Chapter 1
Pilgrimage to Christian Socialism
Martin Luther Kingâs 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 âstanding in bread lines,â King, Jr. asked in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression. By his teen years he knew that the âinseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.â It was the source of his âanti-capitalistic feelings,â he recounted in a 1950 autobiographical essay. The familyâs security could not hide âtragic povertyâ all around him, evident in the hunger and tattered clothing of his playmates. His grandfatherâs Ebenezer Baptist Church was also a community center providing food, clothing, medicine, and childcare for wage-earning mothers. âWhosoever carries the word must make the word flesh,â 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 BUâs Marsh Chapel that year. King had read Thurmanâs book, Jesus and the Disinherited, in which Jesus is portrayed as a âpoor Jewâ and a social revolutionary. In chapel King sat shaking âhis head in amazement at Thurmanâs deep wisdom,â his roommate Philip Lenud recalled. King adopted Thurmanâs description of slavery as a âlow, dirty and inhuman business.â 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 âtriumphant climax,â the slave minister exhorted them, they were neither âniggersâ nor âslavesâ but âGodâs children!â âSomething welled up within them,â King later preached, as they sang, âI got shoes, you got shoes, all of Godâs children got shoes.â 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 âpilgrimage to nonviolenceâ 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 grandfatherâs social gospel ministries. As King learned Baptist preaching, important mentorsâBenjamin Mays, Walter Chivers, George Davis, and Howard Thurmanâfostered Kingâs commitment to racial and economic equality. King read nineteenth-century critics of capitalismâWalter Rauschenbusch, Edward Bellamy, and Karl Marxâat 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 Niebuhrâs socialist writings guided Kingâs understanding of political and economic power, class conflict, and class alliances, as much as Niebuhr shaped Kingâs theology.
History and Heritage
King, Jr. inherited a determination to fight economic and racial injustice from his family and community. We should not identify his or his fatherâs values too closely with their âbourgeoisâ class positions. They both witnessed poverty firsthand, envisioned collective political action to overcome it, and disdained acquisitiveness and class pretensions among Atlantaâs black âbourgeoisie.â King, Sr.âs 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 âsettled upâ the cotton crop. James King was treated as âan object instead of a man,â Daddy King (called âMikeâ) recalled. He respected his fatherâs hard work and occasional defiance of white authority. But ultimately he judged him harshly for growing âold on somebody elseâs land,â a broken, bitter, alcoholic man. In contrast, King, Jr. later wrote, Daddy King resisted segregationâs âbrutalities at first hand.â Compelled to work the fields, Mike attended school only three months a year. Whites saw him âfirst as a workerâ and only then as a child. As a naĂŻve 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 âphysical slavery,â he later testified, but they gained no âland to make that freedom meaningful.â4
Survival, dignity, and resistance were grounded in communal life and in âthe redeeming value of sharing,â 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 fourteenâperilous 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 ârough, countryâ roots as he trained as a young preacher in the 1920s. He considered the elitism of Atlantaâs 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 marketâinsurance men, realtors, businessmen, professors, and, of course, ministers. Mindful of their origins, many genuinely aspired to become ârace men.â 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 Mikeâs future wife, Alberta, took Mike King under his wing. âChange is coming whether the white man can handle it or not,â 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 âan advocate for justiceâ 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.âs 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 fatherâs political fight to equalize teachersâ 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 fatherâs success ethic but admired his politics. He also seems to have picked up Daddy Kingâs disdain for âslick businessmenâ who profited from housing segregation and the low wages they paid black workers. âThe poor, black and white, were taught to hate each other,â King, Sr. recalled. âBusinessmen made money from both.â Martin clearly carried forward his fatherâs conviction that âthe masses had to take part in social change.â Daddy King organized consumer boycotts targeting a âvital part of our cityâs lifeâits economy.â7
Auburn Avenue gave King, Jr. a âdeeply religiousâ identity, and both parents actively discouraged feelings of class superiority in their children. King recalled growing up in neither a crime-ridden âslum districtâ nor a refuge of the âupper class.â This picture of frugal, middle-class solidity is at some variance with Daddy Kingâs own claim to have been âthe best paid Negro minister in Atlanta.â 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 fatherâs scrupulous âsaving and budgeting.â Daddy King did not âlive beyond his meansâ or show off his wealth. Early in their marriage, Martin cooked pigsâ ears for Coretta Scott King. Being his âfatherâs son,â she recalled, he liked them because they were âgoodâ and âcheap.â8
âBefore Black people in Atlanta had access to City Hallâmuch less occupied it,â Martinâs sister Christine King Farris recalled, âDad was a voice for the voiceless ⊠above all else, a man.â Daddy King once rebuked a policeman for calling him âboyâ as Martin watched in awe. âManhoodâ 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 motherâs domestic roles, but in the context of racial oppression, black norms of middle-class motherhood differed from whitesâ. Strong menâs characters contained âantitheses strongly marked,â King often said. He acquired âthe sweet gentleness of my mother and the strong, hard, rough, courage of my father.â Alberta King in her ânaturalâ sphere lavished âmotherly caresâ central to childrenâs secure character development. When her children faced racism, she explained its history âas a social condition rather than a natural order,â 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 âthis is a sin because weâre supposed to be serving the people.â 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 fatherâs 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. Kingâs limits in appreciating womenâs leadership and issues must be understood against this background.9
Kingâs 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: âThe 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.â 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 âbroken-hearted, poor, unemployed, the captive, the blind, and the bruised,â King, Sr. preached. âHow can people be happy without jobs, food, shelter and clothes?â His sonâs 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 fatherâs example and an âinescapable urge to serve humanityâ that seized him in 1944. In January of that year, Franklin Roosevelt promised an âeconomic bill of rightsâ 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 âspeak for the poorâ translate into mass politics? Would the voiceless poor recognize their own aspirations in Kingâs words?
King, Jr. adopted this expansive notion of rights appropriate to a high-consumption society and a nation at war with racist âwarfare states.â 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, âThe Negro and the Constitution,â pushed the limits of New Deal liberalism, weaving a powerful criticism of racial inequality into Kingâs own evocation of social and economic rights. How could America achieve an âenlightened democracyâ when Negroes remained uneducated and âill-nourished,â suffering from diseases that spread across all âcolor linesâ? How could the nation remain whole while forcing people âinto unsocial attitudes and crimeâ? How could America prosper with a whole people âso ill-paid that it cannot buy goodsâ? Victory over fascism abroad demanded âfree opportunityâ 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 âfinest Negroâ lived at the mercy of the âmeanestâ white. Whites exalted a few Negroes and slapped down the rest âto keep us in âour places.â â Tokenism was the norm. âEven winners of our highest honors face the class color bar,â 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 Atlantaâs streets. And Jim Crow tainted even his teenage triumph. After tasting honor at the all-black competition, King rode home in his âplace,â forced to yield his bus seat to a white passenger. âIt was the angriest I have ever been in my life,â he recalled.11
Morehouse Mentors
King, Jr. entered Morehouse College in the fall of 1944, when his commitment to âracial and economic justice was already substantial.â He immediately felt the magnetism of President Benjamin Mays, whom he acknowledged as one of his âgreat influences.â The son of sharecroppers, Mays preached the ethics of political agitation and success through education, admonishing students to perform their work, however humble, âso well that no man living [or] unborn could do it better.â 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 âa religion which ignores social problems will in time be doomed.â Religion must transcend all secular faiths, Mays argued, including communism, fascism, and âcapitalistic individualism.â 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 âdrifting awayâ from his own belief in âcapitalism and Western democracy.â The specifics of King, Jr.âs 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 âto 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.â Sounding more radical in a critique of black class power, King wrote to his â âbrethrenâ â in the Morehouse newspaper in 1947. âThe purpose of education,â he wrote, was to expose repressive propaganda and sharpen social action. Yet most of his classmates thought education would help them forge âinstruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses.â13
A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nationâs 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 âthe dean of Negro leadersâ in June 1956, he was surely exposed to the âsocialist thinkingâ that shaped his mature political philosophy. Under Randolphâs 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, an...