I, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to you
who are in America.”117 Even as he echoed Paul’s salutations to different churches,118
this move suggested King’s own apostolic authority by blurring the line between King
and Paul. As an apostle, King/Paul claimed authority that others lacked: apostles were
“special emissaries of the faith who were understood to be representatives of Christ.”119
As an apostle, King/Paul possessed the authority to criticize Americans for making great
scientific progress without pursuing spiritual progress.
King/Paul then diagnosed the reasons for this tragic failure. American Christians
conceived of morality as “merely group consensus.” Because they were “afraid to be
different,” American Christians conformed to the unjust systems of this world rather than
being transformed by the ethics of “the empire of eternity.” To rebuke this moral
115
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” The King Papers, Vol. III, 415.
116
I will use this term throughout my discussion of this sermon to illustrate the blurring of voices
that King accomplished by speaking through Paul in this sermon. I also wished to distinguish between
King’s use of the Pauline persona and King himself (not to suggest an inconsistency between the two, but
to highlight King’s deployment of this particular persona). Dyson uses this technique to discuss Bill
Clinton’s assumption of King’s mantle in 1993 at the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ in Memphis,
TN. There, a figure Dyson refers to as “Clinton/King” delivered “a report card on the last 25 years.” For
students of both Clinton and King, it is also fascinating that “[w]hen Martin Luther King was assassinated
and Clinton had volunteered to work for the Red Cross in the riot-torn sections of Washington, a next-door
neighbor heard him reciting snatches of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech when he returned home that
night. He knew it by heart.” See Dyson, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 170-173.
117
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” The King Papers, Vol. III, 415.
118
See Galatians 1:1- “Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ
and God the Father,” and 1 Corinthians 1:1- “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of
God” (ESV).
119
Ehrman, The New Testament, 503-504.
44
conformity, King/Paul quoted Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, saying to his fellow
Christians, “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of
your mind.” He followed this citation with another Pauline reference to remind his
listeners that they constituted “a colony of heaven.” While they possessed “a dual
citizenry” in heaven and on earth, King/Paul maintained that “[t]he Christian owes his
ultimate allegiance to God.” King/Paul commanded American Christians, “if any earthly
institution conflicts with God’s will, it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it.”
King built an argument for civil disobedience based on Paul’s instructions to defy moral
status quos and reinterpreted Paul’s idea of dual citizenship to suggest that the injustice of
segregation contradicted the higher laws of God’s kingdom. By citing Pauline
instructions and encouragement to the early Church, King suggested at an alternative
metaphor for the Civil Rights Movement. Oftentimes, King used the Exodus metaphor
because this story suggested that God chose African-Americans to be His people and that
He would deliver them just as He had once delivered the Children of Israel. But in this
sermon, King/Paul called to mind the heroic example of the early Church (“the Roman
Christians” and “the Philippian Christians” to whom he had written so long ago) to show
American Christians what they lacked: the courage to obey God rather than
government.120
120
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” The King Papers, Vol. III, 415-417. Note the
similarity between King’s phrasing and Romans 12:2 (KJV) and Philippians 3:20 as translated by James
Moffat, 1922. Compare King/Paul’s endorsement of civil disobedience with Paul in Romans 13:1- “Let
everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has
established. The authorities that exist have been established by God” (ESV). Clearly, King chooses and
uses select parts of Paul while largely ignoring others. This practice demonstrates King’s control over Paul
as a source, as well as King’s understanding of authorities and law. Just as an unjust law was not (in King’s
mind) a law at all, an ungodly government was not an authority.
45
Having criticized America as a nation, King/Paul moved onto the particular
failures of American churches. King slipped a subtle aspersion into the sermon’s title—
while the historical Paul addressed his letters to the Church at Philippi or Corinth,
King/Paul directed his letter to “American Christians,” thereby insinuating that Christians
in America were so divided that there existed no single American “church” to address.
Without doubt, King abhorred disunity within American Christianity. He deployed Paul’s
church-as-body image to lament the sad truth that “narrow sectarianism is destroying the
unity of the body of Christ.”121 Protestantism alone contained more than 256
denominations, a fact that led King/Paul to proclaim that “God is bigger than all of our
denominations.”122 To King, these divisions within the church represented an unholy
division of the body of Christ. Using Paul’s image of the Church as the Body of Christ
allowed King to show his audience that separation was suicide: the different members of
the Church needed each other as badly as a heart needed lungs, and vice versa. King/Paul
then reminded his audience that “we are all one in Christ Jesus,” an allusion to one of
King’s favorite Pauline passages, Galatians 3:28.123 In this verse, Paul declared the unity
of believers in Christ Jesus, a message King/Paul appealed to as he moved on to what he
saw as an even more poisonous problem among American Christians.
121
For Paul’s use of the Body of Christ metaphor, see 1 Corinthians 12. In 1 Corinthians 12:1213, Paul explained it in their terms—“ For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the
members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all
baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (ESV).
He goes on to explain that just as different parts of the body serve different functions, all of which are
necessary for the health of the body, different members of the church have different abilities and talents, all
of which are necessary for the health of the church.
122
123
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” The King Papers, Vol. III , 416.
Galatians 3:28- “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither
male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (KJV).
46
Up to this point, King/Paul had critiqued the moral conformity of the United
States and its Christians, reminded Christians of their duty to obey the higher law of
God’s kingdom, and lambasted sectarian separations in the Body of Christ. All this work
set the stage for King/Paul’s attack on the supreme societal sin: segregation. King/Paul
cried, “You must face the tragic fact that when you stand at eleven o’clock on a Sunday
morning to sing “In Christ There Is No East Or West,” you stand in the most segregated
hour of Christian America.” Sadly, religion remained more strictly segregated than any
other aspect of American life, largely because of self-proclaimed Christians who
manipulated Scripture to justify the system of segregation and divide the Body of Christ.
King/Paul blasted segregationist scripture-twisting, exclaiming, “my friends, this is
blaspheming!” Segregation contradicted “everything that the Christian religion stands
for,” and to prove it, King/Paul referred to some of King’s favorite Pauline passages.
First, he cited Galatians 3:28 again, this time in full, in order to remind his audience that
that which united believers (Christ) remained infinitely greater than anything that might
divide them (race, class, gender, etc.). Secondly, he reminded his audience of Paul’s
declaration on Mars Hill that “God…hath made of one blood all nations of men.”
King/Paul cited this scripture to counter arguments of white supremacy and call to mind
the common origins of all humanity.124 King used Paul to show that segregation within
the church created a deadly division within the Body of Christ and contradicted the
principles of unity and love that formed the very heart of Christian fellowship.
124
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” The King Papers, Vol. III , 415-418. See Acts
17:24-26 and Galatians 3:28 (KJV).
47
King/Paul’s critique of segregation then moved from Church to State. King/Paul
praised the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v Board of Education,125 and asserted that
the politicians opposing integration had “lost the true meaning of democracy and
Christianity.” Brilliantly blending civil religion and Christianity, King/Paul declared that
men who were “standing against integration” were “not only standing against the noble
precepts of your democracy but also against the eternal edicts of God Himself.” King
took advantage of Paul’s authority to crush segregationists and doubly damn them as
unpatriotic and unchristian. Aware of his Cold War context, King/Paul reminded
Americans that “out of the two billion five hundred million people in this world, about
one billion six hundred million of them are colored.” In this instance, King used the Cold
War to warn Americans that their treatment of their colored brethren could and would
have international ramifications in the struggle for supremacy against the Soviet Union.
By placing the United States’ segregation in a global context, King showed that civil
rights could help the cause of God and country in the battle to defeat godless communists.
After addressing his opposition, King/Paul turned to King’s allies in the freedom
movement. King/Paul implored them to “struggle with Christian methods and Christian
weapons…using only the weapon of love.” Even though he believed love capable of
resolving conflict and reconciling enemies, King knew that freedom fighters would face
criticism, persecution, and even death. Prophetically, King/Paul wrote, “if physical death
is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of
psychological death, then nothing could be more Christian.” Recognizing the
extraordinary dangers the members of the movement faced, King/Paul encouraged his
125
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
48
fellow believers to face persecution without fear or anxiety. “I can say this with some
authority,” King/Paul told his audience, “because my life was a continual round of
persecutions.”126 Here again, King blurred his voice with the apostle and reminded his
listeners that he and Paul both spoke with the authority of experience on the subject of
persecution.127 Having endured such pain, King/Paul repeated Paul’s declaration that
“neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to
come…shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” His
experience with persecution and his faith in the love of God enabled King/Paul to testify
that “[t]he end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and
avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.”128 In order to fight
the good nonviolent fight with courage and determination, the members of the freedom
movement needed to rely on the love of God.
Moreover, these men and women would need to participate in the agape love of
God. With that kind of love in mind, King rewrote the “more excellent way” of which
Paul spoke of in 1 Corinthians 13.129 For King/Paul, only love gave life value. Whatever
Americans achieved in the pursuit of knowledge, King/Paul asserted that “all of this
amounts to absolutely nothing devoid of love.” Even if Americans gave their goods to
the poor and their lives to service, they risked turning virtue into vice, as “[w]ithout love,
126
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” The King Papers, Vol. III, 417-420.
127
King was now a veteran of the movement, having led the Montgomery campaign through
bombings and endless threats, while Paul’s resume of persecution is jaw-dropping in its own right. See 2
Corinthians 11:24-28 for Paul’s list of persecutions which King paraphrased in this sermon.
128
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” The King Papers, Vol. III, 418-419. See Romans
8:38-39.
129
1 Corinthians 12:31- “and yet shew unto you I a more excellent way” (KJV). The following
chapter (1 Corinthians 13) revolves around love.
49
benevolence becomes egotism and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.” For King/Paul,
love reigned as the supreme power of the universe, and the central event of human
history, Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, testified to the supremacy of love. The cross provided
“a telescope through which we look out into the long vista of eternity and see the love of
God breaking forth into time.” Following this ode to love with a soaring benediction,
King/Paul signed off, and King came back to his audience at Dexter with these words—
“This is the letter, and now comes the living of it.”130
Paul’s “still more excellent way” of love resonated deeply with King, and it
allowed King to cast the civil rights struggle as a battle between the love of God and the
hate of humans. In doing so, King seized the moral high ground and motivated his coworkers to remain nonviolent in the face of injustice. By speaking through Paul, King
accessed apostolic authority to show America’s Christians that by endorsing
segregation’s unholy division of the Body of Christ, they committed suicidal sin.
Furthermore, this choice to speak as Paul allowed King to link his suffering with that of
the Apostle Paul. Through that link, King connected the perils faced by the members of
the movement to the dangers endured by the early Church. Lastly, this sermon provided
another opportunity for King to preach agape love as the soul force of the nonviolent
movement.
While little is known about the congregation’s reaction to this sermon in
Montgomery, the bold choice King made in speaking for and through the Apostle Paul in
“Paul’s Letter to American Christians” paid massive dividends over the course of his
130
King, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” The King Papers, Vol. III, 418-420.
50
career in civil rights. In 1955, a young John Lewis heard a radio broadcast of “Paul’s
Letter to American Christians.” Lewis remembered the sermon well:
His sermon was titled “Paul’s Letter to the American Christians.” He’d taken it
from Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth, in which Paul criticized complacent
Christians for their selfishness and failures of brotherhood. He adapted it to what
was happening here, right now, on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama…His
message was one of love and the Gospel, but he was applying those principles to
now, to today…I was on fire with the words I was hearing.
According to Lewis, other preachers failed to reach him because their gospels focused on
the next life and the otherworld; King/Paul reached Lewis because he showed how
actions in this world mattered in the next life. Equally important, King practiced what he
preached. Lewis wrote, “I saw it just up the highway, in Montgomery, where that man,
the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., took the words I’d hear him preach over the
radio and put them into action in a way that set the course of my life from that point on.”
The fire King lit led Lewis to become one of the top leaders in SNCC during the Civil
Rights Movement.131 When C.W. Kelly, an older Baptist minister, heard “Paul’s Letter
to American Christians” at the National Baptist Convention in 1956, he wrote to King
and declared that King’s “‘Letter from St. Paul’ to American Xns was as vivid and real as
any of the Pauline Epistles.” King’s condemnation of the division of the church caused
by segregation resonated with Kelly, who told King that “[t]he real body of X, the
church, ‘has no disunity.’” Just as Paul’s epistles had been shared between communities
in the early Church, Kelly assured King that his “Epistle” would “be ‘passed on to the
131
John Lewis, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
& Company, 1998) 45-48. Lewis went on to a long career of service in the US Congress as a
representative from Georgia. He reflected on his life’s work and concluded his autobiography by invoking
King’s vision with these words: “As a nation, if we care for the Beloved Community, we must move our
feet, our hands, our hearts, our resources to build and not to tear down, to reconcile and not to divide, to
love and not to hate, to heal and not to kill. In the final analysis, we are one people, one family, one
house—the American house, the American family.” See Lewis, Walking With the Wind, 503.
51
churches,’ as the preachers will be talking about it always.” Kelly gushed, “your Epistle
rang with truth.”132 Lewis and Kelly’s reactions to “Paul’s Letter to American
Christians” prove the potency of King’s Pauline persona and explain why he chose to
preach this sermon during a critical moment of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King’s
Pauline persona had both an immediate impact and enduring influence because King/Paul
tied present crises to sacred truths, and King did exactly that when he used “Paul’s Letter
to American Christians” in the midst of the boycott.
In Montgomery, King used Paul as precedent for his visionary ministry, and King
spoke through Paul to deliver a prophetic critique of American Christianity. King also
found in Paul a motive for his movement in Montgomery: agape love. At the NAACP’s
47th Annual Convention in San Francisco in June of 1956, King told “The Montgomery
Story” to over a thousand delegates from thirty-five states. Six months into the boycott,
King explained that the whole campaign began when Mrs. Rosa Park refused to surrender
her seat to a white man on December, 1, 1955, and was subsequently arrested.133
According to King, “almost out of nowhere” leaflets calling for a boycott started
circulating, and “[a]ll of the ministers went to their pulpits and endorsed it heartily, and
so the word was out.”134 The boycott, King claimed, had been over 99 percent effective.
132
C.W. Kelly to Martin Luther King Jr., September 8, 1956, The King Papers, Vol. III, 365-366.
Kelley had already connected King and Paul, previously describing King’s traveling work as “a missionary
journey akin to Paul’s of old,” and exclaiming that “Paul never did it more effectively.”
133
King, “The Montgomery Story,” Address Delivered at the Forty-Seventh Annual NAACP
Convention, June 27, 1956, San Francisco, CA, in The King Papers, Vol. III, 302.
134
King’s account of the boycott does a grave injustice to the work of Jo Ann Robinson, a faculty
member at Alabama State College, president of the Women’s Political Council, and a member of Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church. Robinson and the other members of the WPC reacted swiftly to Parks’ arrest,
preparing and distributing the fliers that informed the black citizens of Montgomery and instructed them to
boycott. Robinson subsequently served on the executive board of the Montgomery Improvement
Association, and played a vital role in the boycott from start to finish. Her autobiographical account of the
boycott, written with David J. Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The
52
Furthermore, King argued that this kind of protest had demonstrated the power of
nonviolent resistance driven by love. “We are not out to defeat or humiliate the white
man,” King said. “We are out to help him as well as ourselves.” The campaign focused
on helping free blacks from oppression and whites from hatred because such an ethic
revealed “the meaning of Christian love…that high type of love I have talked about so
much.” King differentiated between the kinds of love using Greek (the language in
which Paul composed his epistles) and explained that “we are not talking about eros in
Montgomery, we are talking about agape.” Unlike eros, the emotional connection
between lovers, King described agape in this speech as “understanding good will…a love
which seeks nothing in return…a love that loves the person who does the evil deed, while
hating the deed that the person does.”135 According to King, the Montgomery story
testified to the power of agape in action.
In July of the same year, King spoke to a conference of American Baptists in
Wisconsin on the subject of “Non-Aggression Procedures to Interracial Harmony,” and
he gave additional insights into the meaning of love in Montgomery. According to King,
“at the center of the method of nonviolence stands the principle of love. Love is always
the regulating ideal in the technique, in the method of nonviolence.” Because love fueled
the movement, the nonviolent resister sought community, not conquest. King
underscored that the loving ends and the means of the movement, saying, “the end is
never merely to protest but the end is reconciliation…the method of nonviolence seeks
Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987) details the
critical role Robinson and other women played in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. See also Freedom Facts
and Firsts: 400 Years of the African American Civil Rights Experience, s.v. "Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson
(1912–1992)."
135
King, “The Montgomery Story,” The King Papers, Vol. III, 302-306
53
not to humiliate and not to defeat the oppressor, but it seeks to win his friendship and his
understanding, and thereby and therefore the aftermath of this method is reconciliation.”
Preaching this love, King readily admitted, was far easier than practicing it, but
understanding “the real meaning of this love” enabled one to move beyond “empty talk”
of a weak and sentimental love to faithfully loving the oppressor. The love King labeled
“agape” was “the love of God working within men.” Agape love was “the type of love
that can redeem” and “a transforming love” equally capable of changing individuals and
nations. Because agape contained the power to change the hearts and minds of the
oppressor, King explained, agape was “the type of love that we talk about, and that we
are supposed to live about in this method of nonviolent resistance.”136 Agape love, a
concept King discovered in and defined by Paul’s work, became the driving motive and
regulating ideal of all King’s nonviolent work. This particular kind of love enabled King
and his disciples to love those they could not like, to separate the segregationist from
segregation, and pursue redemption, transformation, and finally, reconciliation.
As the Montgomery Bus Boycott approached a year in length, King spoke to the
audience at the MIA’s weeklong Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change on
December 3, 1956, and again, he returned to agape love as the defining ethic and driving
energy of the movement. Agape, as “the highest level of love,” meant “nothing
sentimental or basically affectionate.” Agape therefore differed from eros, or romantic
136
It should be noted that in this speech, King brought up a Pauline statement that did not help his
cause. King did this very rarely, and in this case, he did little with the verse he mentioned. In a discussion
of “religion and the Bible, not properly interpreted, can be used as instruments to crystallize the status
quo…Paul’s command became a watchword: “Servants be obedient to your masters.” This verse, from
Ephesians 6:5, is part of the Paul that King never really addresses, except as broad criticisms of
misinterpretation of the Bible. See King, “Non-Aggression Procedures to Interracial Harmony,” Address
Delivered at the American Baptist Assembly and American Home Mission Conference, July 23, 1956,
Green Lake, WI, The King Papers, Vol. III, 323-327.
54
love, and philia, the reciprocal love between friends. Agape love did not depend on
affection, mutual or otherwise: “[w]hen we rise to love on the agape level we love men
not because we like them…but because God loves you.”137 Again, King connected his
doctrine of Personalism to his Pauline philosophy of agape love—because God made
people in his image and thereby imbued them with intrinsic value, because God agapeloved all people, King and other Christians were duty-bound to love these individuals
unconditionally. Moreover, this love ethic required and enabled King and his followers
to win over their opponents, rather than trying to defeat them. On November 17, 1957,
speaking from his experience in the boycott, King expounded on agape in his sermon,
“Loving Your Enemies.” Therein King explained that at “the level of love…you seek
only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system you
love, but you seek to defeat the system.”138 By preaching on agape love, King hoped to
instill in his movement an unconditional, faith-based love that recognized the God-given
worth of all people, even enemies.
If the concept of agape had remained a theoretical theological distinction in
King’s mind, it would have mattered little to the Montgomery campaign or the nonviolent
resistance movement. But for King, the triumph of nonviolence came when he saw
Montgomery’s black community embrace agape love. On November 13, 1956, the
Supreme Court ruled that segregated buses were illegal. The next day, two mass
meetings occurred, the first of which took place at Hutchinson Street Baptist Church.
137
King, “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” Address Delivered at the First Annual Institute on
Nonviolence and Social Change, December 3, 1956, Montgomery, AL, The King Papers, Vol. III, 458-459.
138
King, “Loving Your Enemies,” delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, November 17,
1957, from A Knock at Midnight, ed. Carson and Holloran, 47-49- King again separated affection for the
opposition from loving the opposition, saying, “I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is
greater than like.”
55
After an opening hymn, a young white Lutheran minister named Robert Graetz read the
Scripture. King described the scene:
He read from Paul’s famous letter to the Corinthians: “…though I have all faith,
so that I could move mountains, and have not love, I am nothing…Love suffereth
long and is kind…” When he got to the words: When I was a child, I spoke as
a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, the congregation burst into
applause. Soon there was shouting, cheering, and waving of handkerchiefs. When
Mr. Graetz concluded the reading with the words: “And now abideth faith, hope
and love, but the greatest of these is love,” there was another spontaneous
outburst. Only a people who had struggled with all the problems involved in
trying to be loving in the midst of bitter conflict could have reacted in this way. I
knew then that nonviolence, for all its difficulties, had won its way into our
hearts.
When the black people of Montgomery celebrated their triumph as a victory of agape
love, King knew that their moment had become a movement. Then King cautioned the
audience to board buses recognizing that the victory in this situation represented “a
victory for the unity of mankind,” and promised that such a loving approach “must in the
long run bring about reconciliation.”139 King dreamed of reconciliation, of forming the
Beloved Community out of the Broken Community, and he knew that only agape could
destroy oppression while healing the wounds it left behind.
The Dream was born in Montgomery, founded on a vision, formulated in a letter,
and fueled by agape love. King substantiated his apostolic authority by appealing to
Paul’s precedent as a visionary leader, and just as Paul’s conversion on the Road to
Damascus remained a source of authority and inspiration throughout his life, King’s
revelation in the kitchen sustained his ministry in Montgomery through the darkest days
of the boycott. During the bus boycott, King delivered a powerful critique of America’s
Christians by penning another Pauline epistle and making the message of the Bible
139
King, “We Are Still Walking,” Liberation, December 1956, New York, NY, The King Papers,
Vol. III, 446- 447.
56
relevant to black believers in Alabama in particular and America in general. This bold
rhetorical maneuver paid dividends for King throughout his career, and connected King’s
story to Paul’s story. For King’s movement, this link suggested an alternative narrative—
that of the early Church.
For King individually, this connection allowed him to use the
Pauline conception of the Church as the Body of Christ to damn segregation as suicide,
and to proclaim the alternative to division and destruction: the more excellent way of
love. Throughout the Montgomery Movement, King interpreted Paul’s concept of agape
love and communicated it to the members of the movement in Montgomery and across
the United States. Agape love proved to be the soul force of King’s movement, the force
that transformed enemies into friends and reformed unjust systems. King’s appropriation
of Paul’s voice and application of Pauline methods and messages helped transform King
from an unknown minister in Montgomery into the nation’s leading spokesman for the
Civil Rights Movement. But as the movement progressed, King found that he was forced
to embrace another aspect of Paul’s project—that of the suffering saint.
57
CHAPTER 3
“I BEAR IN MY BODY THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS”—KING’S
SUFFERING AND PAUL’S PAIN
Sitting in the shoe section of Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem, Martin
Luther King, Jr. signed copy after copy of Stride Toward Freedom, his account of the
Montgomery Bus Boycott. Each man, woman, or child in line got a moment with King, a
moment with the hero of Montgomery, a moment with history. There was awe in some of
the eyes he looked into- it was September 20, 1958, and this young reverend was trying
to turn the world upside down. The line had to keep moving, though, so King gave each
book a smooth, swift signature and then took another to sign. A woman approached with
no book in hand. King looked up, but saw no awe in her eyes.
“Are you Martin Luther King?”
The question surprised King—perhaps this lady could not believe that the man
from the newspapers was a flesh and blood human being. King nodded, “Yes ma’am I
am.”
Swifter than his signature, she plunged a seven-inch steel letter opener into King’s
upper left chest. Blood seeped out, hot and sticky on the cold steel, and dripped onto the
floor. Policemen tackled the woman, and King was rushed to Harlem Hospital.
Izola Curry was forty-two years old, black, and later diagnosed as a paranoid
schizophrenic. She told police that King and the NAACP had been “torturing” her and
“boycotting” her, and that her attack on King was an act of self-defense: “if it wasn’t him
it would have been me, he was going to kill me.” Finding her unfit to stand trial, doctors
committed Curry to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
58
Martin Luther King, Jr. survived thanks to Dr. Aubré Maynard. In 1926, Dr.
Maynard had been one of the first black interns at Harlem Hospital. Several white
doctors resigned because of his presence. In 1958, he was the director of surgery, and
after two hours and fifteen minutes of surgery, he saved Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life.
One of King’s doctors would later confess, “Had Dr. King sneezed or coughed the
weapon would have penetrated the aorta…He was just a sneeze away from death.”140
*
*
*
As King recuperated in the hospital, hundreds of telegrams, letters, and get-wellsoon cards came to Harlem Hospital, including one from A.J. Muste, a former executive
secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and proponent of nonviolence. Muste
wrote to King, “Through your arrest some weeks ago and much more through your attack
last Saturday God himself has marked you, as I am sure you realize yourself. The marks
you bear in your body, are, as were those of the Apostle, the marks of the Lord Jesus.”141
Muste interpreted King’s suffering in light of the trials and tribulations of the Apostle
Paul, as evidenced by his use of Paul’s writings. Muste lifted the phrase “the marks of
the Lord Jesus” from Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians where Paul wrote, “I bear in my
body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”142 The phrase struck King so powerfully that he used
it himself a few days later in a letter to the Montgomery Improvement Association. To
140
“Wounded Rev. King Develops Pneumonia,” Atlanta Daily World, September 23, 1958; “King
‘Out of Danger,’” New York Times, September 27, 1958, The King Papers, Vol. IV, 498-499. King
sneezing or coughing was certainly a possibility; after the surgery, doctors discovered that King had
pneumonia.
141
A.J. Muste to Martin Luther King, Jr., September 23, 1958, The King Papers, Vol. IV, 500.
142
Galatians 6:17 (KJV).
59
his brothers and sisters in Montgomery, King wrote, “I joyously accept the scars on my
body as the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ.”143
In order to understand the full connotation of King’s comparison to Paul, note the
words that precede this phrase in Galatians: “From henceforth let no man trouble me: for
I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”144 For Muste and King both, the pain
King suffered marked King as an apostle, and like the Apostle Paul, this endowed King
with special authority. Learning from and using Paul’s example as a suffering saint, King
grew to find value in suffering. Like Paul, he saw the necessity of suffering for his cause
both to prove his sincerity to other members of the movement and to transform his
enemies. King learned from Paul that boasting in his suffering served his cause by
granting him leverage his opponents lacked, and King reinterpreted Pauline ideas of sin
and salvation in order to redirect his pain toward reconciliation. The marks of the Lord
Jesus Christ proved a heavy burden to bear, but in the time between Montgomery and
Birmingham, King learned how his scars empowered him to share his message of love
and reconciliation with the world.
The letter King received from A.J. Muste helped King see his pain as an
opportunity. In his letter to King, Muste moved from connecting King to Paul to
describing the full meaning of King’s marks. Muste explained to King that his scars
meant that “[a]bove any other man, Negro or white, you are now inevitably the
instrument both to break down the color bar in this country and to reconcile and heal the
143
King to the Montgomery Improvement Association, October 6, 1958, The King Papers, Vol.
IV, 505-506.
144
Galatians 6:17 (KJV).
60
people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains.”145 Muste understood King’s
mission in its totality in large part because Muste worked for the same cause. King and
Muste both hoped to break down the barriers that separated whites and blacks so that
reconciliation could take place. King aimed for more than a negative vision of a world
devoid of racism and segregation: he, like Muste and many others, sought a world where
love and community replaced hatred and separation. Because Paul had suffered in his
efforts to unify the early Church, King could make use of Paul’s example and draw on
Paul’s apostolic legacy in order to cast his own suffering in that light and use his pain to
move toward his vision of reconciliation and the Beloved Community.
But in order to achieve that dream, King understood that he and others would
have to suffer. For King, suffering and reconciliation were inextricably linked. Yet in
1959, when King wrote “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” for Christian Century, editor
Harold Fey lamented the essay’s lack of insight into and from King’s own suffering. Fey
complained to King, “You have been maligned, arrested and detained. You were stabbed.
You say nothing about such sufferings, which must surely have had some influence on
your thought.” In response, King wrote what would eventually be published in Christian
Century as “Suffering and Faith.” King’s initial reluctance to discuss his personal life
stemmed from his belief that “[a] person who constantly calls attention to his trials and
sufferings is in danger of developing a martyr complex and of making others feel that he
is consciously seeking sympathy.” He acknowledged that it was “possible for one to be
self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice,” but the impact of
his suffering on his thinking justified what might otherwise be vain bragging. King then
145
A.J. Muste to Martin Luther King, Jr., September 23, 1958, The King Papers., Vol. IV, 500.
61
listed some of his “personal sacrifices:” “I have been arrested five times and 1960 [sic]
put in Alabama jails. My home has been bombed twice. A day seldom passes that my
family and I are not the recipients of threats of death. I have been the victim of a near
fatal stabbing.”146 Indeed, King continued to face such persecution throughout his
career—in an interview conducted with Playboy in 1965, Playboy noted that King had
been jailed fourteen times and stabbed once in the chest; his home has been
bombed three times; and his daily mail brings a steady flow of death threats and
obscenities. Undeterred, he works twenty hours a day, travels 325,000 miles and
makes 450 speeches a year throughout the country on behalf of the Negro
cause.147
By listing his persecutions and providing those statistics to Playboy, King participated in
a kind of sacred boasting as exemplified by Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:23-30:
Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one—I am talking like a madman—with
far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near
death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one.
Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was
shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger
from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from
Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from
false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and
thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things,
there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches…If I must
boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.148
King could list his persecutions without bragging because of this Pauline precedent of
boasting in his weakness. Paul listed his sufferings for the cause of Christ in an effort to
demonstrate his dedication and gain an advantage over his opponents in Corinth (these
opponents being the other “servants of Christ” with whom Paul compared himself). By
146
King, “Suffering and Faith,” Christian Century, April 27, 1960, Chicago, IL, http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu (accessed November 3, 2012).
147
“Playboy Interview: Martin Luther King, Jr.” Testament, ed. Washington, 341.
148
2 Corinthians 11:23-30 (ESV).
62
participating in this tradition of sacred boasting, King connected his sufferings to those of
Paul. His suffering gave King insight and authority that others who had not suffered
could neither match nor refute.
King carefully noted that he could only bear these burdens because God
strengthened him. He wrote, “I must admit that at times I have felt that I could no longer
bear such a heavy burden, and have been tempted to retreat to a more quiet and serene
life. But every time such a temptation appeared, something came to strengthen and
sustain my determination.”149 Here, King echoed Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 10—
“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful,
who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation
also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”150 In the face of persecution,
King was tempted to back down from his God-given mission, but in those moments, like
Paul, he drew on a strength not his own.
King’s Pauline perspective on suffering helped him embrace suffering instead of
trying to escape it. Indeed, King thought that suffering formed an integral part of the
process of reconciliation. In “Suffering and Faith,” he wrote, “My personal trials have
also taught me the value of unmerited suffering. As my sufferings mounted I soon
realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with
bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force.” By embracing his
149
King, “Suffering and Faith.” Branch notes that even in the time before the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, King was tempted to take a hybrid teacher/chaplain position at Dillard University in New Orleans
because of his academic bent and because a teaching position offered more freedom. Academia surely
seemed even more tempting when King started receiving death threats. See Branch, Parting the Waters,
123-124.
150
1 Corinthians 10:13 (KJV).
63
pain, King redirected negative force into positive energy. King changed his perspective
and interpreted his unmerited suffering as “an opportunity to transform myself and heal
the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains.” Forgiving his enemies
changed King’s heart, and he hoped that his response would transform his opponents as
well. King aimed to destroy his enemies by making them his friends.
King realized that his message of reconciliation might fall on deaf ears, but he
remained steadfast in his faith. He admitted that “[t]here are some who still find the cross
a stumbling block, and others consider it foolishness, but I am more convinced than ever
before that it is the power of God unto social and individual salvation.”151 In this
sentence King adroitly combined 1 Corinthians 1:23-24 (“But we preach Christ crucified,
unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which
are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God”)
with Romans 1:16 (“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of
God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek”).152
King’s Pauline combination returned to that greatest example of redemption and
reconciliation through unmerited suffering, Christ on the cross, and tied the cross to
King’s message of nonviolence. King connected Paul’s proclamation of the gospel to his
own civil rights struggles and his message of nonviolence, and through this connection
made suffering sacred.
But King did more than simply quote Paul; he reinterpreted Paul. For King, the
cross meant a particular kind of salvation—“the power of God unto social and individual
151
King, “Suffering and Faith.”
152
1 Corinthians 1:23-24, Romans 1:16 (KJV).
64
salvation.” The ministers who supported segregation emphasized the personal nature of
salvation and the gospel—matters of the soul were between the individual and God alone.
But for King, individual regeneration necessitated social transformation; the love of God
and the love of others could not be separated. In King’s cosmos, the cross meant
reconciliation between God and humanity as well reconciliation between individual
human beings. Some white Christians would find integration a stumbling block, and
some members of the Civil Rights Movement would belittle King’s message of
nonviolence as foolishness, but King’s faith in this meaning of the cross only grew as he
endured persecutions. Suffering could redeem both individuals and institutions, and
could even reconcile enemies. Thus King was able to conclude, “like the Apostle Paul I
can now humbly yet proudly say, ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’”153
King’s scars set him apart from the segregationist ministers he opposed and bore witness
to a gospel of reconciliation where pain presented opportunity and Christ offered
salvation for each and for all.
The time between Montgomery and Birmingham tested King’s faith in the merits
of suffering. In the valley between these victories, King sought to share his message
through the means that had worked before: statesmanship and sermonizing. Touring the
country and preaching hundreds of sermons in the style of Billy Graham (who privately
encouraged King and occasionally advised him), King found his rhetoric did little but
elicit applause and admiration—gratifying, to be sure, but the lack of progress on civil
rights frustrated King. College students seized the cutting edge of nonviolent resistance,
first through the spree of sit-ins in 1960 and then through the Freedom Rides of 1961. As
153
King, “Suffering and Faith,”- King again cited Galatians 6:17.
65
King continued to try to change America using words, students challenged King to put
his own body on the line for the movement. But only after King and his comrades failed
to make the National Baptist Convention a vehicle for civil rights did King personally
join in the massive acts of civil disobedience that had come to characterize the
movement. He first did this with the movement’s marches to jail in Albany, Georgia, in
late 1961 and early 1962. There, King learned that the media’s perception and portrayal
of the battle between King and segregation mattered far more than his eloquence or the
righteousness of his cause.154
Albany’s police chief Laurie Pritchett and his minions knew better than to abuse
King or the marchers while the media watched, but King recorded the brutal conditions
of Albany’s jails in his diary. He complained that “occupants are compelled to sleep on
the cold hard steel,” and he noted that the cell he and Ralph Abernathy languished in was
just “as filthy as all the rest.” Pritchett, wary of his political prisoner’s power, sent a crew
to clean the cell block. Later, King described a more crowded scene, writing, “[t]his is a
dark and desolate cell that holds nine persons. It is unbelievable that such a cell could
exist in a supposedly civilized country.”155 Yet Chief Pritchett and Albany’s white power
154
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire, 24-25- According to Branch, King and his ministerial allies
attempted to transform the National Baptist Convention into “a ready-made civil rights phalanx that upon
command could descend upon segregated targets for protest or Christian revival.” Others opposed King,
most notably the so-called “Negro Pope”, the Reverend J.H. Jackson, and after a chaotic convention in
Kansas City in 1961, King was excommunicated from the NBC. Some two thousand preachers left the
church with King, causing a schism between these ministers and 8,000 of their erstwhile brethren. Once he
lost hope for the black church to act as a unified whole against segregation, King moved on to other
methods.
155
King, “Diary From Albany Jail,” July 10-11, 1962, Albany, GA, Series 2: Writings by Martin
Luther King, Jr. (1947-1968), Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr., Collection, Robert W. Woodruff
Library of the Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, GA. Forced to return to jail in Albany later that year,
King kept and then published another jail diary from Albany in August of 1962. See “Diary in Jail,” August
23, 1962, Jet, The King Center Digital Archive, http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/diary-jail
(accessed April 6, 2013).
66
players realized the danger posed to them by King’s continued presence in jail, and
arranged a scheme in which an accomplice paid King and Abernathy’s bail and Pritchett
effectively kicked the two pastors out of jail.156 Pritchett made his move just in time;
King had composed “A Message From Jail,” but his early release meant that King was
not in jail by the time newspapers published his article.157 Chief Pritchett’s public
nonviolence and clandestine maneuvering prevented the Albany Movement from gaining
momentum in the media, and disagreements between the various civil rights
organizations created divisions within the movement.158 Finally, after months of largely
fruitless campaigning, King abandoned Albany in August of 1962 labeled a loser by the
media and resented by SNCC activists who felt they had been left behind in Albany to
clean up King’s mess.159 King suffered in Albany, but he failed to use his suffering to
draw attention to his message of reconciliation. Without the media’s focus, the Albany
Movement languished and died.
Between Montgomery and Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. suffered both
physically and publicly. He remained a leading figure in the Civil Rights Movement, but
students pioneered the sit-ins and Freedom Rides that made headlines and created
political pressure to end segregation. But King’s suffering taught him to value his
résumé of persecution. Just as Paul proved his sincerity by pointing to his scars, King
156
Branch, Parting the Waters, 605-607.
157
King, “A Message From Jail,” New York Amsterdam News, July 14, 1962, 11, 38,
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/pdfs/620714-002.pdf (accessed April 6, 2013).
158
Lewis, King: A Biography, 168-170. For more on Sheriff Laurie Pritchett’s tactics in
combating King, see the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, Henry Hampton, Judith Vecchione, Steve
Fayer, Orlando Bagwell, Callie Crossley, James A. DeVinney, Madison Davis Lacy, et al. 2006.
[Alexandria, Va.]: PBS Video.
159
Branch, Pillar of Fire, 26.
67
gained credibility and authority by detailing his own suffering. Thus King’s suffering
empowered him to preach a gospel of salvation through suffering—just as Christ’s
crucifixion redeemed the world, the pain endured by the members of the nonviolent
movement could redeem their opponents as individuals and the United States as a nation.
Paul initially gained his apostolic authority from his vision, but he maintained it by
preaching in spite of being jailed, whipped, beaten, and stoned. Between Montgomery
and Birmingham, King learned that if he wanted to lead a movement like Paul’s, he had
to practice what he preached and bleed for his gospel. King’s willingness to put his body
in harm’s way led some critics to label him an extremist, a charge that initially disturbed
King. But through Paul, this term took on new meaning:
But when I began to consider the true meaning of the word, I decided that perhaps
I would like to think of myself as an extremist…I consider myself an extremist for
that brotherhood of man which Paul so nobly expressed: “There is neither Jew nor
Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are
all one in Christ Jesus.160
Though he failed in Albany, King left Albany a wiser man. From Albany, King learned
that only Pauline extremism and a willingness to put his body in harm’s way would draw
the attention of the media and stir the nation’s conscience. Building on his earlier
experiences with sacred boasting, King learned from Albany that he could neither suffer
in silence nor accept early release. Albany taught King that, like Paul, he needed use his
suffering to broadcast his message of nonviolence and reconciliation. With that
knowledge, King went to Birmingham to pick a fight he knew he could win.
160
“Playboy Interview: Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Testament, ed. Washington, 356.
68
CHAPTER 4
“AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS”- MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.’S EPISTLE
FROM BIRMINGHAM CITY JAIL
Confined to fifty-four square feet of silence and darkness, sitting on a short metal
cot with no mattress, Martin Luther King, Jr. strained his eyes to read a newspaper. With
no overhead light, he could barely make out the words in front of him. He first saw
names: Charles Carpenter, Joseph Durick, Milton Grafman, Paul Hardin, Nolan Harmon,
George Murray, Ed Ramage, Earl Stallings. All clergy here in Birmingham, King noted.
He kept reading.
The ministers began their joint statement by stating their position that “honest
convictions in racial matters could properly be pursued in the courts,” and that “decisions
of those courts should in the meantime be peacefully obeyed.” King gritted his teeth—
these clergymen had just attacked his decision to march in violation of a circuit court’s
injunction prohibiting protest in Birmingham. His eyes sped across the page, noting that
the ministers praised the citizens of Birmingham for their recent “increased forbearance
and a willingness to face facts” and expressed hope for “a new constructive and realistic
approach to racial problems.” “However,” the clergy said, just when Birmingham had
begun to make genuine progress, the city had been “confronted by a series of
demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders.”
Outsiders. A citizen of the United States, a native Southerner, a fellow Christian and a
minister who led a church only a couple hours away in Montgomery, and yet I am still an
“outsider.”
“These demonstrations are unwise and untimely.” King’s eyes began to fill with
tears of anger and despair, blurring his vision. He read on, however, and saw that the
69
ministers hailed “certain local Negro leadership” as they argued that the situation in
Birmingham should be left in the hands of “citizens of our town metropolitan area” who
knew “the local situation.” The demonstrations, “however technically peaceful those
actions may be,” had “not contributed to the resolution of our local problems.” Local
problems? You think this is only about Birmingham? King shook his head in wonder, and
kept reading.
“We commend the community as a whole, and the local news media and law
enforcement in particular, on the calm manner in which these demonstrations have been
handled.” King began to shiver with rage. Calm? Have you ever been thrown in a paddy
wagon? Ever been called “nigger” by a high school drop-out with a gun and a badge?
Breathing deep, King scanned the conclusion:
We further strongly urge our own negro community to withdraw support from
these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for a better
Birmingham. When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in
the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. We
appeal to both our white and negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and
order and common sense.
Wiping his eyes, King grabbed his pen and started scrawling his reply. At first,
he wrote along the edges of his newspaper; when he ran out of room in the paper, King
wrote on toilet paper, and then on scraps of paper given to him by a black jail employee.
Finally, SCLC attorneys got King a notepad. King was locked in jail, but with his pen,
he fought for freedom.161
161
S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious
Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001),
9-117. The white religious leaders’ statement appears in Malinda Snow, “Martin Luther King’s “Letter
from Birmingham Jail” as Pauline epistle,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71, no. 3 (1985): 321. Snow
quotes the full statement in her article as it originally appeared in the Birmingham Post Herald, April 13,
1963. The clergymen’s statement also appeared in the Birmingham News that same day, and then a partial
copy of the statement was published in the New York Times on Sunday, April 14. See Bass, 297, note 19.
70
*
*
*
When Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” in
April of 1963, segregation was as much a part of the state of Alabama as the AuburnAlabama Iron Bowl rivalry and mustard-based barbeque. Belief in Jim Crow and Jesus
Christ shaped segregationist Alabamans’ worldview, a fact they readily admitted. One
segregationist spoke for many more when he said, “We believe in segregation, and I
mean believe in it, like we believe in God.”162 George Wallace, recently elected
Governor of Alabama by ninety-six percent of the voting public,163 spoke for these
Alabamans in his Inaugural Address, infamously proclaiming “[s]egregation now,
segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!”164 Wallace and most white Alabamans
believed integration endangered their sacrosanct Southern way of life; whatever the
Supreme Court ruled, they vowed to preserve segregation. A bold group of white
clergymen from Alabama published a letter defending the God-given value and rights of
every human being, and pleading with Alabamans to abide by the decisions of the justice
system. For their courage, these clergymen received hate mail and threatening phone
calls from all over the South.165 This was Alabama six years after Martin Luther King,
162
Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the
1950s (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 297-299.
163
Our Campaigns, “AL Governor,” http://www.ourcampaigns.com (accessed March 23, 2013).
164
George Wallace, “The Inaugural Address of Governor George C. Wallace,” January 14, 1963,
State Capitol, Montgomery, AL. http://digital.archives.alabama.gov (accessed March 22, 2013).
165
Bass, Blessed Are The Peacemakers, 21-227.
71
Jr.’s rise to fame in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and these were the same “[d]ear
Fellow Clergy” to whom he addressed his famed “Letter From Birmingham City Jail.”166
Yet King wrote his “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” for a much larger
audience.167 Combining the lessons he learned in Albany’s jails with the apostolic
persona he developed in “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” King took on the role of
imprisoned apostle. In Birmingham, King consciously evoked the legacy of Paul to seize
the spiritual high ground in his argument with moderate religious leaders. King
accomplished this through the very act of writing an epistle from jail (just as Paul penned
many of his epistles from jail), and by drawing parallels between his work and Paul’s
project. Using his identity as an apostle of freedom, King compared and connected his
movement to the movement led by Paul, that of the early Church. By connecting the
story of Birmingham to the story of Christianity’s beginnings, King encouraged his
followers and reminded American Christians of the true role of the church—a
transformative witness of God’s love for all humanity. King’s use of the Apostle Paul in
“Letter From Birmingham City Jail” came at a critical moment for the Civil Rights
Movement, and demonstrated the tremendous power of King’s apostolic persona.
166
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” as it appears in James Melvin Washington’s A
Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., (New York: HarperCollins, 1991),
289- I have chosen to use this version of the letter because it corresponds to the earliest-known versions of
the letter. King admittedly made use of “the author’s prerogative of polishing it for publication” in later
editions, including the version of the letter that appeared in King’s Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper
& Row, 1964), and so I have chosen to use this version because it corresponds more closely to what King
originally wrote. In their statement regarding Wallace, the clergy declared that “hatred and violence have
no sanction in our religious and political traditions,” and proclaimed their belief that “every human being is
created in the image of God and is entitled to respect as a fellow human being with all basic rights,
privileges, and responsibilities which belong to humanity.“ See “An Appeal for Law and Order and
Common Sense,” January 16, 1963, indexed in Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 233-234. Three men
participated in the “Appeal” and not in the “Good Friday Statement” (also called the “Call For Unity”)
which elicited King’s response: Soterios D. Gouvellis, Eugene Blackschleger, and J.T. Beale. See Bass,
Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 233- 237.
167
Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 137.
72
When King arrived in Birmingham in April of 1963, he was coming off an ugly
defeat in Albany, Georgia, where he learned several painful lessons that informed his
Birmingham Campaign. Frustrated by the division between factions of the Civil Rights
Movement in Albany, King chose Birmingham as a location where he could operate
without rivals. After being stymied by the Chief Laurie Pritchett, the SCLC and King
realized that in order to create a moral drama for the media, they needed a violent villain
to star opposite King. Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, the brash and hot-headed
police commissioner in Birmingham, fit the part perfectly. Finally, King learned from
Albany how to use his body and pain to draw attention to the evils of segregation and his
message of reconciliation.168 King and the SCLC planned their Birmingham Campaign
and set the stage for an epic moral drama they hoped would open the eyes of the nation to
the evils of segregation.
In spite of all King’s planning, the Birmingham Campaign started poorly. The
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a SCLC affiliate, had invited King to
Birmingham to join their efforts to end segregation by pressuring local businesses during
the Easter shopping season. Birmingham was in the throes of a highly complicated and
hotly contested mayoral election between Eugene “Bull” Connor and the more moderate
Albert Boutwell, and so organizers waited until April 3, 1963, to begin their nonviolent
resistance campaign. Boutwell had won the election on April 2, but Connor maintained
control of the police, and on April 10, a state circuit court delivered an injunction to halt
the protesters’ marches and sit-ins. With the SCLC’s budget depleted, King could not
168
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65, (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1998), 25-26.
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guarantee protesters that they would be bailed out of jail.169 The campaign teetered on
the verge of collapse just days after it started.170 The night of April 11, King met with his
advisers, and after a heated debate that stretched into the wee hours of the morning, King
chose to commit a “faith act” and march in violation of the injunction. After a restless
night’s sleep, King and the rest of the SCLC’s leadership met at Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church around noon on Friday, April 12, 1963. At roughly 2:30 p.m., King and fifty or
so protestors left the church and marched toward city hall. Seeing a large group of
policemen, the protesters redirected toward the downtown shopping district, and after
they turned onto Fifth Avenue North, police confronted them. King knelt in prayer with
Ralph Abernathy; four police officers arrested the men and stuffed them into paddy
wagons with other marchers, and they headed to Birmingham City Jail. It was Good
Friday.171
That same day, the eight white clergymen met to draft their statement. Exactly
when and in what newspaper King read their statement remains unknown, but on
Tuesday, April 16, King began to compose his reply.172 From the beginning, King wrote
for a wider audience than his “[d]ear Fellow Clergymen.”173 The nationally popular
evangelist Billy Graham had also criticized King’s timing in launching the Birmingham
169
“Birmingham Campaign,” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute,
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_birmingham_campaign/.
170
Branch, Pillar of Fire, 46.
171
Andrew M. Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend
Fred Shuttlesworth, (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999), 354-357.
172
Bass, Blessed Are The Peacemakers, 115.
173
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 289.
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Campaign and asked that King “put the brakes on a little bit.”174 Because of southern
religious leaders like Graham and the eight white clergy behind the so-called “Call For
Unity,” King had long considered some kind of open epistle to white religious leaders.
Such a letter had been on King’s mind when he joined the editorial staff of the Christian
Century at the end of the 1950s. When King worked in Albany in 1962, a writer for the
New York Times named Harvey Shapiro contacted the SCLC and asked King to write a
letter from jail, but the idea was either scrapped or postponed for a different campaign.175
In any case, the concept of an open letter to white religious leaders and the notion of a
prison epistle had cooked in King’s mind for some time, and the Birmingham Campaign
provided King exactly what he needed: a foolhardy police commissioner embodying
segregation’s worst evils and a group of moderate white moderate religious leaders
practically begging for a rebuttal.
In his “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” King crafted a finely tuned argument
that answered the clergymen’s statement and the criticism King and his allies faced in
their crusade for civil rights and an integrated society. In the very act of writing a letter
from prison, King echoed the story of Paul, who penned many books of the New
Testament while imprisoned.176 Moreover, King made use of Pauline literary techniques,
using a Pauline greeting and conclusion in his letter. King also made explicit references
174
Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out, 362.
175
Bass, Blessed Are The Peacemakers, 116-117.
176
Ehrman, The New Testament, 355 (Philemon), 352 (Philippians), 386 (Colossians- scholars
debate the Pauline authorship of this letter, but “Paul” [whoever that may be] claims to be writing it from
prison), 389 (Ephesians- again, the Pauline authorship is debated but “Paul” claims to be writing from
prison). For Biblical cross-references, see Colossians (1:24, 4:10, 4:18), Philemon (verses 1, 9, 23),
Ephesians (3:1, 4:1, 6:20), and Philippians (1:12-14).
75
to Paul’s epistles and direct comparisons between himself and Paul.177 The Pauline
precedent of prison epistles gave King sacred leverage in his debate with his fellow
clergymen, and connected Paul’s persecutions to King’s own trials and tribulations.
Through this connection, King linked the nonviolent movement in Birmingham to the
early Church’s story in the Bible, turning the struggle for civil rights into a sacred battle
for the soul of the Church.
By writing his message from prison, King called to mind the Apostle Paul, who
penned four of his epistles from prison: Colossians, Philemon, Ephesians, and
Philippians. In these epistles, Paul implored his fellow Christians to “[r]emember my
chains,” and identified himself as “a prisoner for Jesus Christ,” “a prisoner also for Jesus
Christ,” “a prisoner for Jesus Christ on behalf of you Gentiles,” “a prisoner for the Lord,”
and “an ambassador in chains.” In his Epistle to the Philippians, Paul consoled his
disciples by telling them that “that what has happened to me has really served to advance
the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all
the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ.”178 Clearly, Paul wanted his readers to
remember his imprisonment and understand that he went to jail for the cause of Christ.
Paul’s imprisonments (and his subsequent reminders to his readers of his imprisonment)
testified to his sincerity and created credibility from his pain. Beyond the references to
imprisonment that Paul made in his own letters, the Book of Acts recounts a number of
episodes in which Paul was imprisoned. These accounts from Acts also added to Paul’s
177
Hoffman, “Holy Martin,” 126-127- also see Snow, “Martin Luther King’s “Letter from
Birmingham Jail” as Pauline epistle,” 318-325.
178
Colossians 4:18, Philemon 1, Philemon 9, Ephesians 3:1, Ephesians 4:1, Ephesians 6:20,
Philippians 1:12-13 (ESV).
76
legacy as an ambassador in chains, a missionary who went to jail for what he believed
and whose gospel could not be contained by prison walls.179 Martin Luther King, Jr.
wished to remind readers of this particular imprisoned Paul, and being locked in
Birmingham City Jail gave King the chance to do exactly that.
After addressing the eight white religious leaders as “[d]ear Fellow Clergymen,”
King’s first words were “[w]hile confined here in the Birmingham city jail,”180 a
combination intended to bring to mind images of a prison-bound letter writer in the style
of Paul. By greeting the white clergymen as “[d]ear Fellow Clergymen,” King asserted
his equality with these white ministers and leveled the playing field. But by pointing to
his confinement in jail, King moved to seize the high ground in this battle.
In case his audience failed to see this parallel between King and Paul, King
explained that “just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the
gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Graeco-Roman world, I
too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like
Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.” Comparing himself to
the Apostle Paul asserted King’s own status as an apostle. An apostle, of course, clearly
outranked a mere minister. King then turned to the ministers’ accusation that he was an
“outsider.” He pointed out that a local affiliate of the SCLC, the Alabama Christian
Movement for Human Rights, had asked him to come to Birmingham. Just as the
Apostle Paul established a network of churches throughout “the Graeco-Roman world,”
King had founded an organization with eighty-five affiliates spread throughout every
179
See Acts 16, Acts 22, and Acts 25.
180
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 289.
77
single state of the South.181 In accepting the ACMHR’s invitation, King answered “the
Macedonian call for aid.” Just as Paul responded to the needs of his fellow Christians in
the early Church, King came to Birmingham as his brother’s keeper. Where the ministers
tried to label King an outsider, he responded by comparing himself to Paul and
connecting the SCLC and the Civil Rights Movement to the early Church.
Comparing himself to Paul and the Civil Rights Movement to the early Church
also implied that the white moderate ministers had lost the true meaning of their faith,
and that King and his movement represented a return to the roots of the Christian church.
King’s early Church metaphor differed from the Exodus metaphor just as the Pauline
persona differed from his Mosaic persona. The Exodus narrative told the story of a
chosen people—but the designation of a chosen people implicitly condemns all others as
unchosen. The broad universalism at the heart of King’s work meant that when he
wanted to include more people in his project, he needed another story. In order to create
sacred time and promote reconciliation, King needed a scriptural example that brought all
people together in community instead of bringing a chosen few out of slavery. He found
this story in the early Church and accessed it through the Apostle Paul. The Exodus story
recorded the migration of a chosen people, while the early Church story called to mind a
movement that united many different peoples. Furthermore, while the Exodus story
featured emigration, the early Church represented transformation—changed lives, not
locations.182 King accessed the story of the early Church by assuming an apostolic
181
182
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 289-290.
See Exodus 6:2-8: “God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord. I appeared to
Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself known
to them. I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they
lived as sojourners. Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the people of Israel whom the Egyptians hold
as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I
78
identity and this move gave him another story to tell, one of inclusion, transformation,
and reconciliation.
In this early Church framing of Birmingham, the white ministers King opposed
were not mistaken believers who misled their flocks and needed a loving rebuke so that
they might recover the original spirit of the Church. King developed his criticism of the
white church later in his epistle, noting how “white churches stand on the sideline and
mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities” and “commit themselves to a
completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and
soul, the sacred and the secular.” In this ghostly kind of Christianity, personal beliefs had
little to do with political action. Such a passive faith bewildered King:
Over and over again I have myself asking: “What kind of people worship here?
Who is their God? …Where were they when Governor Wallace gave the clarion
call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when tired,
bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise form the dark dungeons
of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?183
By asking, “[w]ho is their God?” King implied that the segregationist church-goers (and
the ministers who condoned or failed to condemn segregation) substituted an idol for the
one true God, swapping Jim Crow for Jesus Christ.
Next, King played the part of the imprisoned apostle, arguing that though he and
others were locked in jail, they enjoyed greater freedom than the southerners who
confined themselves to “the dark dungeons of complacency.” This criticism reflected
will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them,
and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my
people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out
from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to
Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.’” At times, this narrative proved
useful to King to show how God would deal justly with African-Americans and whites, but when he
needed to promote reconciliation, this story did not work as well.
183
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 299.
79
King’s conviction that the church had lost its way by failing to witness against the evil of
segregation and provide a prophetic critique of the culture that sustained such evil.184
The church had become “a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound” and often
served as “the arch-supporter of the status quo.” As King explained to the white
ministers, he still saw “the church as the body of Christ,” but he mourned the way in
which Christians had “blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and fear of
being nonconformists.” Because Christians had carved the Body of Christ into pieces
through segregation and then supported the system that maintained that sinful separation,
King believed that the contemporary church (especially the white church of the South)
verged on becoming “an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth
century.”185 By proclaiming an otherworldly, overly-spiritualized and highly
184
While I believe King intended his general criticisms of white moderates for the eight ministers
he addressed (as well as others like them), it is difficult to tell whether King’s specific criticism of
Christians who had failed to speak out against George Wallace’s segregationist demagoguery was directed
toward these men. Earlier in his letter, King acknowledged the good these men had done, saying “I am not
unmindful that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Rev. Stallings,
for your Christians stance on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Springhill College several
years ago.” He does not specifically mention their “Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense,”
though, so there is no indication he knew of the clergymen’s stance against Wallace. It should be noted that
King also criticized black ministers. In his sermon, “Guidelines for a Constructive Church,” delivered June
5th, 1966, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, he laid into cowardly ministers of all races, saying:
This is the role of the church: to free people. This merely means to free those who are slaves. Now if you
notice some churches, they never read this part. Some churches aren't concerned about freeing anybody.
Some white churches face the fact Sunday after Sunday that their members are slaves to prejudice, slaves to
fear. .And the preacher never says anything to lift their souls and free them from that fear. And so they end
up captive. You know this often happens in the Negro church. You know, there are some Negro preachers
that have never opened their mouths about the freedom movement. And not only have they not opened their
mouths, they haven’t done anything about it.
See A Knock at Midnight, ed. Carson and Holloran, 110.
185
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 300- King expounded
on this criticism of the white church and its ministers in in his interview with Playboy in 1965.
PLAYBOY: Can you recall any other mistakes you’ve made in leading the movement?
MARTIN LUTHER KING: Well, the most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because
our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences
80
individualistic religion, the white ministers of the South had preserved their jobs and the
status quo but lost the soul of the church. Without the love of God to break barriers and
unite Christians of all colors, the church had been reduced to the accidents of class, race,
and place.
King’s use of apostolic authority allowed him to condemn the churchgoers who
failed to be Christian. But by claiming apostolic status for himself and connecting the
Civil Rights Movement to the early Church, King implied that at least a few white
Christians joined their black brothers and sisters in “recaptur[ing] the sacrificial spirit of
the early church.” These bold souls “marched with us down nameless streets in the
South” and “languished in filthy roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of
angry policemen who see them as ‘dirty nigger-lovers.’” Using Pauline language to
describe the members of the movement, King praised them as “men willing to be coworkers with God.”186 When Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, he described ministers
of the gospel as “God’s co-workers,” implying that people work with and for God as they
spread the gospel.187 King effectively claimed that just as Paul and the early Church
worked with God and “carried the gospel of Jesus Christ” throughout the ancient
were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our cause to the white power
structures. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct
appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands—and some even took stands against us.
PLAYBOY: Their stated reason for refusing to help was that it was not the proper role of the church to
“intervene in secular affairs.” Do you disagree with this view?
MARTIN LUTHER KING: Most emphatically. The essence of the Epistles of Paul is that Christians
should rejoice at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believe. The projection of a social gospel, in
my opinion, is the true witness of a Christian life. This is the meaning of the true ekklesia—the inner,
spiritual church. The church once changed society. It was then a thermostat of society. But today I feel that
too much of the church is merely a thermometer, which measures rather than molds popular opinion.
Italics added. See Testament, ed. Washington, 345-346.
(NIV).
186
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 296-300.
187
2 Corinthians 6:1. Also see 1 Corinthians 3:9- “For we are co-workers in God’s service”
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Mediterranean world, he and his allies acted as God’s co-workers in the proclamation of
“the gospel of freedom.” By paralleling his message and method with those of the
Apostle Paul, King showed the continuity between his work and Paul’s.
King continued the connection between his project and Paul’s work by pointing
out that those who practiced either gospel were persecuted through unjust laws; by
marching in violation of the circuit court’s injunction and serving their time in prison,
King and his followers walked in the footsteps of their Christian forebears. Addressing
the civil disobedience of the protesters, King wrote, “this kind of civil disobedience…was
practiced superbly by the early Christians who were willing to face hungry lions and the
excruciating pain of chopping blocks, before submitting to certain unjust laws of the
Roman Empire.”188 King again called on the legacy of Paul and the early Church to
describe his own ministry and movement. That he used the story of the early Church to
undergird his argument about civil disobedience as a moral duty revealed the importance
of precedent to King’s project, and showed a particular understanding of the law
informed by King’s reading of Paul. In particular, Paul’s discussion of the law in his
Epistle to the Galatians influenced King’s understanding of the relationship between
God’s Law and human conventions.189 King believed that when laws degraded human
beings and denied their God-given rights, Christian conviction demanded civil
disobedience. Moreover, laws that divided the human family ran contrary to God’s Law.
188
189
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 290-294.
For Paul’s death at the hands of Nero, see Ehrman, The New Testament, 508. For the
importance of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians to King’s thinking on civil disobedience and law, see Susan
Tiefenbrun, “Semiotics and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Cardozo Studies in Law
and Literature 4, no. 2 (Autumn, 1992): 262-263. Tiefenbrun’s exploration of Paul’s anti-law position
shows how Paul thought community and brotherhood were more important than adherence to established
laws (of particular note in relation to King, Paul condemns his fellow evangelist Peter for not eating with
Gentile Christians because of Jewish concerns for ritual purity- see Galatians 2:11-21).
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King’s understanding of the law reflects a kind of Pauline interpretation of law, as seen in
Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where Paul summarized the law in this way—“Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself.” Because “[l]ove worketh no ill to his neighbour,” for Paul
and King “love is the fulfilling of the law.” For King, an unloving law was no law at all.
Long ago, King reminded his white brethren, “[w]henever the early Christians entered a
town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being
‘disturbers of the peace and ‘outside agitators.’” But just as the early Church chose to “to
obey God rather than man,” King and the members of the movement were willing to
break unjust laws to adhere to the higher law of love.190 As the members of the
movement endured persecutions, King sought solace for his people by reminding them
that they carried on the legacy of their Christian forebears.191
Just as the suffering of his followers echoed the suffering of the early Church,
King interpreted his own sufferings in light of the Apostle Paul’s pain, something he had
done since Izola Curry stabbed him in 1958. In answer to the clergymen’s charge that his
campaign of nonviolence constituted “extreme measures,” King cited the Apostle Paul as
one of a handful of history’s great extremists. King wrote, “Was not Paul an extremist
190
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 300. See Romans 13:910, Acts 5:29 (KJV)- this story from Acts involves Peter as the principal actor, not Paul, but it informed
King’s picture of civil disobedience in the early Church, an image he accessed as a part of his apostolic
persona.
191
King’s understanding of the black church as the spiritual descendant of the early Church also
came across in his interview with Playboy in 1965. There, after noting some initial difficulties with certain
ministers and elements of the black church who opposed civil rights work, King said, “the role of the Negro
church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian
history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked
brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in
the catacombs has God’s house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.” See
Testament, ed. Washington, 347.
83
for the gospel of Jesus Christ—“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”192 This
phrase, which first resonated with King in a hospital in Harlem in 1958, continued to be
true for King in a Birmingham jail cell in 1963. King had endured assassination
attempts, arrests, bombings, and constant peril since the beginning of his civil rights work
in Montgomery. Like Paul, King lost blood to gain glory in the cause of Christ, and like
Paul, King demanded respect for his sacrifices. All this suffering gave King an authority
of experience that his peers in Birmingham lacked, and he took pains to remind them of
that fact by identifying himself with the long-suffering Apostle Paul.
King’s extensive and multilayered use of the Apostle Paul leads one to wonder
why King chose Paul instead of other figures. King did not use these different personas
like a person taking off one mask and putting on another. A more appropriate analogy
would be a conductor bringing in different instruments for different movements of a
symphony; King used a Christ-like persona when he was arrested on Good Friday, and
then shifted to King/Paul when imprisoned. King used Paul in his “Letter From
Birmingham City Jail” to tap into apostolic authority of Paul, connect the early Church
and the Civil Rights Movement, articulate a theology of civil disobedience based on the
Law of Love, and present his pain as sacrificial suffering for the cause of freedom.
King’s choice of Paul should also be understood as a choice of particular leader
and a particular narrative: the early Church that brought together so many different
people into the Body of Christ.193 Moses led the Chosen People into liberation while
192
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 297- King is quoting
from Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: “From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the
marks of the Lord Jesus.” See Galatians 6:17 (KJV). See the previous chapter regarding Izola Curry’s
attempt to kill King for more on this phrase and King’s understanding of suffering.
193
Although other figures contributed significantly to the development of the early Church, King
chose Paul over other figures because Paul preached a gospel of grace, love, reconciliation, while other
84
Jesus, though he redeemed the world, only trained a handful of mostly Jewish disciples.
Paul led a movement of all kinds of people and preached the power of reconciliation.
King embraced and reinterpreted this gospel of reconciliation. Paul “inserted
reconciliation at the core of Christian theology” by showing how Jesus Christ’s death on
the cross meant that all humans could be reconciled to God and to one another.194 So
vital was reconciliation to Paul’s project that he defined his life’s work as a “ministry of
reconciliation.”195 Where Moses offered liberation and Jesus offered redemption, Paul
offered reconciliation.
Although King did not use the term “reconciliation” in his epistle, he made use of
the concept and established it as the goal of his nonviolent direct action campaign. Where
other forces in the African-American community, most notably “Elijah Muhammad’s
Muslim movement,” promoted separatism and came “perilously close to advocating
violence,” King preached “the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest.”196
Here, King quoted Paul and identified nonviolent protest with the agape love Paul
leaders in the early Church failed to reach out to Gentiles (Peter refused to associate with Gentiles for a
period until Paul rebuked him- see Galatians 2:11-14) or promoted a more works-based gospel (James the
brother of Jesus emphasized works as a means to and proof of salvation- see James 2:14-26).
194
Curtiss Paul DeYoung, “The Power of Reconciliation: From the Apostle Paul to Malcolm X,”
Cross Currents, (Summer 2007): 203-205. Seyoon Kim, “2 Cor. 5:11-21 and the Origin of Paul’s Concept
of “Reconciliation,”” Novum Testamentum 39, (Oct., 1997). See also Who's Who in the New Testament,
Routledge, s.v. "Paul.”
195
2 Corinthians 5:18- this is a part of Paul’s larger discussion of reconciliation in Christianity:
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has
come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of
reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses
against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ,
God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (ESV).
196
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 296-297.
85
discussed in 1 Corinthians 13.197 King’s “still more excellent way” was nonviolent
“direct action,” a method of protest “whereby we would present our very bodies as a
means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community.”198
Yet again, King merged Pauline thought with his own project by quoting Paul’s Epistle to
the Romans, where Paul encouraged the Christians in Rome to “present your bodies [as]
a living sacrifice.”199 In offering their bodies as living sacrifices, the members of the
Civil Rights Movement aimed to show the nation and the world the horrifying evils of
segregation. In the short term, nonviolence frequently precipitated violence, and
members of the movement (including King) used the shock value of that violence to
pressure politicians into progress. In the long run, however, King believed that
nonviolence could and would transform both the oppressors and the oppressed. In 1960,
writing for the Christian Century, King wrote that
I do not want to give the impression that nonviolence will work miracles
overnight…the nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the
oppressor. It first does something to the heart and souls of those committed to it.
It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that
they did not know they had. Finally, it reaches the opponent and so stirs his
conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.200
Much of the Birmingham’s black population had “been so completely drained of selfrespect and a sense of ‘somebodiness’” that they had grown accustomed to segregation.
Nonviolent direct action demanded disciplined courage and gave marginalized people
197
1 Corinthians 12:31- “But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more
excellent way” (ESV).This line leads into 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul describes agape love as selfsacrificial, unconditional, and abiding love.
198
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington 291.
199
Romans 12:1 (KJV).
200
King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.”
86
good reason to be proud. But while nonviolence touched its disciples first, it also worked
to transform (however slowly) the hearts and souls of Birmingham’s whites, and through
media coverage, the United States as a whole.201 As King said in 1957, “[t]he aftermath
of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community.”202 King’s
ministry of reconciliation strove not simply to integrate black people into the existing
society, but to bind up old wounds and create new bonds. King dreamed of a beloved
community, and he adapted the Apostle Paul’s model and message to work toward
realizing that dream in his “Letter From Birmingham City Jail.”
Certainly, King himself believed that the Letter had a lasting impact. In his
interview with Playboy in 1965, King evaluated the effectiveness of his jailhouse epistle:
Two or three important and constructive things have happened which can be at
least partially attributed to that letter. By now, nearly a million copies of the letter
have been widely circulated in churches of most of the major denominations. It
helped to focus greater international attention upon what was happening in
Birmingham. And I am sure that without Birmingham, the march on Washington
wouldn’t have been called …It was also the image of Birmingham which, to a
great extent, helped to bring the Civil Rights Bill into being in 1963. Previously,
President Kennedy had decided not to propose it that year, feeling that it would so
arouse the South that it would meet a bottleneck. But Birmingham, and
subsequent developments, caused him to reorder his legislative priorities.203
Initially, however, King’s “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” drew little attention.
Only after Bull Connor unleashed his dogs and turned his fire hoses on schoolchildren
did the world turns its undivided attention to Birmingham.204 The media miracle of the
201
King, “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” Testament, ed. Washington, 296.
202
King, “The Power of Nonviolence,” June 4, 1957, University of California at Berkeley,
Testament, ed. Washington, 12.
203
“Playboy Interview,” Testament, ed. Washington, 351.
204
Branch, Pillar of Fire, 48-87.
87
Children’s Marches forced Birmingham’s power players to broker a deal with King.
Following their agreement on May 8, 1963, the media seized on King’s prison epistle as
the defining statement of the nonviolent struggle for freedom.205 The “Letter From
Birmingham City Jail” spread King’s message of love and reconciliation around the
world, and contributed to the long-term success of the Birmingham Campaign. King’s
Pauline prison epistle articulated the ethos of the nonviolent movement in a way that
proved unforgettable.206
In Birmingham, King utilized the Pauline method of writing a prison-bound
epistle, and in it, he communicated a Pauline message of reconciliation. By calling on
Pauline precedent, King connected himself to the earlier apostle, and through that
connection, he tied the Civil Rights Movement to the story of the early Church. This
connection to the early Church helped justify King’s nonviolent civil disobedience, as did
King’s discussion of God’s loving Law and the sinful human laws that degraded and
divided people. Additionally, King used the metaphor of the Civil Rights Movement as
the early Church to show Southern segregationists and moderates how they had lost the
205
Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 132-135. Bass notes that King continued to work on the
letter long after the April 16 date he attached to it; even after he left jail, King continued to compose and
refine his magnum opus. Yet the image of the imprisoned apostle persisted and appealed to Americans’
hunger for a hero.
206
So successful was King’s “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” that he tried to replicate it
during his campaign in Selma, Alabama in 1965. On February 1, 1965, King intentionally got himself
jailed so as to draw attention to the situation in Selma. The SCLC subsequently placed a massive
advertisement in the New York Times with the title, “A Letter from MARTIN LUTHER KING from a
Selma, Alabama Jail.” See Display Ad 13 -- No Title, New York Times, February 5, 1965: 15. But without
the same spiritually super-charged context as his more famous epistle from Birmingham, King relatively
simple fundraising letter failed to stir the nation’s conscience like King’s previous epistle. Like the
Children’s Marches of Birmingham, Selma’s marches saw plenty of violence, and the images of marchers
being beaten and gassed on the Edmund Pettis Bridge drew media attention. But the letter King wrote from
a Selma jail achieved little and slipped from memory because it lacked the Pauline persona that so
distinguished his “Letter From Birmingham City Jail.” For the Selma Campaign, see Lewis, King: A
Biography, 264-296.
88
spirit of the Church and the meaning of the faith. But by following this condemnation
with a message of love and nonviolence, King preached his gospel of reconciliation and
brought his epistle back to the end of community.
No one felt the power King’s Pauline prison epistle quite like the eight white
ministers who provoked it. Just as they had once received vicious letters from
segregationists across the South for opposing George Wallace’s rebellious rhetoric, the
eight clergymen found themselves under fire from all over the United States for
criticizing King’s civil disobedience. Within eighteen months of their statement, only
three of the religious leaders still worked in the city, and by 1971, only one of the eight
remained in Birmingham. Each minister found himself haunted by King’s words for the
rest of his life. A letter from King, one felt, was “just about like a letter from St. Paul.”207
Within a few years of his exchange with these white ministers, King received a haunting
letter himself.
207
Bass, Blessed Are The Peacemakers, 21-227.
89
CHAPTER 5
“ALL FALL SHORT”—SIN, DESPAIR, AND THE DEATH OF THE DREAMER
On January 5, 1965, Coretta Scott King shuffled through her husband’s stack of
unopened mail. Because of Martin’s recent trip to Oslo to receive the 1964 Nobel Peace
Prize, Coretta had plenty of mail to sort through. She tore into a thin package that
appeared to contain a reel of tape. SCLC workers often forwarded recordings of Martin’s
sermons to Coretta because she collected her husband’s talks, so a package with a tape
was nothing new. As she expected, Coretta found a tape. Wondering which of her
husband’s sermons it might be, Coretta played the tape.
But the tape contained no sermons: Coretta heard only grunting, moaning, and
then her husband’s voice in the throes of passion. Looking back in the package, Coretta
pulled out a letter:
KING,
In view of your low grade... I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a
Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as
King Henry the VIII...
King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great
liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of
their own but I am sure they don't have one at this time anywhere near your equal.
You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an
evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God... Clearly you don't believe
in any personal moral principles.
King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest
leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute,
abnormal moral imbecile. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like
Wilkins, a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are
done. Your "honorary" degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim
farce) and
other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done.
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No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself... I repeat — no
person can argue successfully against facts... Satan could not do more. What
incredible evilness... King you are done.
The American public, the church organizations that have been helping —
Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are — an evil,
abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have
just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific
reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way
out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared
to the nation.
Shaken, Coretta phoned her husband. King returned home with several aides. With
Coretta, King and his advisers listened to the tape and read the letter.
*
*
*
Years later, when asked about the sex tape, Coretta replied, “I couldn’t make
much out of it, it was just a lot of mumbo jumbo.” Coretta’s dismissal of the tape, though
dignified, likely reflected an unwillingness to discuss her husband’s infidelity rather than
an ignorance of the tape’s contents. Her husband certainly got the message loud and
clear—King believed (correctly) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent the tapes
and set up a meeting with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover immediately after listening to the
tape and reading the letter. Over a wire-tapped phone, King told a confidant, “they are
out to break me.” Though King believed that “[w]hat I do is between only me and my
God,” the FBI’s persecution of King showed him how his sins jeopardized his
ministry.208
208
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 372-374, and Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 216-217.
91
In the final years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. found himself tormented by
the FBI and haunted by his failures.209 Following the enormous triumphs of the March
on Washington in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and
the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King broadened his ministry to include Northern ghettoes,
poverty advocacy, and peace activism. He soon found himself frustrated and his
popularity waning as he searched in vain for another victory.210 As personal and public
failures dragged King deeper and deeper into depression, King tried to make sense out of
his life through the story of the Apostle Paul’s despair and demise. King used Paul to
define and describe his internal struggle between saint and sinner, and to defend his work
as an imperfect but persistent apostle. King found inspiration in Paul’s example as a
daring dreamer who achieved greatness in spite of his sins and shortcomings. Finally,
King concluded that Paul’s gospel of grace meant that King would find salvation even if
he died without accomplishing his Dream.
King explored these elements of Paul because King increasingly found himself
facing public and personal failures. Hoping to expand his nonviolent resistance
movement to the North, King launched his Chicago Campaign in 1966. To draw
attention to the plight of the city’s slum dwellers and gain credibility with Northern
blacks, King moved into a Lawndale slum tenement at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue on
January 23, 1966. The previous Friday news of King’s intentions leaked. Desperate to
get the apartment up to the city’s housing code, King’s soon-to-be landlords sent a team
209
For an excellent account of the FBI’s persecution of King, see David J. Garrow, The F.B.I. and
Martin Luther King, Jr., (New York: W. W. Norton & Co), 1981. Much of the FBI’s material on King
remains sealed until 2027. See Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 346-347.
210
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 36-61.
92
of four plasterers, two electricians, and two painters to the apartment. But plaster and
paint did little to remove years of filth; when Coretta came to the apartment, she reported
that the smell of urine filled the air. King’s whitewashed apartment provided an apt
metaphor for his Chicago Campaign—Mayor Daley and his Midwestern machine swiftly
responded to King’s campaign by adding new housing inspectors and producing positive
headlines, but their Machiavellian maneuvering was intended to appease critics rather
than address the city’s underlying corruption and discrimination.
Making matters worse, the whole Chicago Campaign suffered from distraction,
disunity, and disorientation: King split his time between Atlanta and Chicago, the various
organizations involved sought different goals and bickered over tactics, and King’s SCLC
fundamentally misunderstood the opposition they confronted. And in the midst of the
Chicago Movement, King and other civil rights leaders returned to the South to complete
James Meredith’s March Against Fear after Meredith was shot. While King continued to
preach nonviolence during the march, Stokely Carmichael’s new slogan “Black Power”
reflected the spirit of many members of the movement. With cries of Black Power
echoing in his ears, King returned to Chicago. There, in spite of a few promising
moments, the Chicago Movement ended with an unsatisfying truce between King and
Daley. King and Daley’s treaty, the “Summit Agreement,” received praise from Mayor
Daley and King supporters alike, but many black Chicagoans agreed with SNCC
organizer Monroe Sharp when he said, “We reject the terms of the agreement that Martin
Luther King made. The rank and file Negro is a new breed of cat who rejects this.”211
211
Lewis, King: A Biography, 314-353- Meredith, the first black student to attend the University
of Mississippi, had planned to walk from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi, but was gunned
down a few feet inside the Mississippi border. King and other activists rushed to Mississippi, where the
fissures between the various factions of the movement deepened. Following the Chicago treaty, one voice
93
Dissatisfaction with the Chicago Campaign’s symbolic victory rendered it a failure, and
King saw the Civil Rights Movement dissolving into feuding factions.
To make matters worse, King’s popularity plummeted in 1967 when his
nonviolence led him to take a stand against “the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world,” the government of the United States.212 King’s anti-Vietnam address at Riverside
Church in New York City led to an onslaught of criticism. LBJ raged about the betrayal
of “Martin Luther King, that goddamned nigger preacher,”213 and the media heaped abuse
on King: Life declared that King’s speech “sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,”214
while the Washington Post alleged that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause,
to his country, and to his people”215 and the New York Times accused King of
“whitewashing Hanoi.”216 In a conversation with his adviser Stanley Levison, King
analyzed the reaction of the politicians and the press. King told Levison, “The thing is I
from the movement complained that the “agreement is a lot of words that give us nothing specific we can
undertake. We’re sick and tired of middle class people telling us what we want.”
212
King, “Why I Am Opposed to the War In Vietnam,” April 30, 1967, Riverside Church, New
York, NY, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu (November 10, 2012).
213
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 60-63. LBJ, upon hearing a rumor that King might run
for president on a peace party ticket, roared at an aide, “Goddamnit, if you could only hear what that
hypocritical preacher does sexually!” See Stephen B. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin
Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1982), 444-445.
214
John J. Ansboro, Martin Luther King, Jr., 254-255 and Stewart Burns, To The Mountaintop:
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Sacred Mission to Save America:1955-1968, (New York: HarperCollins, 2004),
316- the Life article appeared in Life on April 21, 1967, 4.
215
Washington Post editorial quoted in Carl Rowan, “Martin Luther King’s Tragic Decision,” The
Reader’s Digest, September 1967, 38, from Ansboro, Martin Luther King, Jr., 254.
216
“Dr. King’s Error,” New York Times, April 7, 1967, 36, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu
(accessed November 12, 2012).
94
am to stay in my place and I am a Negro leader.”217 King believed that his role as an
apostle of nonviolence required him to stand against the Vietnam War, but America’s
powerbrokers saw King as a civil rights leader and nothing more.
Though some members of the peace movement and younger civil rights activists
embraced King’s stand against the Vietnam War,218 the president, the press, and the
majority of civil rights organizations criticized him harshly for it, and 1967 marked the
first time in ten years that King failed to place in the Gallup Poll’s list of the top ten most
admired Americans.219 On March 31, 1968, King spoke at the National Cathedral in
Washington, D.C., and told this story about his critics:
I remember so well when I first took a stand against the war in Vietnam. The
critics took me on and they had their say in the most negative and sometimes most
vicious way. One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don’t you
think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line
with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your
organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t
you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?" I looked at him and I had
to say, "Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me.220
Misunderstood and increasingly unpopular, King’s public career floundered while his
private life grew ever more stressful. His failures, personal and public, drove him to
despair. Beginning in 1966, journalist Roger Wilkins noted that King suffered from “a
profound sadness,” and Ralph Abernathy, King’s closest friend and confidant, believed
217
Rieder, The Word of the Lord, 36, originally from King-Levison phone conversation, April 8,
1967, FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King, Jr., U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 100-111180, Stanley
D. Levison, Sub-file 9, Vol. 8.
218
See Ansboro, Martin Luther King, Jr., 254, as well as Simon Hall, “The Response of the
Moderate Wing of the Civil Rights Movement to the War in Vietnam,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 3
(September 2003): 682. See Lewis, Walking With the Wind, 395, and Dyson, I May Not Get There With
You, 67.
219
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 6.
220
King, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”
95
that by 1968, King was “just a different person,” a man continually “sad and
depressed.”221 Mired in despair, King returned to the story of the Apostle Paul. In Paul,
King found a kindred spirit, a man of God who also battled depression and despair.222
King empathized with Paul’s internal struggle, his human limitations and divine
aspirations, and Paul’s failures. Called a traitor by some and an Uncle Tom by others,
King struggled to find light in his darkness.
King bore all these burdens as he walked into the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist
Church on March 3, 1968, little over a month before he died. There, King preached a
sermon entitled “Unfulfilled Dreams.” In this sermon, King examined the meaning of
failure and why God let His people fall short of their aspirations. Speaking for God, King
said, “[y]our dream will not be fulfilled…You had the desire to do it; you had the
intention to do it; you tried to do it; you started to do it. And I bless you for having the
desire and the intention in your heart. It is well that it was within thine heart." In the
midst of his despair, King hoped that intention mattered more than accomplishment.
Such a judgment was only fair, King believed, because God demanded that Christians try
“to finish that which is unfinishable.” King saw that his daring dream might never be
realized, and he attempted “to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled.”
Disappointment, King thought, touched every life. He asserted that “life is a continual
221
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 178-189- Dyson also includes the opinion of King’s
friend Deenie Drew that “last year or so, I had a feeling that Martin had a death wish…I had a feeling that
he didn’t know which way to turn.” King’s depression may have been prefigured by two childhood suicide
attempts.
222
See D.W. Palmer, “‘To Die Is Gain’ (Philippians I 21),” Novum Testamentum 17, Fasc. 3 (July
1975): 203-218, and Thomas F. Dailea, “To Live or Die: Paul's Eschatological Dilemma in Philippians
1:19–26,” Interpretation 44, no. 1, (January 1990):18-28. Certainly King saw Paul as a figure who
struggled with depression. In “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” King/Paul mentioned that he was
“depressed at Athens.” The King Papers, Vol. III, 419.
96
story of shattered dreams.” To prove his point, he listed a series of shattered dreams and
shattered dreamers, paying particular attention to the story of the Apostle Paul. “The
Apostle Paul talked one day about wanting to go to Spain,” King said. “It was Paul’s
greatest dream to go to Spain, to carry the gospel there. Paul never got to Spain. He ended
up in a prison cell in Rome. This is the story of life.” In Paul’s life, King saw that the
noblest of ambitions and the greatest of saints still fell short.
King saw the gap between the world he dreamed of and the world he lived in, and
he feared that it was too great to close. So he sought solace in the precedent of the
Apostle Paul once again. Associating himself with Paul gave King more than comfort—
it elevated King and King’s mission from a social campaign to a sacred struggle that
could not be judged by any critic but God. And that critic, King claimed, had already
told him, “You may not see it. The dream may not be fulfilled, but it’s just good that you
have a desire to bring it into reality. It’s well that it’s in thine heart.”223 King used Paul’s
failure to go to Spain as proof that a life of shattered dreams was not a life wasted. This
truth gave King solace in his struggle and served to answer critics who portrayed King as
an idealistic dreamer and failure. King responded to his critics by showing how Paul
gave his all to a cause that ostensibly failed, and yet was remembered as a hero of the
faith. Failure, for King, was neither final nor fatal.
But King dealt with more than the failure of his dreams; he struggled with his
shortcomings as a man as well. King’s sins tortured him, and he obliquely addressed his
personal failures in this sermon as well. The “tension at the heart of the universe between
223
King, “Unfulfilled Dreams,” Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA, March 3, 1968,
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu (accessed January 13, 2013).
97
good and evil” existed within each individual’s life as well, where the conflict between
good and evil took the form of a “civil war.”224 King described the internal conflict:
And every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling
you to be evil. It’s going on in your life. Every time you set out to love,
something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate. Every time you set out
to be kind and say nice things about people, something is pulling on you to be
jealous and envious and to spread evil gossip about them. There’s a civil war
going on.
The desire to do good always came with the temptation to be bad. Human nature, like the
force of gravity, kept dragging King down. Considering the volume of hate mail and
death threats King received, the attempts made on his life, and the constant danger his
family lived in, one can hardly imagine the kind of furious pulsating hatred that King had
to quell with agape love, time and time again. Moreover, the temptations of power and
prestige and pride all pressed on King. International fame meant that wherever King
traveled, he was known and wanted. Discussing King’s sins without condoning them or
condemning him is difficult, but King can only be a whole human being if we
acknowledge his depravity as well as his holiness.
While King had long been unfaithful to Coretta,225 King’s sexual appetite
appeared to increase with the demands of his career and the opportunities offered by
fame. Thanks to the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, we know a fair amount
about King’s sexual exploits. For King, sex served any number of purposes. He once
confessed that “fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction;” perhaps King sought
psychological release through his affairs.226 These moments of sordid sensuality also
224
King, “Unfulfilled Dreams.”
225
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 193-194.
226
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 375.
98
offered King the chance to escape his role as America’s friendly neutered black man—in
one instance, he cried out, “I’m not a Negro tonight!”227 Aside from many brief sexual
encounters, King developed lasting relationships with three women, one whom became
“King’s de facto wife.” In spite of her husband’s cheating, Coretta maintained that she
and Martin “never had one single serious discussion about either one of us being involved
with another person.” But even if his infidelity did not destroy his marriage, Martin’s
constant cheating practically dissolved it. One staffer commented that “Coretta King was
most certainly a widow long before Dr. King died.” The bond between the two Kings
grew so thin that a member of the SCLC staff commented that even if King had survived
the movement, “the marriage wouldn’t have survived, and everybody feels that way.”228
But King did not survive—he fell to an assassin’s gun at the Lorraine Motel in
Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. The night before, King met with two women,
and then he fought with a third female on the morning of his death. Affairs and a failing
marriage should remind us that King, for all his accomplishments, remained human.
Martin Luther King, Jr. drank, smoked, swore, enjoyed dirty jokes, and called his friends
“niggers,” all of which contradicts the familiar image of King as a meek and mild man of
God. But acknowledging King’s humanity does not erase King’s hypocrisy. As a
227
228
Branch, Pillar of Fire, 207.
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 193-218. The Kings constantly fought over finances
because Martin refused to profit from his work. King brought in more than $200,000 a year through
speaking engagements, but he only kept about $4,000 a year from those ventures to supplement the $6,000
a year he received from Ebenezer as its co-pastor. Coretta, who had never known the prosperity that King
eschewed, understandably wanted more for her children and for herself. See “Playboy Interview,”
Testament, ed. Washington, 371.
99
minister, King preached against the sin of adultery that he so often committed.229 The
vicious struggle within King manifested itself even in his lowest moments: he often cried
out, “I’m fucking for God” while making love.230 Did this represent King’s attempt to
remain faithful to his calling even while he cheated on his wife?231 King may have
cheated to relieve the enormous pressures he faced as the leader of the Civil Rights
Movement, or because he had ample appetite and opportunity, or in order to subvert his
impossible holiness and remain human.
Whatever caused King’s infidelity, his
hypocrisy haunted him. As he yielded to temptation over and over, King struggled to
reconcile his failings and his faith. Did his sins mean he was not a true man of God?
Had his own failures doomed his movement? Here again, King found adapted the words
of the Apostle Paul to his own life. King confessed, “We end up crying out with the
Apostle Paul, "The good that I would I do not: And the evil that I would not, that I do."232
King took comfort in knowing that no less a man than the Apostle Paul struggled with
temptation and fell short constantly.233 Surely, then, just as Paul’s own failings did not
229
Dyson, I May Not Get There With You, 155-196- Dyson’s discussion of King’s final night
draws on Ralph Abernathy’s autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography
(New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
230
Branch, Pillar of Fire, 207.
231
Surely this thought occurred to King’s confidants in 1967 when King symbolized his enduring
commitment to nonviolence by performing a marriage ceremony between himself and nonviolence at an
SCLC retreat. There, he said, “I, Martin Luther King, take thee, nonviolence, to be my wedded wife, for
better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” See Burns, To
the Mountaintop, 371.
232
King, “Unfulfilled Dreams.” – King paraphrases Romans 7:19-“For the good that I would I do
not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (KJV).
233
This use of Paul as a conflicted sinner/saint distinguishes King’s last version of this sermon
from earlier editions. His outline of “Unfulfilled Hopes” from 1959 highlighted “the Apostle Paul” as “a
very pertinent example of unfulfilled hopes” and focuses more on Paul’s shattered dream of visiting Spain
than it does his internal conflict and tortured conscience. King told how Paul, en route to Spain, was
arrested in Rome. “He spent his days in that ancient city [Rome], held captive because of his daring faith in
Jesus Christ…because he died a martyr’s death in Rome before his hope could be fulfilled…The story of
100
lead to the failure of the church, King’s own sins did not cause the Civil Rights
Movement’s shortcomings. Moreover, seeing that Paul did evil even though he was a
good man, King saw that his sins did not unmake his faith. Like Paul, King was
tormented by a thorn of the flesh, but King could rest in Paul’s testimony that “he [God]
said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in
weakness.’”234
With this grace in mind, King began to conclude his sermon. He explained to his
audience at Ebenezer that “God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the
separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives.” For King, God’s
grace meant that “[s]alvation is being on the right road, not having reached a
destination.”235 King knew that he walked on the right road, even if perfection remained
a distant destination. He trusted that his sins of the flesh would not outweigh his
sacrifices for freedom. Paul’s grace-based conception of salvation clearly shaped King’s
theology. As a graduate student in 1953, King argued for Paul’s role in redefining
salvation, writing, “[i]t is Paul who comes on the scene affirming that salvation comes
through faith. The law is only set forth to show men that they cant [sic] save themselves,
and must therefore depend on the grace of God in Jesus Christ.” Recognizing that no one
met God’s standard of perfection (the Law), King trusted in salvation by grace alone
through faith alone, a concept he owed to Pauline Christianity. On the same exam, King
interpreted Jesus Christ through a Pauline lens: “The New Testament makes it very
Paul’s life was the tragic story of blasted hopes and unfulfilled dreams.” See “Unfulfilled Hopes” outline,
circa April 9, 1959, Series 2: Writings by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1947-1968), Morehouse College Martin
Luther King, Jr., Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, GA.
234
2 Corinthians 12:7-10 (ESV).
235
King, “Unfulfilled Dreams.”
101
explicit that Jesus is savior and redeemer…through his death and resurrection God has
prepared the way to a release from the bondage of sin and thereby offering him salvation.
“God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.”236 King made plenty of mistakes
along the way, but he marched on toward his final destination trusting that God’s grace
would carry him home.
Though King never explicitly confessed his sins to his congregation, he alluded to
them by speaking of a third party. An anonymous man King greatly admired had been
accused of various sins by some critics, and King spoke up for his friend. One can
almost hear King pleading for a more sympathetic judgment of his life in these lines:
Some weeks ago somebody was saying something to me about a person that I
have great, magnificent respect for. And they were trying to say something that
didn’t sound too good about his character, something he was doing. And I said,
"Number one, I don’t believe it. But number two, even if he is, he’s a good man
because his heart is right." And in the final analysis, God isn’t going to judge him
by that little separate mistake that he’s making, because the bent of his life is
right.
King begged his audience to understand that good and godly men remained fallen
sinners. This humanity, King argued, should not overshadow the great good of their
lives. King preached that God himself would judge humans not by the depth of their sins
but by the height of their dreams.
Standing on that foundation of grace, King concluded, “I can make a testimony.
You don’t need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint. Oh, no.
I want you to know this morning that I’m a sinner like all of God’s children. But I want to
236
King, “Qualifying Examination Answers,” Theology of the Bible, November 2, 1953, Boston,
MA, The King Papers, Vol. II, 209-. King directly quoted Paul’s interpretation of Christ from 2 Corinthians
5:19: “that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against
them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” His discussion of being freed from the bondage
of sin echoes Paul’s interpretation of salvation as freedom in Galatians 5:1- “For freedom Christ has set us
free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (ESV).
102
be a good man. And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, ‘I take you in and I
bless you, because you try. It is well that it was within thine heart.’”237 Admitting his
sins but trusting in the grace of God, King echoed Paul’s own testimony in 1 Timothy:
“Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I
received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his
perfect patience.”238 King answered his critics by reminding them that all of God’s
children sin, and that in this aspect, King’s critics were no better than King. King
reiterated his belief that God would judge him by what he hoped to do and what he tried
to do, not by what he failed to do. Finally, by confessing to be a sinner in need of mercy,
King aligned himself with Paul as apostles whose projects depended not on their personal
merits but on the God of grace who accepted them in spite of their failures.
King finished his sermon by blurring his voice with two of the Bible’s flawed
heroes, King David and the Apostle Paul. King explained that, “you know that God is
even in Crete. If you ascend to the heavens, God is there. If you descend to hell, God is
even there. If you take the wings of the morning and fly out to the uttermost parts of the
sea, even God is there. Everywhere we turn we find him. We can never escape him.”239
King’s reference to Crete was clearly Pauline, but what he meant remains unclear.240
Whatever the particular Pauline context, King interpreted this to mean that God always
walked with him. Moreover, King’s conclusion exalted the inescapability of God. While
his structure most nearly resembled David’s Psalm 139, King also echoed Paul in his
237
King, “Unfulfilled Dreams.”
238
1 Timothy 1:15-16 (ESV).
239
King, “Unfulfilled Dreams.”
240
For Paul’s connections to Crete, see Titus 1 and Acts 27-28.
103
benediction.241 In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul proclaimed that “neither death, nor
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of
God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”242 No failure, no sin, nothing in this world could
separate King from God’s love. As he saw his dream dying, King took solace in the
inescapability of God’s love. He also used the example of the Apostle Paul to show how
a flawed man could still be a man of God, a move he made both to answer critics and
assuage his own fears that his failures as a man and minister might doom his life’s work.
However great King’s sins were, he trusted that God’s grace remained sufficient for him.
Paul and King both saw their dreams shattered, and from Paul, King saw how shattered
dreams could be redeemed by God’s grace. Yet the question remains—what was King’s
Dream?
241
Psalm 139:7-10- “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold,
thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there
shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me” (KJV).
242
Romans 8:38-39 (KJV).
104
CONCLUSION
WHO WAS THE DREAMER, AND WHAT WAS THE DREAM?
I am sitting in the sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Martin Luther King,
Jr. has the people going. Now, of course, only a recording of his voice fills the empty
sanctuary, and the people are two elderly women, one white, one black, who sit in the
front pew. “Amen,” they say, “Preach it Dr. King!” I feel like an intruder here, even
though so much is familiar—the burgundy carpet and hardwood pews feel and look the
same as those in my own Baptist church, and the same signs hang on the wall to record
attendance and weekly giving. But I don’t know these women, their stories, or their
struggles, and so I can’t understand their tears. I take a few pictures and retreat from the
sanctuary to the foyer of the church. I am a little grateful to be out of earshot of King’s
ghost. I tiptoe down the stairs into the basement of the church where an enormous TV
plays an informational video on a loop. I sit down in a metal folding chair and review my
notes. I am here, ostensibly, to do research, but a year in which I have spent more time
with Martin Luther King, Jr. than with many of my friends means that this research trip
feels an awful lot like a pilgrimage. I cling to my notepad as a totem of my objectivity,
and when a tour guide comes in to give a speech about Ebenezer, I refrain from
answering any of his trivia questions about King so I don’t ruin the experience for all the
tourists. The tour guide concludes his spiel and says, “I’d like to share with y’all a gift
God has given me.” He turns his back on us, and after a few seconds, comes back to us
with his eyes shut and his mouth open. “I have a dream today,” he drawls, mimicking
King’s accent, pitch, tone, and cadence perfectly. He channels King for several minutes,
and though I know it is just a tour guide speaking, all I hear is King and the Dream.
105
His name is Stephen Ferguson, and he advertises himself as “The MLK
Experience.” He memorizes King’s sermons and recites them for King events and
celebrations, and he has met a host of King’s disciples at different events. “Andy
Young,” Ferguson tells me, “I had him in tears.” He is taking acting lessons, because
Oprah is doing a miniseries and Steven Spielberg has a movie planned. Ferguson is also
writing a book about King and the Dream. He hails from Fayetteville, NC, and he spent
time in the army as a medic. He is unmarried, he explains, and his daughter is 15, and
then he tells me, “I want to share the message, share the Dream, with more people.” I
want to ask him what the Dream means to him, but I don’t press the point. There is
always tension between profit and prophets, and I don’t want Ferguson to think I suspect
him of ulterior motives. So instead I shake his hand, head up the stairs and out the door,
echoes of King’s Dream chasing me down Auburn Avenue.
*
*
*
For good or for ill, we remember King for his Dream. When he spoke to a quarter
of a million people during the March on Washington, King spoke to the ages, and that
speech, that moment, is where King will always live. But as we celebrate the Dreamer,
we must ask, do we truly understand the Dream? And if we do not, how does a study of
King’s uses of the Apostle Paul help us? Having seen King’s uses of Paul throughout his
civil rights career, one can read the “Dream” speech with new eyes and see a side of the
Dream that we have long overlooked. But before going to Washington, D.C., it is worth
examining some of King’s other iterations of the Dream.
King gave many versions of his Dream talk, but because his 1964 address at Drew
University in Madison, New Jersey, came after the March on Washington, it offered King
106
an opportunity to expound on his Dream.243 King began this talk by describing
“America” as “essentially a dream, a dream yet unfulfilled.” The heart of this dream,
according to King, lay in the “very familiar words found in the Declaration of
Independence. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” The inclusiveness of the Declaration of
Independence resonated with King. “It does not say some men,” he pointed out, “it says
all men. It does not say all white men, but it says all men which includes black men. It
doesn’t say all Protestants, but it says all men which includes Catholics. It doesn’t say all
Gentiles, it says all men which includes Jews.”244 This particular interpretation of the
American Dream owes a debt to one of King’s favorite Pauline passages, Galatians
3:28.245 In both passages, King emphasized their common element of universalism that
included people of different races and different faiths.
Furthermore, according to the Declaration of Independence, all these people share
“certain basic rights” that “are gifts from the hands of the Almighty God.” King then
linked this idea to his belief that all humanity existed in relationship to one another,
thereby implying that so long as African-Americans were denied their God-given rights,
all other Americans would be unable to fulfill their potential. Because “whatever affects
243
For another version of the Dream, see King, “The Negro and the American Dream,” September
25, 1960, Charlotte, NC, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu (accessed March 1, 2013). While this speech has
some similarities in its introduction to the “I Have a Dream” speech, these similarities are also found in
King’s “The American Dream,” February 5, 1964, Drew University, Madison, NJ, http://depts.drew.edu
(accessed March 1, 2013) which I will hereafter refer to as “The American Dream.”
244
245
King, “The American Dream.”
Galatians 3:28 (KJV)- “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is
neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
107
one directly, affects all indirectly,” King believed that “I can never be what I ought to be
until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am
what I ought to be.” So for King, the American Dream had to be universal, because for
America to be at its best, the world had to be at its best. According to King, “the
realization of the American Dream” meant working toward “the dream of men of all
races, creeds, national backgrounds, living together as brothers.” King’s Dream included
the American dream, but it went beyond borders to make all men brothers.246
King believed this Dream could be accomplished only through love. But when he
spoke of love, King again returned to the Greek forms of love to distinguish agape from
other loves. The love he spoke of was not eros (the love that exists between lovers), nor
philia (the love that exists between friends), but “[a]gape,” a love which consisted of
“understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men.” King defined agape as “the
love of God operating in the human heart,” and explained that a man who achieved agape
“loves every man, not because he likes him but because God loves him.”247 While in
graduate school, King studied this divine agape love in the work of Swedish theologian
Anders Nygren. In King’s review of Nygren’s book Agape and Eros, he identified agape
as “the ‘love’ (agape) of which St. Paul speaks in the 13th Chapter of 1st Corinthians.”248
246
King, “The American Dream.” King almost always speaks of “man” and “brothers” and the
“brotherhood of man,” which may strike our ears as distinctly not universal because such language fails to
include women. Certainly, there are critiques to be made of King as a chauvinist, but I think part of this
was simply King speaking the language of his day and his tradition.
247
248
King, “The American Dream.”
King, “Contemporary Continental Theology,” September 13, 1951-January 15 1952?, Boston,
MA?, from The King Papers., Vol. II, 127-128. It should be noted that King plagiarized a good deal of this
paper from Walter Marshall Horton’s Contemporary Continental Theology and an article by George W.
Davis (a professor King had studied under at Crozer). See The Papers, Vol. II, 113. This particular passage
is much like the one describing Nygren’s work in Horton’s Contemporary Continental Theology. See The
Papers, Vol. II, 127, fn 33.
108
The very definition of love, according to King, came from Paul. The love that King
enacted was the love that Paul articulated:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all
mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my
body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind;
love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own
way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices
with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures
all things. Love never ends...So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but
the greatest of these is love.249
Agape love, then, was selfless, forgiving, unconditional, and invincible. In another
instance, King the graduate student defined agape:
Agape as described in the Gospels and Epistles, is “spontaneous and uncaused,”
indifferent to human merit,” and creates value in those upon whom it is bestowed
out of pure generosity. It flows down from God into the transient, sinful world;
those whom it touches become conscious of their own utter unworthiness; they
are impelled to forgive and love their enemies, because the God of Grace imparts
worth to them by the act of loving them.250
In “The American Dream,” King admitted that some southern segregationists were
impossible to like, but the power of agape compelled him to love those segregationists
regardless of how he felt about them. This love flowed from faith, not feeling. King
believed in agape because agape was “the kind of love that can help us achieve and
create the beloved community.” With that agape in his heart, King told his opponents
that “[w]e will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we
will still love you.” Through nonviolence, King lovingly taunted his opponents, “[w]e
will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. And
249
1 Corinthians 13 (ESV).
250
King, “Contemporary Continental Theology.”
109
our victory will be a double victory.”251 Ultimately, agape aimed at changing the
opposition’s heart by responding to hatred with love and winning friends and freedom
both.
While other versions of the Dream speech survive,252 the speech King gave at the
March on Washington in 1963 remains his most famous expression of the Dream, and
indeed, one of the greatest speeches in American history. Unlike “The American
Dream,” the speech known as “I Have a Dream” started off as another talk, “Normalcy
Never Again.” But when King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he did so as a
black preacher who listened for the pulse of the crowd. When he felt the people fading in
“Normalcy Never Again,” King ditched his script and dove into the Dream.253
In spite of all the pain he suffered and hatred he had endured, King declared, “I
still have a dream.” Despite his disappointments with America, King’s Dream remained
“deeply rooted in the American dream.” As before, King found the defining creed of the
American dream in the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase, "We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." But King’s dream was not mere
equality. He painted a portrait of his dream, saying, “I have a dream that one day on the
red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be
251
King, “The American Dream”- King’s victory was a victory for all people- God is interested in
the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as
brothers” (italics added).
252
In addition to “The Negro and the American Dream,” see “The American Dream,” June 6,
1961, Lincoln University, Lincoln University, PA, http://www.thekingcenter.org (accessed March 2, 2013).
253
King, “Normalcy Never Again,“ draft of address at March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom, August 28, 1963, Series 2: Writings by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1947-1968), Morehouse College
Martin Luther King, Jr., Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, Atlanta,
GA. For King’s improvisation, see Branch, Parting the Waters, 881-883.
110
able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”254 King’s vision included equal
rights—in order for whites and blacks to share a table, segregation had to die. But this
image of the oppressed and the oppressor breaking bread together points to the kind of
reconciliation King hoped for, one in which community and communion could be shared
regardless of race.
King went on describing his dream, envisioning a world in which even in
Alabama, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white
boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Again, King’s vision required the end of
segregation as a means to an end: reconciliation, brotherhood, and community. King
believed that God desired such reconciliation just as he did, and so he instructed his
listeners to return to the South with faith in their cause and in their God. “With this
faith,” King assured his audience, “we will be able to work together, to pray together, to
struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we
will be free one day.” Because human beings all lived in relationship to one another,
King knew that freedom for blacks meant freedom for whites as well. This “double
victory” King aimed to achieve required freedom from fear and freedom from
dehumanizing, unjust laws, certainly, but it also included freedom from ignorance and
hate. This was the freedom that King proclaimed, and the freedom he hoped to hear
ringing all the way from “the mighty mountains of New York” to “every hill and molehill
of Mississippi.”255 Freedom, for King, meant freedom from oppression and freedom to
love. King’s dream of freedom was a dream for all.
254
King, “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963, Washington, DC, http://www.americanrhetoric.com
(accessed February 26, 2013).
255
King, “I Have a Dream.”
111
And when he needed to articulate his dream’s amazing universalism, he chose to
echo his favorite Pauline passage yet again. King blended his voice with that of his
enslaved ancestors and the Apostle Paul when he prophesied that by working together
“we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white
men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in
the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we
are free at last!”256 King’s “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and
Catholics” echoed Galatians 3:28, King’s most oft-cited Pauline passage. In Christ, Paul
declared, “[t]here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither
male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”257 Just as Paul sought to unify the
Jews and the Gentiles in the Body of Christ, King strove to bring blacks and whites into
the Beloved Community. With agape love, King believed that the chains of fear and
hatred could be broken and replaced with bonds of understanding and love. King
dreamed of freedom through unity.
But the Dreamer was shot and killed on April 4, 1968. Since then, historians and
scholars and Americans of all kinds have tried to understand King and his Dream. Such
an enigmatic, elusive man requires stereoscopic study. Only by looking at King from
many viewpoints can we appreciate the man behind the myth. Saint, sinner, prophet,
plagiarist, preacher, activist, apostle—King was all these and more. What then, is the
value of studying King’s uses of Paul in the Civil Rights Movement?
256
King, “I Have a Dream.”
257
Galatians 3:28 (KJV).
112
Reading King as a Pauline figure highlights the role of reconciliation in his
project. By thinking of King as a messianic figure, we conceive of him too much in
terms of redemption. King did not live and die to pay for the sins of America—he died
trying to bring Americans together. Likewise, if we think of King as a modern-day
Moses, we run the risk of limiting King’s work to the liberation of a chosen people.
Redemption and liberation formed central parts of King’s project, and he readily
deployed messianic and Mosaic metaphors and made use of the narratives attached to
those figures. But King’s Dream of the Beloved Community required redemption to the
end of reconciliation and demanded liberation for both the oppressor and the oppressed.
King’s uses of a Pauline persona, his reinterpretation and rhetorical use of Paul, and his
conscious connections to the earlier apostle all formed a part of his pursuit of this Dream,
this vision of Americans of all creeds and colors living in community with each other and
communion with God. We can and should study King as a historical figure, but if we
forget that his Dream still requires something from each of us and all of us, then we have
murdered King all over again.
In Montgomery, King used Paul to justify a ministry founded on a vision, to
preach a powerful sermon that showed segregation to be sin for Christians and suicide for
the Body of Christ, and to fuel the nonviolent movement with agape love. When he
nearly died in Harlem, King began to filter his suffering through a Pauline perspective,
where pain led to gain and scars created credibility. In Birmingham, King penned his
Pauline prison epistle to tie the Civil Rights Movement to the early Church, a story that
allowed him to defend civil disobedience as Christian obedience to the higher law of
God’s love and condemn cowardly Christians while calling them to rejoin in the body of
113
believers. When King’s sins and shattered dreams dragged him into despair, he
remembered an earlier apostle who fought a civil war inside himself and took comfort in
the grace of God. Returning to the Dream after exploring King’s uses of Paul throughout
the movement, one can see how racial and religious reconciliation formed the heart of
King’s Dream. King dreamed of a Beloved Community in which people embraced the
other as their brother.
Yet the words of Carl Wendell Hines ring tragically true:
Now that he is safely dead,
Let us Praise him.
Now that he is safely dead,
Let us Praise him.
Build monuments to his glory.
Sing Hosannas to his name.
Dead men make such convenient Heroes.
They cannot rise to challenge the images
We would fashion from their Lives.
It is easier to build monuments
Than to make a better world.
So now that he is safely dead,
We, with eased consciences, will
Teach our children that he was a great man,
Knowing that the cause for which he
Lived is still a cause
And the dream for which he died
Is still a dream.258
Studying the Pauline parts of King’s Dream only matters if it helps us see that
reconciliation remains an ongoing project that demands something of us all. Redemption
can be achieved in a single moment of sacrifice, and liberation is limited to a Chosen
People, but reconciliation only occurs when people work together wherever they are with
258
Carl Wendell Hines, “Now That He Is Safely Dead.” Quoted in Vincent G. Harding, “Beyond
Amnesia: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of America,” Journal of American History 74, (September
1987): 468.
114
whatever they have to build the Beloved Community. Hines is right—“It is easier to
build monuments / Than to make a better world.” A statue is the worst kind of tribute to
King—it freezes an iconoclast into a single mold. We create a fitting monument to King
only when we stand together on common, holy ground.
115
BIBILIOGRAPHY
I arranged the bibliography in the following order: Archival Sources, Published Primary
Sources by Martin Luther King, Jr., Other Published Primary Sources, Secondary
Sources. I chose this order because the overwhelming majority of my primary sources
were authored by King. Within the Published Primary Sources By King section, I have
included several collections of primary sources. Within those collections, I chose to also
cite the individual documents in those collections that I used so that the source is easier to
find.
ARCHIVAL SOURCES
King, “Diary From Albany Jail.” July 10-11, 1962. Albany, GA. Series 2: Writings by
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1947-1968), Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center,
Atlanta, GA.
King, personal copy of Meek’s “A Letter to Christians.” After February 21, 1954? Series
2: Writings by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1947-1968), Morehouse College Martin
Luther King, Jr., Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta
University Center, Atlanta, GA.
King, “Normalcy Never Again,“ draft of address at March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom, August 28, 1963, Series 2: Writings by Martin Luther King, Jr. (19471968), Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr., Collection, Robert W.
Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, GA.
King, “Unfulfilled Hopes” outline. Circa April 9, 1959. Series 2: Writings by Martin
Luther King, Jr. (1947-1968), Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center,
Atlanta, GA.
PUBLISHED PRIMARY SOURCES BY KING
“The American Dream.” February 5, 1964. Drew University, Madison, NJ.
http://depts.drew.edu/lib/archives/online_exhibits/King/speech/TheAmericanDrea
m.pdf.
“The American Dream.” June 6, 1961. Lincoln University, Lincoln University, PA. The
King Center Digital Archive.
http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/american-dream
116
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.. Edited by Clayborne Carson. New York:
IPM in Association with Warner Books. 1998.
Christian Century. Chicago, IL: Christian Century. July 13, 1966.
“Diary in Jail.” August 23, 1962. Albany, GA. Jet. The King Center Digital Archive.
http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/diary-jail.
“Facing the Challenge of a New Age.” The Phylon Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1st Qtr., 1957):
25-34.
“I Have a Dream.” August 28, 1963. Washington, DC.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.
A Knock At Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther
King, Jr., Edited by Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran. New York: Warner
Books, 2000.
“The Drum Major Instinct.” Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA. February 4,
1968. 178-179.
“Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool.” Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church,
Chicago, IL. August 27, 1967,159-162.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute- The King Papers Project
“The Birth of a New Nation.” Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,
Montgomery, AL. April 7, 1957. http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/the_birth_of_a_new_nation_ser
mon_delivered_at_dexter_avenue_baptist_church/.
“The Negro and the American Dream.” September 25, 1960. Charlotte, NC.
http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol5/25Sept1960_TheNegroandtheAmeri
canDream,ExcerptfromAddressatt.pdf.
“Paul’s Letter to American Christians.” Delivered to the Commission on
Ecumenical Missions and Relations, United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. June 3,
1958. Pittsburgh, PA. http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol6/3June1958Paul'sLettertoAmericanC
hristinas,SermonDeliveredtotheCommissiononEcumenicalMissionsandRelations,
UnitedPresbyterianChurch,USA.pdf.
117
“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” Christian Century. April 13, 1960. http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/pilgrimage_to_nonvi
olence/.
“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Delivered at the National
Cathedral. March 31, 1968. Washington, D.C. http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/kingweb/publications/sermons/680331.000_Remaining_Awa
ke.html
“Suffering and Faith.” Christian Century. April 27, 1960. Chicago, IL. http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/suffering_and_faith.
“Unfulfilled Dreams,” Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA. March 3, 1968.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/unfulfilled_dreams/.
“A Message From Jail.” New York Amsterdam News. July 14, 1962. 11, 38,
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/pdfs/620714-002.pdf.
The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., (referred to herein as The King Papers), Edited.
by Clayborne Carson. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2005.
“An Autobiography of Religious Development.” September 12-November 22
November 1950. Chester, PA. The King Papers, Vol. I, 359-363.
“Contemporary Continental Theology.” September 1951-January 1952? Boston,
MA? The King Papers, Vol. II, 127-128.
“Facing the Challenge of a New Age.” Address Delivered at the First Annual
Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change. December 3, 1956. Montgomery,
AL. The King Papers, Vol. III, 458-459.
King to the Montgomery Improvement Association. October 6, 1958. The King
Papers, Vol. IV, 505-506.
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