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“The Gospel I Will Preach”

Let us continue to hope, work, and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.

—Martin Luther King Jr., July 18, 1952

Before Martin Luther King Jr. celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday, he had already devoted several years to preparing for the pastorate. Although he was the son and grandson of black Baptist preachers, he was not interested in simply following in their footsteps. King was unwilling to pastor in a tradition that, as he saw it, had all too often valued the heart above the head, the future above the present, and the spiritual above the physical. He was determined to chart a new course by creatively appropriating the thoughts, methods, and language of the leading preachers and theologians of the day. He sought out role models, such as Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays, who embodied aspects of an intellectually engaged ministry. This is not to suggest that King somehow eschewed his religious heritage. Only because he was so thoroughly grounded and well versed in the black Baptist tradition did he have the freedom to refashion his role and objectives as a pastor. Knowing the terrain so well, he was able to blaze new trails while remaining familiar to his congregation and community.

In a letter composed while in graduate school, King laid out a vision for his ministry, which he called “the gospel I will preach to the world”: “Let us continue to hope, work, and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color.” King came to Montgomery with a heartfelt hope that, with his diligent and faithful effort, God could use his church to assist in racial uplift while he and his congregation labored for social change. King’s earliest religious writings demonstrate that he had worked hard to prepare for this opportunity, crafting a language, a ministry philosophy, and a persona that could inspire thoughtful and purposeful engagement and the transformation of culture. Years before he arrived in Montgomery, King believed in the revolutionary and redemptive power of love. The transforming potency of love was the gospel King would preach to the world.¹

Michael King Jr. was born on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta on January 15, 1929. Known to close friends and family as “M. L.,” his name was officially changed to Martin several years later. The African American community around Auburn Avenue served as an incubator for his development throughout his childhood. Just a few blocks from King’s house sat his “second home,” Ebenezer Baptist Church, a congregation under the leadership of his grandfather and father. Atlanta also housed Morehouse College, where King earned his bachelor’s degree in 1948. King’s upbringing in a southern city greatly shaped his life and ministry.²

During King’s childhood, the African American community in Atlanta had a higher percentage of college graduates than any other southern city. With several black colleges, including Atlanta University, Spelman College, and Morehouse College, the city’s educated black elite assumed roles as spokespeople for their race. Following the devastating 1906 race riot, which resulted in dozens of African American fatalities and the devastation of many black neighborhoods in Atlanta, community leaders adopted a strategy of racial progress rooted in black respectability, or an attempt to achieve racial advancement through embodying the most sublime values of white America. With the onslaught of the Great Depression and the subsequent New Deal, many educated African Americans had the opportunity to become a part of government programs designed to assist those marginalized in their communities. This resulted in an entrenched black professional leadership class in Atlanta and an increasing gulf between the classes and the masses.³

Atlanta provided King with many models of successful, well-educated African Americans who were able to become part of the system and deliver greater services for their community. He also witnessed the emerging gap between the working and professional classes, a chasm he never embraced. On a smaller scale, Montgomery exhibited similar dynamics between the professional and working classes, easing King’s later transition into the ministry in Alabama’s capital city. Had King remained in Atlanta, his emergence into leadership would have happened at a much slower rate, given the number of pastors and community leaders already established as community power brokers as well as the long shadow of his prominent father. Although Atlanta played a major role in fostering King’s development, he became King the civil rights leader in Montgomery.

King brought much of Atlanta with him to Montgomery, however, including the influence of his immediate family. When King’s maternal grandfather, Reverend A. D. Williams, took the helm of Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1894, the struggling Atlanta congregation numbered only thirteen members. Under Williams’s leadership, Ebenezer grew to several hundred, began an ambitious building program, and became one of the leading African American congregations in the city. King’s grandfather was also active in the broader community, serving for a time as the branch president of the NAACP during the organization’s early years in the South. Although Williams died while Martin Luther King Jr. was only two, Williams had a significant influence on the development of King’s father. Martin Luther King Sr., later known simply as “Daddy King,” took over Ebenezer after his father-in-law’s death and helped the church grow from six hundred members in 1931 to several thousand by the late 1940s. He made a name for himself not only in Atlanta but also on the national stage as an active participant in the country’s largest African American organization, the National Baptist Convention. His congregation sat on “Sweet Auburn,” one of the most significant black business districts in the nation. Segregated housing ensured that black professionals and the working class lived in relatively close proximity, but Ebenezer was primarily populated by working-class congregants. The Great Depression struck Atlanta’s African American community early and hard, and Daddy King’s congregation was no exception. Faced with possible foreclosure on their building, the young pastor rallied his church both financially and numerically. Following in the tradition of Williams, Daddy King served as a local leader of the NAACP, led a massive voter registration drive in 1939, and worked for the equalization of black teachers’ salaries with those of their white counterparts in Atlanta’s public schools.⁴

In one of his few extant early speeches, Daddy King called for a church that would “touch every phase of community life,” including politics. Citing Jesus’ commitment to proclaiming good news to the poor, brokenhearted, and captive, King Sr. articulated the necessity of embodying a “social gospel” that combined a concern for people’s souls with a dedication to meeting their physical needs: “How can people be happy without jobs, food, shelter and clothes? … God hasten the time when every minister will become a registered voter and a part of every movement for the betterment of our people.” In his acceptance speech as the new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King Jr. turned to the same text his father had used, citing Jesus’ words in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, found in Luke 4: “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 brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and to set at liberty them that are bruised.” However much King would seek to construct a unique identity as a pastor, the Gospel he would preach remained rooted in the language and tradition of his father and grandfather.⁵

King’s mother, Alberta Williams King, also played a significant role in shaping her eldest son. King described the daughter of Reverend A. D. Williams as one “behind the scene setting forth those motherly cares, the lack of which leaves a missing link in life.” Historian Lewis Baldwin directly connects King’s concern for the poor and his early disdain for capitalism with the influence of his mother. While Daddy King tended to have a more positive view of capitalism as a means for possible racial uplift, King’s mother saw the desperation of the Great Depression as evidence of the tragic flaws of America’s economic system. Young King grew up witnessing long bread lines and other consequences of the “tragic poverty” of his neighborhood. King also observed how socially engaged his father and mother were, which planted in him a passionate concern for social transformation that would mark his public ministry.⁶

As the son of a preacher, King’s family extended to Ebenezer Baptist. He joined the church the same day as his older sister, Christine, determined “not to let her get ahead of me.” For King, conversion was much more of a process or journey than the result of some “crisis moment.” Ebenezer exposed him to a vast network of black Baptist preachers from throughout the nation. Some of the most renowned preachers of the day stayed in his home during revivals. Many scholars have mined the influence of the black church tradition on King, including a recent work by Mervyn Warren, who aptly calls the black church King’s “conscious ancestral home, continually feeding and flavoring his religious and educational development as well as his clerical activities.” His religious heritage greatly influenced King’s worldview, preaching, and ministry. Literally hundreds of times a year he observed and participated in the rituals and practices of his church. He listened to countless sermons, learning not only the language of the pulpit, but also how to move and lead a congregation. The lessons King internalized during his formative years at Ebenezer provided the roots for much of what he would endeavor to accomplish as a pastor and civil rights leader. His church would continue to shape King even as he took advantage of a wartime early admission program to matriculate at Morehouse.⁷

King began studies at Morehouse in the fall of 1944 at the age of fifteen. According to his own accounts, he entered college as a religious skeptic, more interested in a career in law than in pursuing a life of ministry. Through exposure to religion professor George Kelsey and college president Benjamin Mays, King found models for a socially active and intellectually rigorous ministry. Captivated by their examples and influenced by his roots in his father’s church, King decided to become a preacher. Although he had begun to consider the ministry while in high school, at the time he still grappled with skepticism. While a senior at Morehouse, his urge to enter the ministry “appeared again with an inescapable drive.” King’s later reflections on his call emphasized his desire to serve humanity while minimizing the “miraculous or supernatural.”⁸

King’s descriptions of his call to ministry demonstrate his desire to fashion a new kind of pastorate that maintained its roots in the African American tradition. For black Baptists, the story of one’s call to preach was extremely important and tended to have formulaic features. Such narratives typically focused on supernatural and emotional elements that included initial resistance and disobedience to the call, followed by a later decision to fully obey God’s voice by entering the ministry. King’s story included a period of resistance, but the battle was not centered on whether to obey God or not. His struggle was intellectual as he wrestled with personal doubts and ecclesiological shortcomings. King eventually embraced his calling not due to an emotionally charged event or supernatural intervention, but as a rational destination at the end of a rigorous intellectual journey. King credited not only the example of traditional pastors such as his father but also the influence of faculty members at Morehouse with serving as inspirations for the new type of minister he hoped to become. In explaining his decision, King highlighted a “desire to serve God and humanity” and the contention that he could best contribute to society through the pastorate. He sought to couch his ministry service in terms that would be readily applauded by the more rationalistic white liberal church tradition while not completely dismissing the significance of a call to preach. Morehouse College was the place where King began to flesh out the type of ministry he hoped to embody.⁹

King benefited significantly from his interaction with Benjamin Mays. In contrast to the Alabama State College president H. Councill Trenholm, Mays was willing to speak publicly against segregation. While King was a student at Morehouse, Mays began writing a weekly column for the Pittsburgh Courier, a nationally syndicated and widely read African American newspaper. Mays later acknowledged that the themes of his newspaper articles often corresponded with his weekly Tuesday morning chapel service sermons. Chapel services were compulsory in the 1940s, and Mays spoke nearly every Tuesday to the entire student body. King’s interaction with Mays extended beyond the chapel, as they developed what Mays later called “a real friendship which was strengthened by visits in his home and by fairly frequent informal chats on the campus and in my office.” These conversations often included analysis of some of the points of Mays’s sermons, occasionally resulting in King’s disagreement with some of Mays’s arguments. Morehouse provided an atmosphere of intellectual curiosity that appealed to young King, leading him to pastor and preach in a fashion that would foster questioning and debate. Perhaps as an attempt to validate his educational pedigree for largely white audiences, King’s later writings often minimized the influence of his time at Morehouse. The limited mention of Mays’s influence in King’s later publications should not minimize the very significant role he played in shaping King’s leadership style and his early homiletic themes. A comparison of Mays’s Pittsburgh Courier articles with King’s early sermons provides firm evidence for what scholars have long suspected: Benjamin Mays had a major impact on the language and themes that became staples of King’s preaching and thought.¹⁰

One of the criticisms King often leveled against the traditional black church was its tendency to deal almost exclusively with spiritual matters while not consistently addressing social challenges. In a Crozer Seminary assignment, King argued that modern preaching must “deal with great social problems,” adding that sermons should help people “adjust to the complexities of modern society.” During Tuesday chapel services, Mays modeled precisely this type of engagement with the great issues of the day. He regularly addressed topics that were pertinent to the black community and thus should be on the minds and hearts of any Morehouse graduate.¹¹

Mays regularly considered issues of concern to the African American community, including efforts to gain voting rights. In his first article for the Pittsburgh Courier, published in June 1946, Mays hailed a recent victory in an effort to secure the ballot for blacks in Georgia. He also issued a challenge to his readers, calling southern blacks to pay the necessary price required for substantive racial change in the region. While some expected justice to be a given, Mays prescribed long-term commitment and struggle as prerequisites for African Americans’ achievement of full voting rights. Part of Mays’s mission was to develop “Morehouse Men” who would become the vanguard of the new black leadership. Through hard work, discipline, and sacrifice, these emerging leaders would usher in a new day for African Americans. After four years under Mays’s tutelage, King understood that substantive social change would require vigorous effort. This was a lesson Mays wanted every Morehouse graduate to not only understand but embody.¹²

Mays combined his admonition for commitment and sacrifice with a broad value-based critique of racist politicians. He was quite willing to chastise reactionary white leaders by name, suggesting that their fight to “keep the Negro a third-rate citizen” was a battle against the ideals of the United States and the teachings of Jesus. Mays’s strategy was to challenge the supposed authority of racist government officials by appealing to a higher law found in the Constitution and the Bible. He consistently appealed to timeless moral principles to suggest that “evil carries within its structure its own self-destruction.” African Americans had embodied such hope in the face of overwhelming oppression since the early days of slavery. The theme was not new, but Mays articulated this hope in educated language, something King would adopt for himself. In numerous school papers and sermons, King emphasized the ultimate death and destruction of evil by articulating a hope-filled faith in the face of violence, unjust laws, and oppressive economic institutions. He even developed a quotation-laden refrain that he used countless times in sermons and speeches to justify hope: “There is something in the universe that justifies Carlyle in saying, ‘No lie can live forever.’ There is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant saying, ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ There is something which justifies James Russell Lowell in saying, ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet the scaffold sways the future.’ There is something in the universe that justifies the Biblical writer in saying, ‘You shall reap what you sow.’” True to his religious heritage, King clung to hope even in unfriendly circumstances. Throughout his ministry, King preached a Gospel grounded in an optimistic hope for the ultimate triumph of God in the face of any challenge.¹³

Mays’s hope did not prevent him from seeing some of the damage that racism had caused. He mined the psychological implications of discrimination, recognizing that one of the greatest challenges facing blacks was their deeply rooted sense of inadequacy, leading him to call segregation “a badge of inferiority.” He cited the devastating consequences of slavery, segregation, and discrimination to explain the particular challenge to self-esteem that blacks often faced. Like Mays, King also explored the detrimental psychological effects experienced by many African Americans, noting, “it’s so easy for us to feel inferior because we have lived so long amid the tragic midnight of injustice and oppression.” Both Mays and King recognized that feelings of inferiority often led to passivity and fear.¹⁴

Over and over again, Mays challenged his readers to overcome their trepidation, calling fear “the greatest enemy of mankind.” He believed that as long as black southerners were under the influence of fear, they would lack the necessary boldness and resolve to sustain a movement for change. When fear rules, progress becomes stunted, justice is deferred, and equality proves evasive. The courage that is so essential to significant social advancement can easily fall prey to crippling cowardice. King took this message to heart, claiming fear was the root cause of warfare and racism. As Vernon Johns, E. D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, and Mary Fair Burks were calling on the people of Montgomery to take courageous stands for justice, Mays emphasized to King and anybody who would listen that fear was one of the greatest enemies that could retard the racial progress society so desperately needed.¹⁵

Following a tradition of racial uplift, Mays prescribed hard work and responsibility in the face of strong and destructive social mores and prejudices. His hope for every Morehouse graduate was that they would cause all of society to take notice of their achievements and diligence. Mays continually preached the importance of doing any job “as if God sent you into the world at this precise moment in history to do this work.” King massaged and crafted this theme into one of his set rhetorical pieces that he repeated regularly in sermons and public speeches. King joined Mays in believing that a strong work ethic could help blacks overcome inferiority and fear, reshape distorted white perceptions, and thus enable them to chart a course of bold action necessary for the challenges ahead. King’s preaching and ministry sought to affirm the God-given dignity of African Americans while also calling on them to live up to high expectations and greater responsibility.¹⁶

In Mays’s view, the battle for civil rights would be waged in the South. He also realized that many of the best and brightest African Americans preferred the more polite racism of the North, Northeast, and West. To counteract this pull, Mays directly challenged all who would listen with his argument that the ultimate commitment to the cause of justice and equality could only be lived out in the South. He went so far as to call southern blacks “the most courageous” on the American scene. Mays believed that circumstances demanded that people of courage live in the South, proving their ability to overcome fear and oppression. Not only did King call for courage in the face of fear, but he also heeded Mays’s challenge to return to the South.¹⁷ When King began to ponder where to live and serve following graduate school, perhaps he remembered the challenge of Mays years earlier. Despite the difficulties of being a pastor in the heart of Dixie, King decided to return to the South, setting his life on a trajectory that would place him on the front lines of one of the most significant social movements in human history.¹⁸

Mays saw the leadership and social philosophy of India’s Gandhi as a possible model for the direction in which African Americans should move to secure greater equality in the United States. During King’s junior year at Morehouse, Mays traveled to India, where he met Gandhi. Following the Indian leader’s death in early 1948, Mays wrote an article fondly recalling the ninety minutes they had spent together a year earlier. The primary topic of their discussion had been the use of nonviolence as a method for bringing about social change. Mays credited “the moral and spiritual power of non-violence” as the turning point in the struggle for Indian independence from Great Britain. While not a novel assessment, Mays’s articulation of this belief must have made an impression on young King. When looking for models and examples to hold up before his students at Morehouse, Mays found none more powerful than Gandhi’s independence movement in India.¹⁹

Over his last eighteen months at Morehouse, King was in regular contact with a man who had met with and been inspired by Gandhi. Although King rarely mentioned Gandhi in his early religious writings and sermons, Mays’s enthusiastic articulation of his precepts planted seeds that would fully blossom years later as King entered into the heart of the struggle for civil rights in Montgomery. In one extant assignment submitted for a course at Crozer, King did include a reference to the Indian leader as an example of one whose life demonstrated “the working of the Spirit of God.” While it would be many years before King would intensely study Gandhi’s life and strategies, part of the resonance of the Indian movement with him can be linked to his exposure to Benjamin Mays.²⁰

Although King may not have adopted nonviolence as a way of life until he found himself on the front lines of the struggle in Montgomery, he did subscribe to the Gandhian belief that the welfare of the oppressor must be taken into account in social struggle. Mays stressed this same theme in his speeches and articles, noting that discrimination “scars not only the soul of the segregated but the soul of the segregator as well.” From his student days onward, King consistently articulated that oppressors have value and are worthy of redemption. His hope was that by appealing to the hearts of these churchgoing, God-worshiping southerners, not only would laws be transformed, but the spirits of white southerners would be redeemed. Even in his earliest sermons and religious writings, King already embraced the transforming power of the love ethic found in the teachings and life of Jesus.²¹

Years before he arrived in Montgomery, King believed in the redemptive power of love. As his public ministry and civil rights leadership took flight, he articulated a vision of African Americans carrying out a noble mission to both overcome segregation and save the soul of America. Mays had sounded a similar note while King was a student at Morehouse, arguing that the fight for justice and equality is part of “a battle to save the soul of the South and the soul of America.” For King, the ultimate weapon against evil and the best hope for redemption was found in one’s capacity to love. Appealing not only to Gandhi and Mays but also to the words of Jesus, King preached incessantly about the need to love and forgive as “love has within [it] a redemptive power.” King called forgiveness “the Christian weapon of social redemption” and the “Christian weapon against social evil,” believing that it represented “the solution to the race problem.” While King would develop a greater depth of understanding and conviction regarding nonviolence, many of his root convictions regarding the redemptive power of love were established long before he came to Montgomery.²²

King changed and matured during his four years at Morehouse. Many scholars have emphasized the significance of the black Baptist roots in shaping the young King’s preaching and leadership, while others have noted how the white northern academy influenced his thought and convictions. The pivotal importance of Morehouse and Benjamin Mays are often downplayed. This oversight needs to be corrected. Were it not for King’s time at Morehouse and his exposure to a role model like Mays, one may justifiably ask whether King would have entered the ministry at all. During his time at Morehouse, King acquired the academic tools and language to navigate the educational landscape of Crozer Seminary and Boston University. He was able to engage the ideas that formed the curriculum of the white academy. King was prepared to set out on a task of synthesizing the vibrant black church tradition with the language and ideas of white theologians.

After his son’s four years at Morehouse, Daddy King offered King Jr. the opportunity to be the assistant pastor at Ebenezer. Convinced of the pressing need for a more educated pastorate, and desiring to move out of the shadow of his imposing father, the young King declined. Instead he chose to head north to Crozer Theological Seminary. Located in a suburb of Philadelphia, Crozer was one of the leading seminaries of the day. The institution had also made a commitment to expand its diversity by accepting several African American students in the fall of 1948, including King as well as fellow Morehouse graduate and King’s close friend Walter McCall. Unlike many of his classmates, when nineteen-year-old Martin King searched for a seat in his first preaching course at Crozer, he did so as a licensed preacher, well-schooled in the African American church tradition. Although as a graduate of Morehouse he had all the educational credentials he would need to serve as a pastor in an African American Baptist church, King was not interested in merely following in the footsteps of his father or fulfilling the expectations placed on African American pastors. He was determined to break the mold, and three years at an elite white seminary would allow him to incorporate the best ideas and practices of the white liberal church into his pastorate.

King’s time at Crozer was a season of development and growth rather than one of activism. However, when a restaurant in New Jersey refused service to King and some of his friends, they refused to leave quietly. The owner finally threatened them with a gun and forcibly removed them. King and his companions tried to take the matter to the courts based on New Jersey’s civil rights laws, but they had to drop their case when none of the white witnesses would agree to testify. For the most part, however, King chose to avoid confrontation during this season of his life. This was far from King’s only negative experience during his time at Crozer. At one point, a fellow student pointed a gun at him, believing King had played a prank on him. King earned respect from fellow students with his calm response to this incident and for not holding a grudge against the gun-waving classmate. King preferred to respond to the scorn of a few students and professors with affability, forbearance, and forgiveness.²³

As King completed his education at Crozer, some in Montgomery were already in the midst of a struggle for justice. Robinson had joined Burks as part of the Women’s Political Council (WPC). Vernon Johns was boldly challenging segregation and white violence in the pulpit and on the streets of Alabama’s capital. Although no longer an officer with the local NAACP, E. D. Nixon continued to agitate for change. King’s direct involvement in the southern struggle would have to wait, however. He wanted to further his education before returning South, leading him to Boston University, where he pursued a Ph.D. in theology.

King intended to study a school of philosophy known as “personalism” with Edgar Brightman, one of Boston University’s many renowned professors. The core principle of personalism when applied to theology is that human beings in a community provide the best approximation of the character of God. Personalism supports having faith in a personal God who is in relationship with creation. This view meshed well with the tradition of many black churches, which tended to emphasize God’s accessibility and involvement in the world. Always interested in being a well-educated pastor, King was excited to embrace a theological system and language that validated many of his deepest religious convictions.²⁴

In later years, King paid homage to the influence of significant white theologians, philosophers, and social theorists when recounting his intellectual development. In an essay titled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” penned for inclusion in Stride toward Freedom,King emphasized his exposure to Walter Rauschenbusch, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Many scholars disagree with the weight the essay grants to these thinkers, noting that they merely provided systems and language for deeply held beliefs King had developed years earlier from the African American Baptist church. For example, while King credited Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Moral Society for providing a necessary corrective to the unbridled optimism found in liberalism, many historians have rightly tempered the significance of Niebuhr’s influence, noting that living under segregation and white supremacy would check anyone’s unbridled optimism. During King’s first months at seminary, he was already questioning the significance of “high-minded” liberalism, suggesting it failed to address the daily challenges and struggles people face.²⁵

By the time King reached Crozer, he was already familiar with the published sermons of the more renowned preachers of the day. Keith Miller has helpfully examined the extensive use of these homilies in King’s preaching, showing how he regularly borrowed titles, themes, images, and even paragraphs as building blocks for his own sermons. In an exercise for a preaching course during his first year at Crozer, Robert Keighton asked the class to write five brief sermon introductions. For one of these, King copied the title and a two-sentence introduction from Fulton Sheen’s “The Effects of Conversion.” King continued to use the words and ideas of others in the pulpit, as evidenced in a sermon delivered at Ebenezer titled “The False God of Science,” which began with a paraphrase of the introduction from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “Why Worship?” The very next week, King again reworked portions of a Fosdick sermon in his introduction and as arguments to bolster a few of the sermon’s main points. In the same summer, King borrowed significant portions of Fosdick’s “Righteousness First” sermon for a message he retitled “First Things First.” He also leaned heavily on a Robert J. McCracken homily to compose “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity.” As many scholars have noted, King clearly used and failed to cite the work of other preachers for many of his homilies.²⁶

Although King benefited significantly from his studies and his exposure to the sermon collections of prominent white preachers, his wife, Coretta Scott, greatly influenced him as well. She was more of an activist than King when they met during his first year in Boston. A native of Alabama, Scott had attended the integrated Antioch College in Ohio before enrolling at the New England Conservatory of Music. She was interested in politics and had actively supported the presidential candidacy of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in 1948, attending the party’s convention as a youth delegate. There is significant evidence that Scott and King shared many convictions regarding the necessity for economic and political change.²⁷

Shortly after they began dating, Scott gave King a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian look at the future, Looking Backward: 2000–1887. The book celebrates the emergence of a classless society achieved through the demise of capitalism. Scott wrote a brief note to King inside the book: “Dear Martin, I should be interested to know your reaction to Bellamy’s predictions about our society. In some ways it is rather encouraging to see how our social order has changed since Bellamy’s time. There is still hope for the future…. Lest we become too impatient.” After reading the book, King wrote Scott a letter that included his thoughts on Bellamy’s work. Calling the author “a social prophet,” King added, “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” Perhaps seeking to impress his activist-minded girl King included words he had used in a prayer at the conclusion of a sermon three years earlier: “Let us continue to hope, work, and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color.” This time King added, “This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.” With their engagement and subsequent marriage in 1953, King found a wife who would stimulate him intellectually and urge him to be more of an activist for the ideals to which they both subscribed.²⁸

When considering King’s time in Philadelphia and Boston, it is easy to forget that he spent every summer back home in Atlanta working as an assistant pastor for his father at Ebenezer. In addition to filling pulpits in the northern church, including Twelfth Avenue Baptist Church in Boston, King remained grounded in the southern African American church. King preached regularly at Ebenezer during summer breaks as his father traveled or tended to other pastoral and denominational duties. This time at Ebenezer helped keep King connected to the concerns and challenges facing working-class African Americans in the segregated South. As he prepared to preach each Sunday, the composition of his audience demanded that he bridge the gap between the academy and the people as he attempted to share about the power and love of God. Many of King’s early Ebenezer sermon manuscripts remain, and their content demonstrates his efforts to remain connected to his home community in Atlanta.

During King’s graduate student years, he directly addressed racial issues from the pulpit. In an early sermon at Ebenezer, King noted: “The average white southerner is not bad. He goes to church every Sunday. He worships the same God we worship. He will send thousands of dollars to Africa and China for the missionary effort. Yet at the same time he will spend thousands of dollars in an attempt to keep the Negro segregated and discriminated.” A few weeks later, King challenged the United States to observe their faults rather than constantly pointing out the flaws in the Soviet Union: “While we see the splinters in Russia’s eye we fail to see the great plank of racial segregation and discrimination which is blocking the progress of America.” King did not let his audience off too easily, however, proceeding to chastise African Americans for discriminating against one another and seeing “the splinters in the white man’s eye” while failing to recognize “the planks in their own eye.” Even as a young theology student, King was ready and willing to challenge injustice while also calling on his parishioners to examine themselves first so that true social transformation could occur. Years before King assumed the pastorate at Dexter, his sermons already included bold challenges to America and the church on issues of race, international affairs, and economic justice.²⁹

During summer breaks, King used his opportunities to preach at Ebenezer to further refine themes that bridged his emerging theology with the expectations of a congregation. In “Loving Your Enemies,” King called his listeners to examine themselves, to “see the good points in your enemy,” and not to seek their adversary’s demise even when the opportunity presented itself. King argued that one should love one’s enemy “because the process of hate for hate brings disaster to all involved,” “because hate distorts the whole personality,” and “because love has within it a redemptive power.” This sermon contains many of the essential elements of the social ethic King would one day preach to the world. Eighteen months before he first ascended to the pulpit at Dexter, King’s vision for social change had already taken shape, and at its core was the revolutionary power of love found in the teachings of Jesus.³⁰

Despite King’s core commitment to ideas of social and economic change, he was far from the front lines of the struggle already emerging in the South. He was a radical scholar and preacher, but not yet an activist. In Montgomery, Alabama, however, radical activists like E. D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, and Jo Ann Robinson were already hard at work. Six weeks after King’s sermon on love at Ebenezer, Jo Ann Robinson penned a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. Noting that a local five-and-dime store had recently added two separate lunch counters for blacks and whites, she offered praise for the store’s manager, noting he “deserves much credit for realizing that Negro people, too, must eat. Human frailty makes it utterly impossible for men, irrespective of color, to deny pangs of hunger or thirst.” Complaining that in many stores “even ice water is not available for Negroes,” she marveled at a water fountain at a local store “where all kinds of people drink: Sick people, well people, clean people, dirty people. The fountain has been so scientifically constructed that germs cannot get to the flow of water—that is from white faces anyway. Seemingly, only black faces can contaminate and make the water unfit for human consumption.” While King preached a Gospel of love and justice, Robinson used humor as she publicly lobbied for opportunities she knew African Americans deserved. Robert D. Nesbitt Jr., the chairperson of the search committee at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, would help connect King with Robinson and other civil rights activists in Montgomery.³¹

Deacon Nesbitt was in Atlanta on a business trip when a friend told him he ought to visit with young King. Nesbitt felt a great deal of pressure as he searched for his congregation’s next pastor. He had led previous search teams that had resulted in two controversial pastors, each of whom had left under duress. The Dexter deacon decided to follow up on the lead and ended up in the home of one of Atlanta’s most prominent Baptist ministers, Martin Luther King Sr. Nesbitt liked what he saw in Daddy King’s eldest son, the promising Martin Luther King Jr. As the child of a pastor, young King knew the expectations and challenges of the pastorate. He was also a candidate for a doctoral degree, a feature that was sure to impress the many educators who regularly attended Dexter. Despite King Sr.’s misgivings about the strong deacon board and the “silk-stocking” reputation of Dexter, Nesbitt prevailed upon King Jr. to preach a sermon at the Montgomery church. For his part, King considered Dexter a promising opportunity and a suitable proving ground for the intellectually and socially engaged pastorate he had laboriously crafted, and he agreed to preach at the church in early January. In Montgomery, King’s Gospel would intersect with the public activism of Robinson, Nixon, Burks, and Parks. They were ready for each other. Nesbitt’s visit to the King home provided just the opportunity Martin Luther King Jr. needed to set him on a path that would propel him to the forefront of the civil rights movement.³²