What if Martin Luther King Jr. had never accepted the call to preach at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery? Would he have become a famed civil rights leader? Would the bus boycott movement have succeeded? How was the subsequent course of American history altered by the contingencies that brought together King and the Montgomery movement?
Although it may be difficult for those who see King as a Great Man and national icon to imagine contemporary America without taking into account his historical impact, Troy Jackson allows us to understand the evolution of King’s leadership within a sustained protest movement initiated by others. Rather than diminishing King’s historical significance, Jackson’s revealing, insightful account of the Montgomery bus boycott invites a deeper understanding of the many unexpected and profound ways that movement transformed King as well as other participants. Jackson points out that King himself was aware of his limitations and the accidental nature of his sudden fame. Even as he rose to international prominence as spokesperson for the boycott, King often cautioned against the tendency of others to inflate his importance. “Help me, O God, to see that I’m just a symbol of a movement,” he pleaded in a sermon delivered after the successful end of the boycott. “Help me to realize that I’m where I am because of the forces of history and because of the fifty thousand Negroes of Alabama who will never get their names in the papers and in the headline. O God, help me to see that where I stand today, I stand because others helped me to stand there and because the forces of history projected me there. And this moment would have come in history even if M. L. King had never been born.” He added, “Because if I don’t see that, I will become the biggest fool in America.”1
Troy Jackson was a colleague of mine in the long-term effort to publish a definitive edition of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Becoming King builds on vast documentation that the King Papers Project has assembled since 1985, when Coretta Scott King named me to direct the project. The hundreds of thousands of documents that the project’s staff examined in hundreds of archives and personal collections have illuminated not only King’s life but also the lives of thousands of individuals who affected King’s life and were affected by him. The third volume of The Papers 2 focused on the Montgomery bus boycott, but Jackson also makes effective use of the original research he contributed to volume 6, Advocate of the Social Gospel, September 1958–March 1963,3 which traces the development of King’s religious ideas. The latter volume brought together many of King’s student papers from Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University with a treasure trove of materials from the files that King used to prepare the sermons he delivered at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and other places. These sermonic materials, which remained in the basement of King’s Atlanta home for three decades after his death, provided a new window into the experiences that shaped King before his arrival in Montgomery. They also gave Jackson a sensitive understanding of how King’s experiences during the boycott reshaped his identity as a social gospel minister. Jackson’s years of immersion in King’s papers, his background as a clergyman, and his years of in-depth research regarding the Montgomery boycott movement allow readers of Becoming King to comprehend the complexity and imaginative possibilities of religious biography converging with social history.
Although Jackson’s study provides ample evidence to support the conviction of many of Montgomery’s black residents that their movement “made” King into the leader capable of all he would later accomplish, the interaction of the man and the movement was by no means one-sided. King arrived in Montgomery with a wealth of experiences and intellectual exposure that served him well once Rosa Parks suddenly changed the course of his life. After Parks’s arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, King was at first reluctant to assume a leading role in the boycott movement, having rejected previous entreaties to seek the presidency of the local NAACP branch. Yet Jackson shows that he was singularly well prepared to offer a kind of leadership that helped transform a local movement with limited goals—such as more polite enforcement of segregation rules—into a movement with far-reaching implications for race relations in the United States and throughout the world. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) had numerous other leaders capable of mobilizing and sustaining a mass movement, and King was not being overly modest in asserting that the boycott would have happened even if he had never lived. But King’s presence made a major difference in determining how the boycott would be seen by those who supported or opposed it and by those who would later contemplate its significance.
Although King was surprised when other black leaders chose him as MIA spokesperson, his hastily drafted remarks at the MIA’s first mass meeting on December 5, 1955, were a remarkable example of his ability to convey the historical significance of events as they unfolded. Like his great speech at the 1963 March on Washington, King’s speech at Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church was a compelling religious and political rationale for nonviolent resistance in pursuit of ultimate racial reconciliation. At a time when the one-day boycott had received little attention outside Montgomery and when few could have been certain that it could be continued for days or weeks (much less for 381 days!), King audaciously linked the boycott’s modest initial goals to transcendent principles: “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
While King assumed the crucial task of inspiring black residents, other MIA leaders were already beginning to establish the transportation alternatives that sustained the boycott. As Jackson points out, resourceful and experienced NAACP leaders such as Parks and E. D. Nixon had challenged the southern Jim Crow system years before King’s arrival. Similarly, Jo Ann Robinson of Montgomery’s Women’s Political Council did not require King’s guidance before drafting and duplicating thousands of leaflets urging residents to stay off buses. These individuals, along with others such as Ralph Abernathy, might well have gained more prominence if they had not been overshadowed by King. Still, although the boycott had already attracted overwhelming black support when he became head of the MIA, King’s uplifting oratory on the first night of the boycott provided an unexpected stimulus to a mass movement already in progress. Using imagery that subtly linked the boycott to the struggle to end slavery, King’s address concluded with a portentous passage that became an accurate prediction of the nascent movement’s place in the long struggle for social justice: “Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a race of people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.’”
King was neither a historian nor a civil rights lawyer, but his training and experiences as a Baptist minister gave him an inclusive, historical perspective that allowed him to understand the civil rights militancy spurred by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education as confirmation of his prophetic worldview. Although Jackson recognizes that King would sometimes find it difficult to translate his intellectual radicalism into civil disobedience, his sympathy for the oppressed was deeply rooted and enduring. One of King’s earliest seminary papers, written when he was nineteen—seven years before the start of the Montgomery boycott—demonstrates that he was already committed to a ministry based on knowing “the problems of the people that I am pastoring.” At this early stage of King’s ministry, moreover, civil rights reform was only an aspect of his social gospel agenda. When King defined his pastoral mission—“I must be concerned about unemployment, slumms [sic], and economic insecurity”—racial segregation and discrimination were conspicuously absent from the list, which was a prescient suggestion of his antipoverty crusade two decades later.4 Although he was undoubtedly concerned about civil rights, his basic identity as a social gospel minister was already firmly established before the Brown era of mass civil rights activism.
Growing up as the son of the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., the younger King had absorbed the essentials of the social gospel at an early age. Daddy King was part of a well-established tradition of black ministers, particularly those in black-controlled churches, also providing political as well as spiritual leadership. As the younger King became aware of the dangers his father faced while advocating black voting rights and equal salaries for black schoolteachers, he came to admire his father’s ability to stand up to whites—“they never attacked him physically, a fact that filled my brother and sister and me with wonder as we grew up in this tension-packed atmosphere.” Such formative experiences as well as his own encounters with southern racism infused the younger King with an abhorrence of segregation, which he found “rationally inexplicable and morally unjustifiable.”5 Although as a teenager King would reject his father’s biblical literalism, he would retain his admiration for a father who “set forth a noble example I didn’t mind following” and whose “moral and ethical ideals” remained precious to him “even in moments of theological doubt.”6 When King accepted his call to Dexter, he cited the same social gospel credo (Luke 4:18–19) that his father had used in 1940 while advising fellow ministers regarding “the true mission of the church”: “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 brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”7 King’s conception of his social gospel mission would evolve during his years at Crozer, due in part to the considerable impact of Reinhold Niebuhr’s neo-orthodox critique of liberal Christianity. He continued to seek a middle ground between Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel optimism and Niebuhr’s skepticism about human perfectibility by eclectically synthesizing “the best in liberal theology with the best in neo-orthodox theology.”8King’s underlying commitment to his social gospel ministry did not waver. Indeed, it may have been the unyielding nature of King’s basic theological convictions that limited his prospects as a theologian. A scholarly synthesizer rather than an original scholar, he drew upon the ideas of more creative theologians—sometimes without attribution, and without adding many new insights of his own. He graduated from Crozer highly adept at explaining and defending his basic religious beliefs. Modern notions of historical exegesis assuaged the religious doubts of his teenage years and answered his need for religion that was “intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying.”9 Similarly, his graduate studies in systematic theology at Boston University provided opportunities to incorporate the personalist theology of his mentors into his belief system. King’s dissertation predictably rejected the views of theologians Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, who, in King’s view, reduced God to an abstraction. “In God there is feeling and will, responsive to the deepest yearnings of the human heart; this God both evokes and answers prayers,” King concluded.10
Although King’s academic writings would provide a scholarly gloss for his oratory in Montgomery, it was in King’s personal correspondence and his early sermons that he first expressed forcefully the social gospel vision that distinguished his leadership during the bus boycott and afterward. In particular, King’s correspondence with Coretta Scott during their courtship in Boston reveals that he expected a major social transformation extending beyond civil rights reform. Because King was attracted to Scott partly because of her political involvement—she had been a Progressive Party activist during the 1948 election and involved in pacifist causes at Antioch College—he was able to confide to her his own radical leanings. “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he wrote in a July 1952 letter prompted by Scott’s gift of Edward Bellamy’s socialistic fantasy Looking Backward 2000–1887 (originally published in 1888). King asserted confidently that capitalism had “outlived its usefulness,” having “brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” King added that the change “would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This, it seems to me, is the most sane and ethical way for social change to take place.” Although the public expression of such thoughts would have been political heresy, King informed his future wife that both capitalism and communism were inconsistent with true Christian values. Even Bellamy was faulted for failing “to see that man is a sinner … and will still be a sinner until he submits to his life to the Grace of God. Ultimately our problem is [a?] theological one.” Cautioning Scott against excessive optimism, King observed: “It is probably true that capitalism is on its death bed, but social systems have a way of developing a long and powerful death bed breathing capacity. Remember it took feudalism more than 500 years to pass out from its death bed. Capitalism will be in America quite a few more years my dear.”
King was not quite so candid in his sermons as in his letters to Scott, but the sermons he delivered while assisting his father at Ebenezer during the summer of 1953 (soon after his marriage in June) viewed racial segregation and discrimination in the context of a wide-ranging critique of the modern world and as aspects of a global struggle for peace with social justice. Several of these sermons focused criticism on modernity’s “false Gods”—science, nationalism, and materialism. Sharply criticizing American chauvinism and anticommunism, King offered blunt advice: “One cannot worship this false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time.”11 In another sermon King prepared that summer, he insisted international peace was the “cry that is ringing in the ears of the peoples of the world,” but such peace could be achieved only when Christians “place righteousness first. So long as we place our selfish economic gains first we will never have peace. So long as the nations of the world are contesting to see which can be the most [imperialistic] we will [never] have peace. Indeed the deep rumbling of discontent in our world today on the part of the masses is [actually] a revolt against imperialism, economic exploitation, and colonialism that has been perpetuated by western civilization for all these many years.”12
King’s comprehensive Christian worldview was perhaps most evident in the sermon “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” which he delivered in August 1953 and, in various forms, later in his life. While rejecting communism as secularistic and materialistic, King nonetheless insisted that communism was “Christianity’s most formidable competitor and only serious rival.” Marxian thought, King argued, should challenge Christians to express their own “passionate concern for social justice.” Returning to the passage in the book of Luke that his father had used thirteen years earlier, King argued, “The Christian ought always to begin with a bias in favor of a movement which protests against the unfair treatment of the poor, for surely Christianity is itself such a protest.” Karl Marx could hardly be blamed for calling religion an opiate of the masses, King lamented. “When religion becomes [so] involved in a future good ‘over yonder’ that it forgets the present evils ‘over here’ it is a dry as dust religion and needs to be condemned.”13
Less than a year after King delivered his sermon on communism, he accepted the call to become the pastor of the Dexter congregation and began to refine his unique leadership style. Jackson assesses the strengths and the limitations of this leadership, noting, for example, that King’s global prophetic vision ensured his prominence but sometimes obscured the pressing, prosaic concerns of the working-class MIA members who had regularly ridden buses and thus sacrificed the most on a daily basis during the boycott. Vernon Johns, King’s sometimes abrasive predecessor at Dexter, actually focused his ministry more than did King on the economic issues that were central to Christian social gospel. King, for his part, pushed gently yet consistently against complacency after becoming pastor of a congregation known to be difficult to control. Wary of the power of the church’s deacons, King used his acceptance address as an occasion to assert his spiritual authority and to suggest the immensity of the task ahead. Only twenty-five, he challenged his mostly older congregation to expand their vision: “It is a significant fact that I come to the pastorate of Dexter at the most crucial hour of our world’s history; at a time when the flame of war might arise at any time to redden the skies of our dark and dreary world; at a time when men know all [too] well that without the proper guidance the whole of civilization can be plunged across the abyss of destruction…. Dexter, like all other churches, must somehow lead men and women of a decadent generation to the high mountain of peace and salvation.”
That some Dexter members welcomed King’s ambitious agenda would become evident during the bus boycott, but it is nonetheless worth noting that King not only encouraged church members to become registered voters and NAACP leaders but also to see the southern Jim Crow system as part of a passing global order of colonialism and imperialism. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision of May 1954, King became even more convinced that segregation was doomed, unless, as he warned in an address the following year to Montgomery’s NAACP branch, black Americans became “victims to the cult of inevitable progress.” King also warned against becoming “so complacent that we forget the struggles of other minorities. We must unite with oppressed minorities throughout the world.”14 As Rosa Parks listened to King’s address, she might well have been encouraged to take her own stand against complacency less than six months later. King’s words undoubtedly inspired black leaders who shared his sense that the southern Jim Crow system was a vulnerable anachronism. Soon after King spoke, he was invited to join the branch’s executive committee.
Thus, the decision to elect King to head the MIA was unexpected, but the qualities of mind that King demonstrated in his early ministry were well suited to the role of being the principal spokesperson of the boycott movement. His subsequent decade of civil rights leadership was, in some respects, a departure from his original social gospel mission, but only to the extent that he necessarily narrowed his focus to the southern issues of segregation and racial barriers to voting. Seen from the perspective of his entire ministry, the years from Montgomery to the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were a time during which he felt compelled to play down the radicalism of his social gospel Christianity. To be sure, during his entire public life, he would often describe the African American freedom struggle in the context of African and Asian anticolonial struggles, and he would often draw attention to the issue of international peace. But only toward the end of this decade of civil rights reform did these broader concerns become a central part of his message, as it was in his rarely heard Nobel lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964. Only after the Voting Rights bill had been enacted did King make clear that even this landmark reform did not fulfill his dream. Only then would he return to his social gospel mission of achieving economic justice, bringing his ministry to Chicago and then Memphis as part of the Poor People’s Campaign. Only then, to the consternation of those who saw him merely as a civil rights leader, would he speak out unambiguously against war, imperialism, and militarism.
It is worthwhile to speculate regarding what would have happened to King if he had not accepted the call to Dexter or if he had not been selected to head the MIA. If not for Rosa Parks, he might not have become the preeminent African American of his era or a Nobel laureate or have his birth commemorated with a national holiday. It is also likely that, if not for King’s role in the Montgomery bus boycott, the contributions of grassroots activists in Montgomery and other protest centers would be remembered differently. Jackson suggests, moreover, that King’s oratorical brilliance may have fostered his rise to international prominence while also diminishing his ability to sustain a mass movement. Not until the Birmingham campaign of 1963 would King experience a similar degree of success in mobilizing an entire black community. By acknowledging that the bus boycott had only a limited impact on the lives of Montgomery’s black working class, Becoming King is a necessary corrective to romanticized versions of civil rights progress and Great Man historical myths. Yet Jackson also reminds us that historic social movements provide opportunities for some men and women of all classes and backgrounds to rise unexpectedly to greatness.
Having acknowledged the importance of contingency in King’s emergence as a leader, he demonstrates that King’s prophetic vision encouraged others to see their resistance to injustice as more historically significant than would otherwise have been the case. Because of King, the African American freedom struggle gained a historical significance it would otherwise have lacked. The Montgomery bus boycott would have happened without King, but King’s oratory helped to ensure that the boycott became one of those exceptional local movements for justice that would send ripples of inspiration to oppressed people elsewhere.
Clayborne Carson
Notes
1. King, “Conquering Self-Centeredness,” August 11, 1957.
2. Birth of a New Age, December 1955–December 1956, ed. Clayborne Carson, Stewart Burns, Susan Carson, Peter Holloran, and Dana L. H. Powell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
3. Ed. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Susan Englander, Troy Jackson, and Gerald L. Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
4. King, “Preaching Ministry” [September 14–November 24, 1948], in Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6: 72.
5. Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 5.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Quote in introduction to Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 1, Called to Serve, January 1929–June 1951, ed. Clayborne Carson, Ralph E. Luker, and Penny A. Russell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 33–34.
8. King, “How Modern Christians Should Think of Man,” November 29, 1949–February 15, 1950, in Papers, 1: 274.
9. Carson, ed., Autobiography, 15.
10. King, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” April 15, 1955, in Papers, 2: 512.
11. King, “The False God of Nationalism,” July 12, 1953, in Papers, 6: 132.
12. King, “First Things First,” August 2, 1953, in Papers, 6: 144–45.
13. King, “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” August 9, 1953, in Papers, 6: 148–49.
14. King, “The Peril of Superficial Optimism in the Area of Race Relations,” June 19, 1955, in Papers, 6: 215.