Martin Luther King’s family and mentors immersed him in a river of collective memory stretching back to slave times. His father escaped the exploitative sharecropping system in 1918, becoming a prosperous minister in Atlanta by the time Martin was born in 1929. But poverty was still a near neighbor. Why were so many people “standing in bread lines,” King, Jr. asked in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression. By his teen years he knew that the “inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.” It was the source of his “anti-capitalistic feelings,” he recounted in a 1950 autobiographical essay. The family’s security could not hide “tragic poverty” all around him, evident in the hunger and tattered clothing of his playmates. His grandfather’s Ebenezer Baptist Church was also a community center providing food, clothing, medicine, and childcare for wage-earning mothers. “Whosoever carries the word must make the word flesh,” its pastor, A. D. Williams, preached.1
King scaled heights of achievement in both black and white society. But he remained acutely aware of his roots in the collective strivings of ordinary African Americans. King met Howard Thurman in 1953 during his final year studying for a Ph.D. at the School of Theology at Boston University (BU). Thurman had traveled far from his own poor rural roots, graduating from Morehouse College and Rochester Theological Seminary and becoming dean of BU’s Marsh Chapel that year. King had read Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, in which Jesus is portrayed as a “poor Jew” and a social revolutionary. In chapel King sat shaking “his head in amazement at Thurman’s deep wisdom,” his roommate Philip Lenud recalled. King adopted Thurman’s description of slavery as a “low, dirty and inhuman business.” How had slaves built spiritual defenses against fear, humiliation, and violence? Thurman recalled his grandmother tell of an open-air gathering of slaves who had assembled to hear a sermon. In a “triumphant climax,” the slave minister exhorted them, they were neither “niggers” nor “slaves” but “God’s children!” “Something welled up within them,” King later preached, as they sang, “I got shoes, you got shoes, all of God’s children got shoes.” It was not simply a sermon of Reassurance. The social gospel promised shoes on earth, not just freedom in the hereafter.2
King described his “pilgrimage to nonviolence” in 1958, surveying his nonviolent inspirations and theological development. King never wrote of his parallel pilgrimage to democratic socialism, which is understandable given the repressive anticommunist climate of the 1950s.3 But the seeds of his mature socialism are clearly visible in his youth and education. King emulated his father and grandfather’s social gospel ministries. As King learned Baptist preaching, important mentors—Benjamin Mays, Walter Chivers, George Davis, and Howard Thurman—fostered King’s commitment to racial and economic equality. King read nineteenth-century critics of capitalism—Walter Rauschenbusch, Edward Bellamy, and Karl Marx—at the same time that he developed a repertoire of sermonic set pieces borrowing from now obscure Protestant preachers, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Eugene Austin, and Robert McCracken. In ways not fully appreciated, Reinhold Niebuhr’s socialist writings guided King’s understanding of political and economic power, class conflict, and class alliances, as much as Niebuhr shaped King’s theology.
King, Jr. inherited a determination to fight economic and racial injustice from his family and community. We should not identify his or his father’s values too closely with their “bourgeois” class positions. They both witnessed poverty firsthand, envisioned collective political action to overcome it, and disdained acquisitiveness and class pretensions among Atlanta’s black “bourgeoisie.” King, Sr.’s memoir, Daddy King, vividly recalls the dilemmas of resistance and repression, despair and endurance that poor rural black folk faced after Reconstruction. Toiling in a rock quarry as a young man, his father, James King, lost part of his right hand in an explosion. His employer fired him without compensation. He returned to sharecropping, but landowners regularly cheated him when they “settled up” the cotton crop. James King was treated as “an object instead of a man,” Daddy King (called “Mike”) recalled. He respected his father’s hard work and occasional defiance of white authority. But ultimately he judged him harshly for growing “old on somebody else’s land,” a broken, bitter, alcoholic man. In contrast, King, Jr. later wrote, Daddy King resisted segregation’s “brutalities at first hand.” Compelled to work the fields, Mike attended school only three months a year. Whites saw him “first as a worker” and only then as a child. As a naïve twelve-year-old, Mike protested when a landlord defrauded his father of money due him from the sale of some cottonseed. The landlord publicly branded James King a troublemaker and evicted the family. One breach of Jim Crow economic subordination elicited harsh reprisals. King, Jr. learned from the history of his family and people. Emancipation freed blacks from “physical slavery,” he later testified, but they gained no “land to make that freedom meaningful.”4
Survival, dignity, and resistance were grounded in communal life and in “the redeeming value of sharing,” King, Sr. learned. His mother Delia King worked in cotton fields and kitchens to keep her family together, drawing Mike into church as a place of refuge and renewal. Delia taught Mike that making money carried an unacceptable price if it threatened personal safety, kin or family. He got a job heaving coal into locomotive engines at age fourteen—perilous work that nevertheless stoked his dreams of rescuing his family from poverty. The racially segmented southern labor market was harsh and unforgiving. Mike observed how bosses favored white workers in assigning extra work, as they in turn pandered to the bosses and denounced each other as labor agitators. It was the end of his childhood, he wrote. Delia King tracked down Mike and rebuked his boss for hiring her underage son. She also refused $500 in wages owed Mike, protesting that she would accept nothing that would allow anybody to exploit her child. Mike could not even reap the bitter fruit of his own exploitation.5
Mike King moved to Atlanta in 1918 with little money or education. Established middle-class blacks scorned his “rough, country” roots as he trained as a young preacher in the 1920s. He considered the elitism of Atlanta’s black bourgeoisie to be as bad as white racism. But the turn-of-the-century Negro and mulatto upper class, whose status derived from serving elite whites, had to accommodate a new class of professionals and entrepreneurs who rose with the expanding Negro market—insurance men, realtors, businessmen, professors, and, of course, ministers. Mindful of their origins, many genuinely aspired to become “race men.” They admired both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, mixing strategies of race uplift through business enterprise and protest for equal citizenship rights. One of these, Reverend Adam Daniel Williams, the father of Mike’s future wife, Alberta, took Mike King under his wing. “Change is coming whether the white man can handle it or not,” he told Mike in 1920. Williams had arrived in 1893 from rural Georgia, filling Ebenezer Baptist Church with migrants swelling the Auburn Avenue neighborhood. Ministering to the poor and working class, he preached that every minister should be “an advocate for justice” all week long, not just on Sunday. President of the Atlanta NAACP from 1917 to 1920, Williams agitated for voting rights and equal educational funding; he helped found Booker T. Washington High School, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s alma mater. King, Jr. grew up comfortably among ambitious people whose class consciousness was leavened by humble origins and a strong sense of racial solidarity and determination to fight the injustices of caste.6
King, Sr. rose quickly in black Atlanta, graduating from Morehouse College in 1930, marrying Alberta Williams, and inheriting the Ebenezer pulpit in 1931. Martin admired his father’s political fight to equalize teachers’ salaries and his protests of Jim Crow elevators in the courthouse. Ministers, unlike teachers, were comparatively immune from white reprisals, King, Sr. recognized, and had special obligations. In 1935, he led several hundred protesters downtown, demanding the ballot. Whites looked on dumbfounded; white newspapers never covered black protests. King, Jr. grew critical of his father’s success ethic but admired his politics. He also seems to have picked up Daddy King’s disdain for “slick businessmen” who profited from housing segregation and the low wages they paid black workers. “The poor, black and white, were taught to hate each other,” King, Sr. recalled. “Businessmen made money from both.” Martin clearly carried forward his father’s conviction that “the masses had to take part in social change.” Daddy King organized consumer boycotts targeting a “vital part of our city’s life—its economy.”7
Auburn Avenue gave King, Jr. a “deeply religious” identity, and both parents actively discouraged feelings of class superiority in their children. King recalled growing up in neither a crime-ridden “slum district” nor a refuge of the “upper class.” This picture of frugal, middle-class solidity is at some variance with Daddy King’s own claim to have been “the best paid Negro minister in Atlanta.” But the black class structure was overpopulated at the bottom and fluid at the top, and nowhere near as stratified as white society. The Kings were not so far from humble origins to consider assuming aristocratic airs. King, Jr. wrote with pride of his father’s scrupulous “saving and budgeting.” Daddy King did not “live beyond his means” or show off his wealth. Early in their marriage, Martin cooked pigs’ ears for Coretta Scott King. Being his “father’s son,” she recalled, he liked them because they were “good” and “cheap.”8
“Before Black people in Atlanta had access to City Hall—much less occupied it,” Martin’s sister Christine King Farris recalled, “Dad was a voice for the voiceless … above all else, a man.” Daddy King once rebuked a policeman for calling him “boy” as Martin watched in awe. “Manhood” meant confronting racism in the public sphere, demanding equal respect, treatment, and representation, speaking truth where others might fear or be unable to speak for themselves. Provisioning and protecting the private sphere created an intertwined meaning of manhood. Within the home, King, Sr. considered his authority paramount. But like her mother, Jennie Celeste Williams, Alberta Williams King was not caged in the private sphere: active in Ebenezer Baptist Church, she directed the choir, frequently taking it on the road. Martin later mentioned only his mother’s domestic roles, but in the context of racial oppression, black norms of middle-class motherhood differed from whites’. Strong men’s characters contained “antitheses strongly marked,” King often said. He acquired “the sweet gentleness of my mother and the strong, hard, rough, courage of my father.” Alberta King in her “natural” sphere lavished “motherly cares” central to children’s secure character development. When her children faced racism, she explained its history “as a social condition rather than a natural order,” bolstering their sense of dignity and desert. When as young adults they showed off their fancy cars in the front of the house, she commanded them to move the cars out back, admonishing that “this is a sin because we’re supposed to be serving the people.” In this context, Martin learned to respect women first as mothers and culture carriers, and then as activists. King, Sr. exercised final authority over family decisions; Martin could not remember one family argument. His father’s model of unquestioned authority surely influenced his leadership style. Many in SCLC recalled that King avoided heated debate, delegating strong antithetical positions to staff and reserving final decisions for himself. King’s limits in appreciating women’s leadership and issues must be understood against this background.9
King’s father and grandfather shared commitments to economic reform and religious as well as secular ideals of social obligation to the poorest Americans. King, Sr. preached in 1940 to a Baptist association, quoting Jesus as he had quoted the prophet Isaiah in Luke 4:18: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Blacks facing severe discrimination and disproportionate unemployment had not yet begun to benefit substantially from the economic recovery driven by World War II defense production. Ministers must speak for the “broken-hearted, poor, unemployed, the captive, the blind, and the bruised,” King, Sr. preached. “How can people be happy without jobs, food, shelter and clothes?” His son’s last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church demanded he be eulogized as a servant of the bruised and captive poor, not as a Nobel Prize winner. Deciding on the ministry in 1947, King credited his father’s example and an “inescapable urge to serve humanity” that seized him in 1944. In January of that year, Franklin Roosevelt promised an “economic bill of rights” that would extend rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to include human rights to jobs, decent homes, medical care, old age security, collective bargaining, and living family wages.10 In the age of radio and fireside chats (and soon television), how would the ministerial imperative to preach to and “speak for the poor” translate into mass politics? Would the voiceless poor recognize their own aspirations in King’s words?
King, Jr. adopted this expansive notion of rights appropriate to a high-consumption society and a nation at war with racist “warfare states.” As a high school senior in 1944, Martin won his way to the state finals of a speech competition sponsored by the Black Elks. His oration, “The Negro and the Constitution,” pushed the limits of New Deal liberalism, weaving a powerful criticism of racial inequality into King’s own evocation of social and economic rights. How could America achieve an “enlightened democracy” when Negroes remained uneducated and “ill-nourished,” suffering from diseases that spread across all “color lines”? How could the nation remain whole while forcing people “into unsocial attitudes and crime”? How could America prosper with a whole people “so ill-paid that it cannot buy goods”? Victory over fascism abroad demanded “free opportunity” and victory over racism at home, King argued, echoing discourse of the wartime black Double V campaign. Invidious walls of caste blocked African American class and status achievement. The “finest Negro” lived at the mercy of the “meanest” white. Whites exalted a few Negroes and slapped down the rest “to keep us in ‘our places.’ ” Tokenism was the norm. “Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar,” he stated. King spoke from experience. He had grown up acutely conscious of his exclusion from white schools, downtown stores, and theaters; he recalled seeing episodes of police and Ku Klux Klan violence on Atlanta’s streets. And Jim Crow tainted even his teenage triumph. After tasting honor at the all-black competition, King rode home in his “place,” forced to yield his bus seat to a white passenger. “It was the angriest I have ever been in my life,” he recalled.11
King, Jr. entered Morehouse College in the fall of 1944, when his commitment to “racial and economic justice was already substantial.” He immediately felt the magnetism of President Benjamin Mays, whom he acknowledged as one of his “great influences.” The son of sharecroppers, Mays preached the ethics of political agitation and success through education, admonishing students to perform their work, however humble, “so well that no man living [or] unborn could do it better.” King repeated these phrases verbatim in his sermons on black achievement in the face of adversity. Mays also preached the social gospel, writing in 1940 that “a religion which ignores social problems will in time be doomed.” Religion must transcend all secular faiths, Mays argued, including communism, fascism, and “capitalistic individualism.” King had other activist social gospel models, but Mays clearly stood out as a towering exemplar.12
As postwar cold war tensions intensified, Daddy King worried that Martin was “drifting away” from his own belief in “capitalism and Western democracy.” The specifics of King, Jr.’s anticapitalism remain obscure until 1950, but he clearly thought that democracy was incompatible with capitalism built on exploitation and white supremacy. In 1946, a rash of racial murders swept the South as soldiers returned from World War II. King wrote to white readers of the Atlanta Constitution in conventional terms of postwar racial liberalism. Blacks merited full citizenship rights: the right “to earn a living at work for which we are fitted by training and ability; equal opportunities in education, health, recreation and public services; the right to vote; [and] equality before the law.” Sounding more radical in a critique of black class power, King wrote to his “ ‘brethren’ ” in the Morehouse newspaper in 1947. “The purpose of education,” he wrote, was to expose repressive propaganda and sharpen social action. Yet most of his classmates thought education would help them forge “instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses.”13
A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s largest all-black labor union, addressed Morehouse in June 1945. Benjamin Mays welcomed to Morehouse radical race men who were committed to mobilizing, not just uplifting, the masses. Well before King met “the dean of Negro leaders” in June 1956, he was surely exposed to the “socialist thinking” that shaped his mature political philosophy. Under Randolph’s threat of a massive march on Washington, Franklin Roosevelt had agreed to create the Fair Employment Practices Committee to ensure nondiscrimination in defense industries. At Morehouse, Randolph issued a Popular Front call to arms against global and American capitalism, fascism, and racism. The “purpose of education” was to equip people both to live within society and to change it. But Negroes were “devastatingly individualistic,” he said. They were all witnessing “the breakup of a great civilization … the civilization of capitalism.” Capitalism was turning into fascism to survive because “white and black, brown and yellow peoples” were revolting globally against “property relations” based on empire and coercion. “World financial materialism” generated rampant militarism to protect the “economic spheres of influence, trade routes, and political suzerainty” of imperial capitalist nations. The only alternative was socialism, he proclaimed. Racial “demagogues” would no longer manipulate the anxieties of white and black workers, who must together “climb up out of the ditch of economic, political and social backwardness.” What then could Morehouse men do? Serve the masses, said Randolph. “Establish organic contact with the people in the shacks and the hovels. There resides the power … They, the masses may be poor in property but they are rich in spirit.”14
King’s education continued on the shop floor. During summers off from college, he worked in factories, wanting to learn about workers’ “problems and feel their feelings,” classmate Lerone Bennett, Jr., heard him say. King hauled furniture at a mattress company and worked at Railway Express until he quit when the foreman called him a “nigger.” King thought it outrageous that black men at the same jobs earned much less than whites. But King later stressed that “the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro.” His speeches consistently alternated between an appreciation of class exploitation crossing racial lines and the racial economic oppression specific to blacks, who worked for comparatively low wages in the South’s “mean and dirty” jobs reserved exclusively for them.15
King chose the secular discipline of sociology as his major, graduating from Morehouse in 1948 at age nineteen. His advisor, Walter Chivers, exposed him to secular critiques of social inequality. A graduate of the New York School of Social Work, Chivers held no Ph.D. and had published no books, but his students revered him as a “cosmopolitan sociologist.” Chivers had investigated rural lynchings and conducted field research on urban black poverty. King saved none of his writings for Chivers, but Bennett vividly recalled Chivers’s argument that “money was the root not only of evil but of race.” Chivers’s own writings suggest a more complex bequest; his “situationist” sociology bears close resemblance to King’s later views of race, culture, and poverty. Chivers surely supported King’s challenges to Baptist propriety as he sorted out whether he wanted to pursue law, medicine, or the ministry. Chivers lambasted Morehouse’s “puritanical Baptist Missionary heritage,” describing how parents frowned on dancing, smoking, birth control, and Darwinian theory. Yet Chivers was awed by Negro ministers’ “power over Negro masses,” a potentially “destructive force” but also an untapped well of popular mobilization. Dynamic leadership developed in churches serving “common people,” where ministers created new “avenues of public service” and free African American spaces. Nevertheless, Negro ills were “almost insoluble” in segregated locales and could only be healed through “conflicts and crises” that directly challenged the color line.16 How could leaders isolated in segregated enclaves lead socially transforming confrontations with white power? How could segregated churches challenge segregation? Chivers hardly suspected his teenage student would grab both horns of this dilemma, mastering black and white vernacular speech and using churches as inspirational bases for nonviolent protests.
Chivers shaped King’s developing understanding of culture and poverty. In Chivers’s view, black poverty produced infant mortality, crime, and family instability, matters not of “race” but of “environment.” Unemployment, job discrimination, poor housing, inadequate recreation, and lack of medical care severely stressed black people’s physical and mental health. The Chicago School of Sociology had viewed crime and “social disorganization” as temporary obstacles in new migrants’ progress toward assimilation and social and geographic mobility. Its critics saw caste and class as serious barriers to mobility, and “situationist” sociologists like Chivers suspected that a coherent lower-class culture compounded the problem. Harlem’s poor people developed an “antisocial life-routine,” he wrote, engaging in vice, numbers rackets, and petty crime. These were compensations for joblessness, tenant exploitation, and “economic despair,” self-destructive, perhaps, but essentially “adaptations” to poverty and racism. When police disrupted Harlem’s routines in 1935, suppressing the rackets and enforcing evictions of penniless people, “these abnormal people ‘blew up,’ ” Chivers explained. The Harlem riot of 1935 was an uprising of people “emotionally unbalanced and neurotic from hunger and other deprivations.” Grounded in an analysis of economic racism, Chivers’s emphasis on psychopathology reflected what Alice O’Connor identifies as an “increasingly psychological” analysis of lower-class culture characteristic of the 1940s.17 Situationists reemerged in the 1960s as the cities burned, and experts again debated culture and structure, economic stress and police provocation, the psychology of despair and the politics of violent protest.
King attended the interracial but predominantly white Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania between 1948 and 1951. Founded by a Baptist industrialist, Crozer had become a bastion of the social gospel. King’s liberal and progressive instructors nurtured his sense of a loving, suffering, personal God, creative in history and manifest in human service to those whom Jesus called “the least of these.” King’s exposure to liberal Protestantism and the social gospel presaged his later indictment of the intertwined “triple evils” of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. Scholars have shown that King’s “borrowing” of sermonic language from liberal Protestant preachers was a common practice among seminarians, more like musical homage than scholarship. In graduate essays, King usually quoted, rearranged, and commented on others’ words, listing his sources in bibliographies. King chose material that reflected his core values and emerging social mission. One essay praised the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah for rejecting hierarchical religion as “organized hypocrisy” and offering a democratic, dissenting religion of the heart. An essay on late Judaism praised the patriarch Issachar, who practiced simplicity of living, joyful work for spiritual rewards, and service to God and the poor. The patriarch Zebulun modestly provisioned his household, then gave to “the sick, the aged and the needy [to] be blessed by God for his compassion.” King agreed: “all wealth belongs to God,” who sees no distinction between rich and poor. In an essay on Buddhism, King rejected the “narrow and selfish” Hinayana tradition in favor of Mahayana Buddhism, whose compassionate Bodhisattvas delay their Enlightenment to return to the cycle of life, death, and rebirth to serve “all suffering beings.” King’s lone history paper admired George Whitefield’s ecumenical, learned, charismatic, and populist evangelical preaching. Whitefield’s 1740 tour of the colonies ignited the Great Awakening, which touched “all classes,” gave rise to abolitionism, and spread popular “concern for Indians and Negroes and underprivileged people.”18
Of the all-white Crozer faculty, King felt closest to George Washington Davis, the working-class son of a Pittsburgh labor activist. King took seven classes with Davis, bathing in “warm evangelical liberalism.” King peppered his religious analyses with observations of social contradictions and historical crosscurrents. One paper sought to synthesize liberal theological optimism with a neo-orthodox attention to sin: the South had a “vicious race problem,” but the “noble possibilities of human nature” revealed themselves in the region’s racial improvements. Davis introduced King to the concept of agape, which saturated his many sermons on nonviolence. Agape was the unconditional “sacrificial” love Jesus practiced, a counterweight to cold “commercial transactions” of modernity. Interdependence defined human life. We prosper not by our selfish efforts, King wrote, but by other people’s sacrificial gifts “beyond our merit and deserving.” Another essay exuded postmillennial optimism. The Kingdom of God would arrive not after apocalypse but gradually through people practicing “trust, love, mercy and altruism.” King always preferred the social ministry of Jesus to the sufferings of Christ on the cross, though toward the end of his life he spoke increasingly of the cross he had to bear.19
King dreamed of a world at peace waging a global war on poverty. Breezily reconciling Darwinism and Christianity, King wrote of a God imminent in nature who guided humanity’s “creative evolution.” When Davis asked King to explain the problem of evil in a world created by a good and all-powerful God, King addressed the political and economic sins of militarism, poverty, and slavery. If knowledge were the only obstacle, humanity would “conquer poverty, for there is ‘enough and to spare’ for all,” King claimed. If only we could substitute a crusade against poverty for the ceaseless “preparation of war.” But God-given free will leads inevitably to human “selfishness, pride, greed, [and] lust for power.”20
George Davis influenced King’s understanding of the class system, and the moral and global costs of acquisitive individualism. With Davis, King read the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, whose 1907 book Christianity and the Social Crisis indelibly marked King’s evolving “social concern.” Harry Emerson Fosdick’s paraphrase of Rauschenbusch was good enough for King to use in later writings and sermons: “Any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul, is a spiritually moribund religion.” Rauschenbusch did not discuss racism, but King felt his horizons broaden precisely because of Rauschenbusch’s analysis of class and poverty. King shared Rauschenbusch’s love of the Hebrew prophets and the parables of Jesus recorded in Luke regarding the corruptions of the wealthy and the dignity of the poor. He often used the parables to decry the spiritual snares of individualism. The “rich fool” hoarded his property without thinking about his dependence on God or other people. “A victim of the cancerous disease of egotism, the fool failed to realize that wealth always comes as a result of the commonwealth,” King preached. “Men no longer love the Commonwealth, because it does not stand for the common wealth,” Rauschenbusch wrote. “Exploitation creates poverty.” And Rauschenbusch linked capitalism and militarism in ways King openly professed by 1958. Rauschenbusch wrote,
When we comprehend how few wars have ever been fought for the sake of justice or the people; how personal spite, the ambition of military professionals, and the protection of capitalistic ventures are the real moving powers … then the mythology of war will no longer bring us to our knees…. In the same way we shall have to see through the fictions of capitalism. We are assured that the poor are poor through their own fault; that rent and profits are the just dues of foresight and ability … that we cannot compete with foreign countries unless our working class will descend to the wages paid abroad. These are all very plausible assertions, but they are lies dressed up in truth.21
King began his public ministry demystifying the moral fictions of capitalism and individualism. He ended it explicitly denouncing his own country’s practice of imperial war in the service of profit.
Recent scholars rightly view King’s “religious identity” in relation to his indigenous black roots. Yet King spent six years in predominantly white theological institutions, where his political identity, social vision, rhetoric, and language developed in ways appropriate to diverse audiences. How else could he have merged so well the languages of Baptist folk preachers, liberal Protestantism, and the democratic left? To ask who shaped King most decisively poses a false choice, an either/or King would have rejected.22
While King tasted a new freedom in the North, he discovered its hidden, two-faced racism. He had worked on a tobacco farm in Connecticut in 1944 and 1947, traveling “anywhere” he wanted, he wrote home. Crozer was a progressive interracial institution, and King was elected president of the senior class. But when King and three black friends insisted on service in a New Jersey tavern in June 1950, the proprietor fired a gun, later testifying he feared hoodlums would rob him. King dropped charges when whites refused to testify. King transcended his earlier “antiwhite” feelings, he wrote. But he did not shy away from confronting whites blind to any difference between black seminarians and criminals.23
King had often discussed the Indian independence leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi, at Morehouse, friends recalled. But not until attending Crozer did he study Gandhi in depth. In the spring of 1950, Howard University president Mordecai Johnson lectured on Gandhi in Philadelphia. King found Johnson “profound and electrifying,” and quickly bought a half dozen books on Gandhi. Johnson had followed Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman to India to meet Gandhi during the 1930s. Gandhi led the nonviolent movement that freed India from British control, Johnson lectured, and then embraced India’s “Untouchables as children of God.” The Howard University Gandhians did not reduce Gandhi to a one-dimensional prophet of civil disobedience simply confirming black Christian beliefs. Black leaders had long appreciated Gandhi’s vow of poverty, repudiation of Indian caste, the Indian economic boycott of British goods that Gandhi initiated and Gandhi’s consequent efforts to develop home manufacturing. “We are all one—we the Despised and Oppressed, the ‘niggers’ of England and America,” W.E.B. Du Bois had declared in 1919. In 1928, Mary Church Terrell praised Gujarati farmers who resisted British taxation and showed how the oppressed could resist “the rich and powerful.” Gandhi’s simple loincloth inspired Mordecai Johnson, who told Howard University graduates in 1930 to don the “cheapest variety of homemade overalls to let the Negro farthest down know that they are one.” In 1936, Thurman heard Gandhi simultaneously blame India’s poverty on colonialism and call on all Indians to assume responsibility for the indigenous depredations of class and caste. Gandhi adopted an untouchable daughter and changed the term “from outcaste to ‘Harijan’, meaning ‘Child of God,’ ” Thurman wrote. These symbolic acts of solidarity reconciled and united Indians who remained demoralized and divided by inequality, thereby releasing “energy needed to sustain a commitment to nonviolent direct action.” All of these themes resonate in King’s later Gandhism.24
Johnson also resisted the ideological alignments of the cold war. The “free world,” he told delegates to the 1950 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) convention, had perpetuated its freedom for two hundred years “by the political domination, economic exploitation and social humiliation of over half the human race.” No other single phrase so persistently rings through King’s sermons on colonialism and domestic racism. Johnson’s dissident anti-imperialism was remarkable in light of the CIO’s mass expulsion of communists the year before, although it resonated with a deeply rooted black tradition of anti-imperialism. The United States could live in peace with Russia only if it initiated disarmament, Johnson told Howard University’s 1951 graduating class. Then both nations could help unravel the West’s “imperialistic habits.” Anticipating King’s call for a world war on poverty, Johnson urged the United States to sponsor a United Nations program of “economic reconstruction … to bring about adequate subsistence in food, clothing, housing and health for every human family of every race, color, nationality and culture on the earth.”25
King’s favorite book on Gandhi was British cleric Frederick Fisher’s That Strange Little Brown Man Gandhi, according to Crozer professor Kenneth Smith. King would have learned from Fisher that Gandhi made his vow of poverty while aiding striking Indian miners in South Africa. Through their “poverty and struggle,” the miners inspired Gandhi to put service above “personal gain.” Gandhi was a high-caste Hindu and a British university graduate, but South African whites treated him as “simply a ‘coolie.’ ” He went on to challenge attitudes of superiority among “the ruling classes in India, both brown and white, English and Brahman,” Fisher writes. Gandhi linked militarism and capitalism, discerning in “the system of war the seeds of its own destruction,” perceiving “in private capital the destruction or subversion of spiritual values.” He was a “master dramatist” on the world media stage, Fisher argues, describing the highly publicized Salt March of 1930 in defiance of Britain’s monopoly on salt production. King found the Salt March especially compelling. Beginning with one man’s defiant symbolic act—“the simple act of holding aloft a pinch of free, untaxed sea salt”—it led to a protest involving millions. Finally, Gandhi wrestled with the dilemma of political independence and economic underdevelopment. “Britain’s destruction of India’s handloom industries” retarded Indian economic progress long after nationhood came in 1947, Fisher reports. Gandhi’s spinning wheel became a symbol of resistance and a source of work “for the largest body of unemployed in the world.”26
Over the 1949 Christmas break, King preached at Ebenezer and read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. This deeply unsettled his father, who made few distinctions between Marxian socialism, atheism, and totalitarian communist regimes. J. Pious Barbour, a Baptist preacher, socialist, and family friend who welcomed King into his home for many conversations, recalled King’s growing conviction that “the capitalistic system was predicated on exploitation prejudice, [and] poverty.” Marx got the economics of capitalism right and it was time for “a new social order,” King told Barbour. “Capitalism carries the seeds of its own destruction,” King wrote in his notes in the spring of 1951. All systems carried such seeds, but capitalism failed “to meet the needs of the masses.” Postwar waves of trade union strikes and popular support for socialized medicine signaled “a definite revolt” by the American proletariat, part of a global “move away from capitalism.” Organized labor would eventually force the “nationalization of industry.” What was “more socialistic than the income tax [or] the T.V.A. [Tennessee Valley Authority]?” King asked. President Truman’s 1948 reelection had proved labor would soon be powerful enough to elect a president. True, capitalism was “trying all types of tactics to survive.”27 But King believed socialism was coming.
King’s sunny optimism blinded him to the dark clouds already lowering upon the left. Congressional conservatives and the American Medical Association had fatally weakened the drive for socialized medicine by 1949. The income tax and the TVA proved perfectly consistent with corporate capitalism. The Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s had sought to link domestic civil rights to a powerful labor movement, an expanded welfare state, and an anti-imperialist movement for democracy at home and abroad. Anticommunism broke many of those links and eviscerated the core institutions of the left, especially the unions. After the largest strike wave in American history in 1946, the Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, overriding Truman’s veto. Corporations and conservatives stalled union organizing by hampering basic tactics of labor solidarity and permitting states to pass “right-to-work laws” banning union shops (union shops required all new workers to join a union if the majority of workers chose to unionize). In the 1950s and 1960s, failure to repeal this provision (section 14b) was the greatest blow to the Negro-labor alliance that King dreamed might draw unorganized workers into a powerful progressive movement. Under Taft-Hartley, unionists also had to purge their “Communist” leadership or risk loss of legal protections for collective bargaining. The CIO expelled eleven left-led industrial unions with a million members in 1949—unions that supported civil rights, social welfare, and aggressive drives to organize unorganized workers. In the South, white supremacists manipulated fears of communism to stall Operation Dixie, the AFL and CIO’s major drive to unionize southern industries. By 1950, the civil rights unionism that joined left-led unions to grassroots African American voters’ leagues and robust NAACP chapters was seriously weakened. Mainstream unions withdrew from social democratic politics and organizing drives to focus on collective bargaining. Simultaneously, the NAACP made pariahs out of “fellow travelers” like W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson and helped shut down the Council on African Affairs, the main institutional vehicle for African American internationalism.28
King dreamed of socialism when even social democratic liberalism was on the ropes. Despite the promises of the New Deal and the Fair Deal, economic liberalism had been in retreat since the 1938 elections. Congressional conservatives abolished New Deal agencies responsible for public employment and economic planning during World War II. The 1945 Full Employment Bill would have targeted public investments on places and persons vulnerable to economic dislocation. The Employment Act of 1946 promised only maximum employment through fiscal and tax policies affecting aggregate economic growth. This moderate fiscal Keynesian orthodoxy in economic policy took root and lasted through the 1960s, despite continued social democratic challenges from the interracial left, including King’s. Even Truman’s attempt to revive the wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), an instrument for enforcing equity in federal contracting, was defeated. Truman’s Fair Deal also proposed to abolish the poll tax, provide federal direct aid to education, and raise the minimum wage and broaden its coverage. But only veterans, the elderly, upwardly mobile white homeowners, and some public housing tenants saw gains by the time congressional conservatives roared back to power in 1950. The Korean War and McCarthyism stalled reform until the mid-1960s.29
As liberals increasingly severed civil rights from economic justice, race took on heightened urgency. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr saw in the new racial liberalism a challenge to the New Deal faith that economic progress alone could further black “assimilation” into the mainstream. Prosperity and modernity were entirely compatible with persistent, even newer forms of racism, he argued. The powerful engine of postwar economic growth left millions behind. The economy surged ahead, stimulated by military spending and pent-up consumer demand. But federally sponsored southern industrialization did not equalize wages between whites and blacks or open opportunities in skilled jobs and technical professions. Moreover, the structural foundations for the urban crisis were already being laid. Black migrants poured out of the declining agricultural South into urban centers already beginning to lose manufacturing jobs, where walls of segregation had been reinforced by federal policy, banks, builders, corporations, and white working-class homeowners who used the language of New Deal rights to defend their “decent” homes and turf against black “invasion.” Still, the cold war gave domestic freedom fighters new leverage; racism now became an international embarrassment to a U.S. government upholding the mantle of “free world” leadership. This advantage was severely blunted by the marriage between racial liberalism and anticommunism, however, which cut a wide destructive swath through the left.30 How could minority rights and workers’ rights be secured if racial liberalism separated the fight against class power and inequality from the antiracist agenda?
The cold war intellectual climate shaped King’s public discourse, but he also resisted a liberalism that reduced racism to prejudice and separated racial and class inequality. Liberal social scientists and intellectuals studied the social psychology of race as they turned away from the political economy of race and class and lost faith in labor unions as the vanguard of social change. The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal had published his monumental American Dilemma in 1944, which had been a moral summons to America’s egalitarian “conscience” and a broad social democratic program for intervening in the economy and providing opportunity for people Myrdal feared might become trapped in a permanent “underclass.” The weakening of progressive forces in the late 1940s led social scientists to downplay his analysis of structural racism and focus almost exclusively on white prejudice. King eloquently appealed to white America’s conscience in terms of this racial “moralistic liberalism,” Walter Jackson argues. King believed liberal promises and used the cold war rhetoric of American freedom. Yet he never forgot that racism and class power were coequal and powerful forces shaping social structure. And though he often criticized racist union locals and conservative labor hierarchies, he retained a faith in the revitalization of progressive interracial and social democratic unions.31
After his exposure to the religious and academic left, King learned much about socialism from survivors of the carnage on the political left. Anticommunist socialists and social democrats continued to advocate civil rights, social democracy, and détente with the Soviets. King entered a circle whose key figures were A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, socialist and pacifist Bayard Rustin of the War Resisters League, New York lawyer and former Communist Party fund-raiser Stanley Levison, NAACP activist Ella Baker, Ralph Helstein of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), and Walter Reuther, the powerful president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the CIO. The auto workers and the meatpackers became King’s most generous financial backers in the 1960s. As Kevin Boyle has shown, Reuther envisioned not class struggle but “corporatist” cooperation among government, business, labor, and consumers. Like King, Reuther arrived at a dialectical “middle way” between communist statism and unfettered free market capitalism. America must steer a course between the “ideological nonsense which holds that the profit motive is the exclusive incentive for progress” and the “regimentation and dictatorship that characterizes total state ownership of economic resources.” The CIO and the NAACP joined the liberal anticommunist bandwagon but did not renounce social democracy or economic justice. At the NAACP’s forty-fifth convention in June 1954, CIO treasurer James Carey condemned the antiliberal, antilabor, anticommunist demagogues of the right. Free the South from “its obsession with race” and mobilize black and white workers against the racial and regional shackles on the New Deal, he exhorted. He dreamed of an America “where there is no endless chain of poverty from generation to generation—where monopoly does not make you a beggar for a job.” After the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, progressives challenged union hierarchies to be more responsive to black aspirations for representation. The greatest challenge involved persuading white workers that in an era of recession and manufacturing job shrinkage, black workers were not the ones threatening them with beggary.32
King’s contacts with the labor left lay in the future. In the early 1950s, teachers, preachers, theologians, and Gandhians enlarged King’s vision of racial and economic justice. He deplored McCarthyism, but his approach was very cautious. He frequently sermonized on the dangers of individual conformity and “adjustment” to a repressive social order. King’s sermon “Transformed Nonconformist” drew language directly from the liberal Baptist Eugene Austin, who condemned anticommunism at King’s 1951 Crozer graduation. America might travel the road “toward thought-control, business-control [and] freedom-control, until we land in totalitarianism,” Austin warned. Federal workers were fired simply for advocating “peace and civil liberties” and “equal rights for all races and classes.” Austin called on men of conscience to oppose “the anaesthetizing security of identification with mass movements,” as did many anticommunist liberals in the 1950s who thought Joseph McCarthy was a “populist” threat to the republic. King, in sharp contrast, never abandoned the radical left’s faith in mass action.33
King moved to Boston in the summer of 1951 to earn a Ph.D. in systematic theology at Boston University. He told his new girlfriend, Coretta Scott, that he was not pro-capitalist like his father and had no ambitions to wealth. “A society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people’s needs is wrong,” she recalled him saying. A small elite should not “control all of the wealth.” King’s frequent claim that capitalism took “necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes” has the ring of the late nineteenth-century Protestant critique of capitalism. After reading Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Utopian novel, Looking Backward, Martin wrote Coretta that he was “much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” In Bellamy’s fictionalized America of 2000, state ownership replaced competitive capitalism, shared abundance replaced poverty, and industrial peace replaced class war. Private property led to “poverty with servitude,” argued Reverend Barton, a voice for Bellamy in the novel. Bellamy synthesized prophecy and social science, and properly believed in peaceful evolution toward socialism, not violent revolution, King wrote.34
In criticizing capitalism and developing his own defense against charges of communism, King drew eclectically from Christian thinkers. After reading the writings of the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain in 1951, King wrote that communism arose in response to “a Christian world unfaithful to its own principles.” The popular Protestant preacher Robert McCracken supplied most of the wording for King’s 1952 sermon titled “The Challenge of Communism to Christianity.” Communism propounded “metaphysical materialism,” “ethical relativism,” and “strangulating totalitarianism.” It lacked “moral absolutes” and quashed civil liberties. Under communism, “Man is made for the state and not the state for man.” But King also praised The Communist Manifesto as a work “aflame with a passionate concern for social justice.” Marx’s devotion to a classless society made him almost Christian, said King. Marx championed “the poor, the exploited, and the disinherited,” dreaming of “a world society transcending the superficialities of race and color, class and caste.” But tragically, communist regimes created “new classes and a new lexicon of injustice.”35
Marx also voiced King’s lifelong anger at “the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty,” King preached and wrote in 1950s. The “profit motive” should not be the cornerstone of the economy. Morally, capitalism inspired men to be “more concerned about making a living than making a life.” Money and status especially corrupted the middle class. We judge success by “our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than the quality of our service and relationship to humanity,” King repeatedly stressed. Capitalist nations had already reduced inequality, though not nearly enough. King envisioned a synthesis of the two opposing moral philosophies. Capitalists could not see the truth in collectivism: “life is social.” Marxists failed to see the truth in individualism: “life is individual and personal.”36 Marx exerted considerable influence over King’s view of capitalism, but King remained circumspect and more deeply influenced by the American social gospel.
King did not praise the Soviet Union’s racial policy or openly criticize private control of the means of production. When Melvin Watson, dean of the Morehouse School of Religion, heard King’s sermon in August 1952, he alleged that King misunderstood Marxian materialism, the “disturbing” but irrefutable claim that human life was conditioned “by the means of production.” Watson charged King with ignoring the Soviet constitution’s clear denunciation of racism, which grounded socialism’s strong appeal in third world nations. McCracken had praised Soviet advances in literacy, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and the fight against “racialism.” In 1952, both Benjamin Mays and Mordecai Johnson hailed Stalin’s achievements in overcoming racism and poverty.37 King rejected this line. Publicly, he denounced “the profit motive” but not corporate control of the means of production. Until 1963, and even thereafter, King generally attributed poverty to the unequal distribution of wealth and the government’s failure to fulfill its responsibilities, without specifically indicting the corporate “captains of industry.”
Black Christianity, Chivers’s situationist sociology, the social gospel, Gandhism, and Marxism all informed King’s opposition to racism, exploitation, poverty, and militarism. Reinhold Niebuhr helped him think through strategies of social change and specific dilemmas of political and economic power. By 1952, Niebuhr had abandoned the pacifism and socialism of his early career to embrace liberal anticommunism. Yet the socialist Niebuhr of the 1930s most profoundly influenced King. Scholars have long focused on Niebuhr’s importance to King’s theology and nonviolence, but not his influence on King’s political economy. In the spring of 1952, King recalled, he devoured Niebuhr, almost “uncritically” swallowing all his “social ethics.” King praised Niebuhr’s early ministry to the Detroit working class in a paper on Niebuhr’s ethics written for his Ph.D. advisor, L. Howard DeWolf. King agreed that injustice resulted from “the concentration of power and resources in the hands of a relatively small wealthy class.” Free markets could not create housing for the poor, and squads of social workers could not address systemic injustices, Niebuhr argued, and King copied. Only Christian “ ‘equalitarianism’ ” could redress the inequality and “economic chaos” endemic to capitalism. Change would come only by setting “the power of the exploited against the exploiters,” King quoted with approval. King deemed Niebuhr’s social analysis “profound.”38
King’s political economy and his understanding of the dilemmas of social change were influenced by Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, published in 1932. Niebuhr also helps us conceptualize the central dilemmas of political and economic power preoccupying King at mid-century. Several times King praised the book, lauding Niebuhr’s insights into coercive power. Practitioners of nonviolence must be responsibly coercive, Niebuhr argued. White individuals might support black freedom, but “the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.” Neither white goodwill nor black violence could free Negroes from their “menial social and economic position.” Philanthropy, education, improvements in sanitation, and police protection would never dismantle the foundations of black oppression, which lay in the Negro’s “political disfranchisement” and “economic disinheritance.” What caused that? For Niebuhr, disproportionate economic power over the means of production was the “root of social injustice.” “The combination of political and economic power which the dominant classes set against the worker in the modern state must be met by a combination of political and economic power.”39 The words “political and economic power” ring powerfully and persistently throughout King’s discourse and gained radical force over the years.
Given the strength of capitalist power, could the state democratize a class society? Would oligarchies bend to the political and economic power of the masses? Niebuhr was ambivalent; so was King. The only counterweight to concentrated economic power was “a vigilant and potent state.” But proletarian revolutions dedicated to classless societies generated their own oppressive class systems and totalitarian states. As a graduate student, King approved of Niebuhr’s call for democratic power “to resist the inordinate ambition of rulers.”40 He increasingly recognized the state as a central site of struggle, where power was already stacked in favor of the privileged but where the powerless could, with imaginative leadership and creative tactics, force concessions from their oppressors.
King shared Niebuhr’s threefold approach to democratizing the state: moral appeals to the white majority; interracial working-class mobilization; and consolidated black economic and political power. Despite employers’ power, industrial workers had forged new rights to organize and bargain collectively, exerting power on legislatures to pass income and inheritance taxes and welfare state protections. And nowhere had the “economically and politically weaker classes” reached their full strength. Furthermore, workers could mobilize middle-class allies. Welfare states had also emerged in countries where strong labor movements did not exist and exploited workers appealed to the “conscience of the community.” Dominant classes might “recognize minimum social needs” as extensions of “previously accepted political and social principles.” Traditional consensus symbols and rights declarations—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—grounded King’s later claims for human rights to employment, decent housing, political participation, and guaranteed income. Finally, Niebuhr speculated that a farmer-labor coalition might bring about “melioristic socialism” in America. King held similar hopes for a labor-civil rights coalition and, later, a radical multiracial coalition of the “deprived” and the “powerless.”41
Niebuhr touched on a dilemma all activists confront: how to sustain activist faith in the face of inevitably shattered dreams. “No one will suffer the perils and pains involved in the process of radical social change, if he cannot believe in the possibility of a purer and fairer society than will ever be established,” he wrote. The dreams of imagined societies could be “dangerous because they justify fanaticism.” But to abandon utopias was equally perilous, a capitulation to the “inertia” of the status quo. King frequently preached about how to sustain faith in the face of shattered dreams, which are “a hallmark of our mortal life.” King David dreamed of building a Hebrew temple that he never finished. Saint Paul dreamed of preaching in Spain, but mourned his last days in a Roman prison. The only viable response was that of King’s slave forebears: accept “inexpressible cruelties” and cling “tenaciously to the hope of freedom.”42
Niebuhr showed King a way to mobilize Christian faith against the horrors of war and technological fanaticism. A paper King wrote for DeWolf in June 1954 grappled with several texts, including Niebuhr’s Nature and Destiny of Man, written after the September 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland. Liberal Christianity, mystified by “optimistic charms of modernity,” could no longer stand up to the “calculated cruelty” of trench warfare, death camps, and urban firebombing. To expect redemption through science or technology only fed “pride of power,” which was itself the source of totalitarian repression. Niebuhr’s line of reasoning left King purged of pride but grasping for hope. Niebuhr extended a frail lifeline: a chastened heart open to empowering grace could climb “heights of Agape normally impossible,” King appropriated. Niebuhr offered sparse biblical theology, but Christ promised guidance as the “the everlasting mind of God” breaking through into human history.43
King moved to Montgomery, Alabama, on October 10, 1954, to pastor Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where until April 1955 he balanced his pastoral duties with long early morning hours writing his dissertation. “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman” plagiarized material from a previous BU dissertation and various secondary and primary sources. King was moving quickly out of academia toward his ministerial calling and cobbled together note cards that lacked proper documentation. The dissertation made few social or biblical references, but King’s selection of material does reveal ideals and ambivalences central to his emergent political ministry. King’s Afro-Baptist heritage informed his acceptance of theological Personalism, the basis for his criticisms of Tillich and Wieman, both of whom rejected the idea of a God limited by personhood. Tillich described God as a powerful “ground of being,” while Wieman thought of God as a “creative event” continuously infusing meaning and value into the world. Neither theologian provided a God whom King could worship. But King clearly liked Tillich’s dialectical claim that justice depended on love, which could not countenance retribution (a theme echoed in King’s later critique of capital punishment).44
King clearly preferred the naturalistic theology of the relatively apolitical American-born Wieman to the systematic theology of the German-born Christian socialist Tillich. As a chaplain in the German trenches during World War I and a refugee from Nazi persecution of the left, Tillich made no secret of his affinities with Marxist humanism. But King mostly attended to Tillich’s highly abstract 1951 tome, Systematic Theology. Wieman comes through as more socially and politically grounded. History’s greatest “creative event” was when the early Christians embraced forgiveness in the context of “intermingling races” in the Roman Empire. Divinely inspired creative human “interchange” could move history. Wieman also grappled with class hierarchy in a way King found compelling enough to copy at length. The “richest fulfillment” of human culture emerged from cosmopolitan elites freed from toil. But exploited majorities thereby suffered unnecessary pain and “hard labor,” while most elites exalted their own desires over what was noble, beautiful or just. King came to believe that fulfillment and creativity lay within reach of the masses through democratic distribution of the common wealth.45
King’s own Christian socialism structured much of his thinking regarding class and race, political and economic power. The need to appeal for black unity across class lines and for white majority support, together with the weakening of civil rights unionism, worked against King’s overtly embracing a socialist program. But the terms on which King rejected Kennedy-Johnson liberalism were close to Niebuhr’s early socialism. King embraced the faith that democratic socialism would be possible if black people could consolidate power, the poor could emancipate themselves, and the majority could see the justice of their cause.
Daddy King married Martin and Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953. Coretta insisted that her duty to “obey” be stricken from the marriage vows. She was a pacifist and a graduate of progressive Antioch College. Though she gave up her ambition to be a professional singer to be a preacher’s wife, the couple accepted an ideology of companionate marriage that accorded her authority and gave her scope for public activism. Martin was not “self-conscious” about sharing housework, she remembered, for “he was too sure of his manhood.” He thought women were as intelligent as men and capable of holding “positions of authority and influence.” But for himself, he wanted a wife, “a homemaker, and a mother.” Coretta King took seriously the job of raising children in a society that devalued them, and confronted her husband when she seriously differed with his judgments about the family’s financial needs. Her father, Obie Scott, was “a poor but self-respecting land owner.” When he became the first Negro in town to buy a truck, armed men threatened him and police arrested him on traffic charges. He bought a sawmill, and whites burned it and his house down. “Any assertion of black manhood was regarded by the ruling class as dangerous and was quickly put down,” she commented in 1968. It was difficult “for black men to take their natural place as the head of the household and the protector of their families.” Mrs. King spoke at prayer pilgrimages, peace rallies, and college commencements, performed concerts, and marched at Selma and in welfare rights demonstrations. Though, like Alberta Williams King, she did not work for wages, neither did she accept a narrowly circumscribed public role or a rigidly traditional marriage of “separate spheres.” King was no feminist forerunner, but his views on gender were more liberal than the male norms of his day. And like many black women, Coretta prized an ideal of masculinity central to black traditions of resistance.46
If King’s egalitarianism remained bounded by gender, he continually elaborated upon a critique of economic inequality evident in his earliest sermons. King drafted many of his major sermons before he became a public figure and published them in Strength to Love in 1963. The texts draw widely on liberal Protestant preachers and will soon be published for scholars interested in the performative, communal dimensions of King’s preaching. King first preached “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” in 1953, a critique of individualism that drew upon the parable of the good Samaritan to make the case for practicing “dangerous altruism.” Individuals and nations limited to the self-developing “length” of life too often pursued “nationalistic concerns and economic ends,” King preached in 1958. Living out of the “breadth” of Christian service, the Good Samaritan stopped on the dangerous Jericho Road to care for a victim of robbery. Perhaps the priest and Levite hurried by in haste to reach a meeting of the “Jericho Road Improvement Association,” King quipped in a 1960 version. But the Good Samaritan asked, “If I do not help this man, what will happen to him?” In 1963, determined to change the “conditions that make robbery possible,” King’s Samaritan had transcended loyalty to “tribe, race, class or nation.” He rejected patronizing charity in favor of compassion and respect for poor people’s capacity for social action. By 1965, King demanded more than “Good Samaritan approaches” for the Jericho Road’s individual victims. Now he demanded “massive action … to get rid of the Jericho Road which brought the victims into being.” By 1966, African American history itself was one long Jericho Road, robbing blacks of dignity and decent work. The road stretched from slave plantations to “the triple ghetto” of poverty, race, and “human misery.” By 1968, King’s own dangerous road detoured to Memphis, where he preached, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”47
King contrasted Christian communalism with rampant consumerism in a Detroit sermon in February 1954. Man’s “better world” would come through rediscovery of “precious values,” not economic growth. Moral relativism was an “atomic bomb” in men’s souls, leading to “damaging selfishness.” Humankind’s “moral genius lags behind” its technological and scientific progress, he asserted in perhaps his most common set piece. “Automobiles and subways, televisions and radios, dollars and cents, can never be substitutes for God,” King exhorted. Technology itself had become a false god, an expression of the lust for power whose end could well be nuclear Armageddon. King preached his sermon “Dives and Lazarus” weeks before the Montgomery bus boycott began in December 1955. There was an “impassible gulf” between the wealthy and the invisible poor. On earth, wealthy Dives spurned Lazarus who appeared at his door begging for crumbs. Later roasting in hell, Dives fruitlessly implored Abraham to send Lazarus from heaven with water to cool his tongue. Dives was “a conscientious objector in the war against poverty,” King explained in his last Sunday sermon at the National Cathedral in 1968.48
King developed his famous sermon “A Knock at Midnight” in 1955. He drew on the parable of Jesus in Luke 11:5–6, in which a householder, safely in bed at midnight, resists an importunate neighbor who bangs on his door asking for three loaves of bread to feed a hungry traveler. The mid-twentieth century had brought midnight to the social order, King preached. How long would churches withhold “the bread of hope” from a world dominated by power-hungry leaders proliferating the nuclear means for global annihilation? How long would white churches slam their doors in the faces of Negroes seeking “the bread of freedom” and turn their back on impoverished African nations seeking “the bread of social justice”? How long would sheltered ministers give benedictions to naked nationalistic aggression, denying “the bread of peace” to a world “gone mad with arms buildups, chauvinistic passions, and imperialistic exploitation”? How long would clergymen align themselves with “privileged classes” against the disinherited of the world seeking “the bread of economic justice”? And how long would elite Negro churches continue to serve up bread “hardened by the winter of morbid class consciousness?”49
Experience, education, and compelling role models all had led King to an eclectic but coherent Christian radicalism by 1954. King determined to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, practicing an egalitarian social ministry and “manfully” challenging racial segregation. King’s personal witness to racial and economic inequality gained analytical substance by exposure to academic mentors Walter Chivers and George Davis, by his reading of Marx and the ministers who interpreted him, and by his mature identification with the “meliorist socialism” of Reinhold Niebuhr. King had been exposed to a Gandhism more nuanced and radically egalitarian than most Americans would ever recognize. He was still developing a ministerial identity that could balance his elite learning with his commitment to minister to common people. One observer of a King sermon criticized King’s aura of “disdain and possible snobbishness” toward ordinary people. Others noticed King’s humility and accessibility, despite his “bourgeois” origins.50
King’s initial solution was to mobilize the privileged to serve the disinherited. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was known as “the big folks’ church,” serving professionals, professors, and businessmen. King gave his first sermon in May 1955, firmly setting the tone for a socially engaged ministry politically activating the black middle class. “I have felt with Jesus that the spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and set at liberty those that are bruised.” King’s first “Recommendations” sounded authoritarian, demanding his congregation unconditionally accept God-given authority descending from “the pulpit to the pew.” But King democratized some church functions and fostered leadership among the parishioners, including women. King followed his predecessor Vernon Johns in pressing for a more authentically religious, egalitarian, and politically active congregation. He did not want to pastor an exclusive “social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.” The “gospel of Jesus is a social gospel,” King preached. Everyone should register to vote and recruit for the NAACP. He set up a new committee focusing on “social, political, and economic” improvement, appointing as cochairs Mary Fair Burks and Jo Ann Robinson, leaders of Montgomery’s Women’s Political Council (WPC). A new Social Service Committee he charged with “visiting the sick and needy.” A year later, the Social and Political Action Committee had excelled in registering voters. Dexter led the city in contributions to the NAACP, King boasted. This was hardly mass militancy, but neither was it bourgeois complacency. J. Pious Barbour tried to lure King away from what he considered an anti-intellectual backwater. “This is the day of Mass preachers except in certain spots. Hurry and get one,” Barbour counseled. The allures of status tested King’s commitment to the poor, but events outside his control and the ideal of an egalitarian ministry compelled more democratic choices.51