apostle to the americans: martin luther king, jr. - Davidson College

128 Pages·2013·0.8 MB·English

APOSTLE TO THE AMERICANS: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.’S USES OF THE
APOSTLE PAUL DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

BY
CHADWICK J. HARPER

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DAVIDSON COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF
HISTORY IN FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE KENDRICK K.
KELLEY PROGRAM IN HISTORICAL STUDIES

APRIL 8, 2013, DAVIDSON, NORTH CAROLINA
TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: “I have become all things to all men”—The Enthralling and Elusive
Martin Luther King, Jr.……...…………………………………………………….1

CHAPTER 1: “I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee”—Becoming
King.…….……………………………………………………………….……….14

CHAPTER 2: “I heard a voice saying to me”—A Vision, An Epistle, and
Agape..…………………………………………………………………………...31

CHAPTER 3: “I Bear in My Body the Marks of the Lord Jesus”—King’s Suffering and
Paul’s Pain……………………………….………………………………………57

CHAPTER 4: “Ambassador in Chains”—Martin Luther King Jr.’s Epistle From
Birmingham City Jail.……………………………………………….………...…68

CHAPTER 5: “All Fall Short”- Sin, Despair, and the Death of the
Dreamer ………….………………………………………………………………89

CONCLUSION: Who Was the Dreamer, and What Was the
Dream?….………………………………………………………………………104

BIBLIOGRAPHY...………………………………………………….…………………115
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Almost 50 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. told America about the Dream.
This year, I have been able to explore one perspective on King and the Dream thanks to
the friends and family of Kendrick Kelley. Their generosity honors the memory of
Kendrick Kelley, a Davidson man who died serving our country in the Vietnam War.
The sacrifices made by Kendrick Kelley and others like him protect our freedoms and
provide us the chance to chase the Dream.
I am also indebted to Dean Will Terry, another Davidson man whose generosity
has marked my life. Without Dean Terry, I would not have come to Davidson, and I
would not have become who I am today (though he shouldn’t have to take all the blame).
Dr. Mike Guasco has generously given guidance to my project every step of the
way. Dr. Guasco is a talented historian, but the fact that he put up with me for over a
year shows that he is also a good and patient man. Dr. Daniel Aldridge gave me the
benefit of his expertise throughout this entire project, and I am grateful for his help.
Though I was never fortunate enough to have a class with Dr. Robin Barnes, his copy-
editing skills prevented a host of errors. I decided to be a history major mostly because
of Dr. John Wertheimer—any good writing in this thesis is due to his instruction, and the
rest of it shows that even the best professors can only do so much.
I am also indebted to Dr. Elizabeth Mills for encouraging an anxious and insecure
freshman to keep reading and keep writing. I should also thank Dr. Anne Wills for
introducing me to the study of African-American religious traditions and for living out
her faith in a compassionate and understanding way. I am also grateful to Dr. Andrew
Lustig for patiently answering my questions while encouraging me to keep asking them.
Preaching at Lake Forest Church this summer gave me a new appreciation for King’s
transcendent power as a preacher, and for that opportunity and much more, I will always
be grateful to Michael Flake and the people of Lake Forest.
I am grateful to the fine folks at the Atlanta University Center Robert W.
Woodruff Library for helping me search through the Morehouse College Martin Luther
King, Jr. Collection. I also appreciate the welcome I received from the archivists at King
Library and Archive at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
To my fellow Kelley Scholars (Anne, Sarah, Claire, and Will)—thank you and
congratulations! I’d say more, but you’ve all had to read more than enough of my
writing.
I owe an enormous thank-you to my friends for their support throughout this
process and over the past four years. I also want to thank my family. Words are not
enough, but know that I thank God for y’all.
Lastly, I am grateful for Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the men and women who
shared the Dream. By remembering their faith, their hope, and their love, we can live the
Dream.
-CJH

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall
know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these
three; but the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:12-13
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INTRODUCTION
“I HAVE BECOME ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN”—THE
ENTHRALLING AND ELUSIVE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

“I’m sorry, you don’t know me.” Marin Luther King Jr. first spoke these words to
a journalist who chastised King for criticizing the United States’ violence in the Vietnam
War. King retold the story of that encounter and repeated this admonition from the pulpit
of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in a sermon he preached only five days
before he died.1 King, had he lived, might have said the same thing to historians;
scholars have struggled to define and describe King ever since an assassin in Memphis
murdered the man and gave birth to the myth. David Levering Lewis wrote the first
academic biography of King, King: A Biography,2 and served as the Martin Luther King
Jr., Professor of History at Rutgers University, but even Lewis confessed, “Who he was
simply escaped me.”3 Judging from the hundreds of articles and dozens of books
produced by other historians, Lewis is one of many scholars enthralled and eluded by
King. Nearly a half-century after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. remains one of
American history’s most enigmatic and elusive figures.
King’s elusive nature stems his clever employment of multiple personas.
Historian Jonathan Rieder lists King’s roles as preacher, prophet, apostle, ambassador,

1 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” Delivered at the
National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu (accessed
September 20, 2012). *Hereafter all of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s documents will simply list “King” as the
author. Also, while I have chosen to give only basic citation information for online documents, more
detailed information for all online sources is available in the bibliography.
2 David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography, 2nd ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1978)- originally published in 1969.
3 David Levering Lewis, “Failing to Know Martin Luther King, Jr.,” The Journal of American
History 78, no. 1 (June 1991): 81-84.
2

and translator, among others. A supremely talented performer, King played many parts
and cleverly combined a host of voices into a chorus. King’s multiplicity of identities,
the seamless way he slid between them, and the manifold ways in which he blended them
together led Rieder to label him the “Chameleon King.”4
Thousands of miles away and hundreds of years before King, a likeminded
minister wrote, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I
might save some.”5 The similarities between the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther King,
Jr. extended beyond their ability to communicate the same message in different ways to
different people. In addition to this multi-vocality, both men espoused a barrier-breaking
gospel in order to reconcile groups across boundaries of class, creed, and race.6 Like
King, Paul followed in his father’s footsteps to become a member of the religious elite,
led a diverse and often contentious movement, served as an itinerant minister, suffered
persecution, was frequently imprisoned, penned epistles while in jail, and died a martyr’s
death. Paul lived and died trying to bring Jews and non-Jews (or Gentiles) into
communion with God and community with each other. Therefore Paul preached a

4 Jonathan Rieder, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin
Luther King, Jr., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008),1-2.
5 1 Corinthians 9:22, New International Version- Generally through the course of this thesis, I have
used the English Standard Version when attempting to communicate the substance of a given scriptural
passage to the reader, especially when the King James Version’s language obscures its meaning. I have
used the King James Version when I have felt that the language of the King James Version influenced
King’s own language, or when King quotes directly from the King James Version. Here, I made use of the
New International Version because the language of this version more clearly communicates Paul’s
emphasis on adapting his gospel to suit his audiences. Various versions have been used on an occasional
basis throughout this thesis, and the version used is marked using the following set of abbreviations:
English Standard Version (ESV), King James Version (KJV), New International Version (NIV).
6 Scott W. Hoffman, “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,”
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Introspection 10, no. 2 (Summer, 2000):126.
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message of redemption to the end of reconciliation: Jesus died so that human beings
could be reconciled to God and to one another.7
Martin Luther King, Jr. used Paul throughout his quest to build the Beloved
Community,8 but in spite of King’s many multi-layered uses of Paul, historians have
largely ignored King’s relationship to Paul. To break that silence, this thesis will explore
instances in the Civil Rights Movement9 in which King constructed and deployed a
Pauline persona, interpreted and imitated Paul, and connected his own project of
reconciliation10 to the work of the Apostle Paul. When the Montgomery Bus Boycott
transformed King from a promising twenty-six year-old minister into the leading voice of
the Civil Rights Movement, King used Paul’s precedent as a visionary leader to support

7 Who's Who in the New Testament, Routledge, s.v. "Paul."

8 King’s vision of the Beloved Community is a concept I will return to throughout this thesis.
Josiah Royce, a philosopher and theologian who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation, coined the term,
but King made the term famous (see The King Center’s “The King Philosophy,”
http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy). King developed the concept beginning early in his career.
In 1957, King proclaimed that “[t]he aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community.
The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation.” See King,
“The Birth of a New Nation,” Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, April 7,
1957. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu (accessed April 3, 2013). In 1959, King spoke of the Beloved
Community as the goal of nonviolence, saying, “when you follow this way…a new friendship and
reconciliation exists between the people who have been the oppressors and the oppressed“ and that “the
way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.” See “Palm Sunday
Sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi,” Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, March
22,1959, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., (hereafter simply The King Papers), ed. Clayborne Carson
(Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2005), Vol. V, 145-157. King’s ultimate goal was the
Beloved Community: “the objective that we seek...the end of that objective is a truly brotherly society, the
creation of the beloved community.” See King for Christian Century (Chicago: Christian Century, July 13,
1966). The Beloved Community was the end goal of King’s project, and he committed to nonviolent
resistance because he believed that nonviolence resolved conflict while reconciling enemies.

9 “The Civil Rights Movement” is a troublesome term insofar as it suggests a false picture of “the
Civil Rights Movement” as a monolithic entity. In a sense, there were many movements within the Civil
Rights Movement, and I do not intend to downplay the diversity and (at times) discord within the
movement through the use of this term. Rather, I use the term “Civil Rights Movement” simply to
demarcate a certain time period (for the purposes of this thesis, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to
King’s death in Memphis) and to refer broadly to the various groups working for equal rights for African-
Americans.
10In the sermon, “Loving Your Enemies,” King gave one definition of reconciliation, saying,
“Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again.” See King, Strength to Love, (New York:
Pocket Books, 1964), 43.
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his own authority. King developed and deployed a Pauline persona during the
Montgomery Movement in his preaching, and he fueled the bus boycott with a
particularly Pauline idea of love. When King endured persecution and pain, he looked to
Paul as an example of how he might embrace suffering and use his scars to advance his
cause. When he found himself locked in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, King wrote
a Pauline epistle from prison in which he argued for the supremacy of the Law of Love
and connected the Civil Rights Movement to the story of the early Church. Toward the
end of his life, facing his personal and public failures, King drew on Paul to reconcile his
double life as a saint and a sinner. In Paul, King found a source of inspiration for his
movement and for himself, and through reinterpreting Paul, King developed the message
of love and reconciliation that history remembers as the Dream.
Investigating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s uses of the Apostle Paul during the Civil
Rights Movement will help us better understand King’s vision of reconciliation.
Stereoscopic sight allows human eyes to combine two perspectives into a single image
that has greater depth and breadth than either perspective provides on its own; with this
thesis, I hope to give another perspective on King so that by viewing him from another
vantage point, we might gain a more complete picture of the Dreamer and his Dream.
* * *
Like an ancient ruin covered by a thousand years of dirt and dust, the man who
lived and breathed and died as Martin Luther King, Jr. has been buried beneath a mound
of mythology. Historians constantly reimagine and reinterpret King’s memory, and some
historians create new Kings to serve their causes. Michael Kazin attempts to unlock the
meaning of the 1960s by returning to the heart of King’s identity as a “[r]adical
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democrat.” For Kazin, King’s movement spawned the civil rights fights of all other
subsequent groups, from the women’s movement to the current struggle of gay and
lesbian Americans. Kazin pits these King-inspired reformers against conservative leaders
like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and others who represent a countermovement
against the progress of the 1960s.11 Like Kazin, Timothy B. Tyson finds in King an ally,
though Tyson describes King as “another southern preacher” instead of as a radical
reformer. Tyson contends that King’s memory has been twisted and tortured to the point
that he has become “a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus…a benign vessel that can be
filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion may dictate.” Yet in spite of the
many manipulations of King’s memory, Tyson believes that King still speaks as a
powerful prophet if we will listen to the real King and not the neutered versions offered
to us by politicians. According to Tyson, because King condemned the Vietnam War, he
would condemn the war in Iraq as immoral and impractical.12 Kazin and Tyson are more
explicit in their reasons for reimagining King than most scholars, but their arguments
demonstrate the power of appealing to King’s memory for current causes.
Students of King debate his theology as well as his politics, and much of the battle
consists of identifying the sources behind King’s work. Many historians consider King’s
philosophical foundation the thinkers he studied at Crozer Theological Seminary and
Boston University, figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Mahatma Gandhi, Reinhold Niebuhr,

11 Michael Kazin, “Martin Luther King Jr., and the Meanings of the 1960s,” The American
Historical Review 114, no. 4 (October 2009): 987-989.
12 Timothy B. Tyson, “Martin Luther King and the Southern Dream of Freedom,” Southern
Cultures 11, no. 4, (Winter 2005): 97-106.
6

and Paul Tillich.13 In addition to these thinkers, Warren E. Steinkraus highlights the
importance of the doctrine of Personalism to King. According to Steinkraus, Personalism
taught King that individuals’ lives have inherent value, an idea which led King to
nonviolence.14 Like Steinkraus, John Rathbun sees the sources of King’s theology as the
Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch,15 the Neo-orthodoxy of Paul Tillich and
Reinhold Niebuhr, the doctrine of Personalism, and Gandhi.16 Whether these men ignore
the historical role of the black church17 in shaping King because of their own prejudice or
because King presented a whitewashed intellectual history remains unclear, but the fact is

13 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was an enormously influential German thinker whose doctrine
of nihilism and announcement that “God is dead” both challenged King’s faith. See Biographical
Dictionary of 20th Century Philosophers, s.v. "Nietzsche, Friedrich.” Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
pioneered tactics of nonviolent social change in South Africa and India, and his philosophy of satyagraha
(“holding fast to the truth”) and his tactics informed and inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.’s project in many
vital ways. See The Columbia Encyclopedia, s.v. "Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand.” Reinhold Niebuhr
(1892-1971) began his career with a profound social concern, but his socialist ideas and optimism were
tempered by the horrors of the Second World War, leading Niebuhr to preach “conservative realism,” a
paradigm that acknowledged the deep sinfulness of humanity and the moral tragedies of life in a fallen
world. King found Niebuhr challenging and insightful, but maintained a more hopeful view of humanity (at
least until the final years of his career). See The Columbia Encyclopedia, s.v. "Niebuhr, Reinhold." Paul
Tillich (1886-1965) was an influential American thinker and philosopher whose concept of a more remote
God pushed King to defend his belief in Personalism. Tillich prioritized faith over salvation, believing that
faith should be the ultimate concern for humans, and it may be that this idea informed King’s own
conception of salvation, especially in his later years (for more on King’s developing understanding of
salvation, see Chapter 4). For more on Tillich, see The Columbia Encyclopedia, s.v. "Tillich, Paul
Johannes.”
14 Warren E. Steinkraus, “Martin Luther King’s Personalism and Non-Violence,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 34, no. 1 (January-March, 1973): 97-103.
15 For a survey of Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel, see J. Phillip Wogaman, Christian
Ethics: A Historical Introduction, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 210-216. For the
purposes of this thesis, the Social Gospel can be described as an early 20th century movement in liberal
Protestantism that emphasized the systemic nature of sin and the societal aspects of salvation, leading to a
particular concern with economic structures and a tendency toward Christian socialism with a focus on
programs of social outreach and improvement. In this construction, sin is selfishness and sharing is part of
God’s work of salvation.
16 John W. Rathbun, “Martin Luther King: The Theology of Social Action,” American Quarterly
20, no. 1 (Spring, 1968): 38-53.
17 I do not use the term “the black church” to imply that African-Americans are religiously
homogenous. I use it to refer to the various faith traditions that emerged from African-Americans’ shared
experiences as enslaved and marginalized people and therefore shared certain theological emphases and
practical similarities. I will explore the black church’s influence on King in Chapter 2.
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that scholars long attributed King’s ideas to these thinkers while ignoring King’s deep
roots in the black church.
Only in recent years have scholars followed the lead of James Cone and others
who trace the roots of King’s theology to the black church. Cone argues that the black
church helped King see the Gospel’s “true meaning as God’s liberation of the oppressed
from bondage.”18 While Cone does not totally dismiss the impact of Tillich, Niebuhr,
Gandhi, Thoreau,19 and Rauschenbusch, he maintains that King was first, last, and always
“a product of the black church tradition.”20 Vincent Gordon Harding likewise argues that
King’s civil rights work grew out of his work as a minister. Harding writes of King, “he
held a vision for all America, often calling the black movement more than a quest for
rights—a struggle ‘to redeem the soul of America.’” Harding contends that King’s vision
stretched far beyond civil rights, and that King’s memory has been manipulated “into the
relatively safe categories of ‘civil rights leader,’ ‘great orator,’” and “harmless dreamer of
black and white children on the hillside.”21 In Harding’s eyes, such manipulation

18 James Cone, “Black Theology in American Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 53, no. 4, (December 1985): 755-756- Given Cone’s status as the father of black liberation
theology, this understanding of King is unsurprising, but it should not and cannot be dismissed, especially
given Cone’s extensive research into King’s life and thought. For additional works by Cone on King, see
“Martin and Malcolm on Nonviolence and Violence,” Phylon (1960-) 49, no. ¾, (2001): 173-183, and
Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992).
19 Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American writer and thinker whose experiences with
and essay on “Civil Disobedience” influenced King’s understanding of the law and individual conscience.
For more on Thoreau, see Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, s.v. "Thoreau, Henry David.”
20 Cone, “Black Theology in American Religion,” 761.
21 Vincent Gordon Harding, “Beyond Amnesia: Martin Luther King. Jr., and the Future of
America,” The Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (Sep. 1987): 469-473. It should be noted that Harding
worked with Dr. King frequently and even drafted the sermon “Why I Am Opposed to the War In
Vietnam” which King gave at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. See Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get
There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr., (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 67-69. It is worth
noting that King preferred Harding’s draft to a version composed by Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones.
King felt that the initial draft was too conservative, and he reminded his speech-writers, “I’m a minister of