What He Received

This chapter considers the preaching and sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like all preachers, King relied on what had been given him. For the construction of his sermons, what he received was a body of titles, outlines, and formulas from other preachers. The outlines followed the conventional sermon schemes he had learned in the black church and from his seminary teachers. The formulas were what classical orators would have called proofs of the speaker’s arguments. The proofs illustrate or substantiate the often unexceptional arguments with a sensual beauty that overshadows the logic of the ideas themselves. Together, the outlines and the proofs constitute what the classical tradition called the topoi, or “places,” where a culture or religious tradition “stores” its nuggets of wisdom and its basic methods of telling the truth.

Bearing “The Gospel of Freedom”

This chapter focuses on the vehicle of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s social gospel: the mass meeting. The mass meeting was born in Montgomery, Alabama, with the December 5, 1955 rally at the Holt Street Baptist Church. From the beginning, the meetings served an indivisibly sacred and civic agenda. At Holt, the throng listened to Bible readings, sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and took courage from a sermonic speech by the young Dr. King. The mass meetings held throughout the South also served to solidify a sense of community among participants. The meetings provided a continuous social commentary on fast-breaking events, a forum for information and tactical planning, a school for correction and instruction in nonviolence, a place of praise and encouragement, but, most of all, a way of keeping together.

The Ebenezer Gospel

This chapter details Martin Luther King, Jr.’s stint as “copastor” of Ebenezer Baptist Church, which lasted for less than one hundred months. Although he did not preach at Ebenezer every Sunday, he spoke there often enough to establish “my gospel,” an evolving, sometimes volatile interpretation of God’s will for Ebenezer and the world. The Ebenezer Gospel is what the preacher King said to his people over the course of his pastorate. It is important to gather the fragments of this gospel into a coherent whole because he carried a modified version of it into world history, thus making knowledge of the Ebenezer Gospel essential to an understanding of his public message—his quest for justice, yearning for redemption, insistence on nonviolence, embrace of suffering, prophetic rage, and all else that emerged from his Sundays in Atlanta. King’s Ebenezer sermons are the religious subtext for his sermon to the nation.

The Masks of Character

This chapter discusses the personae, or “masks,” implicit in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s strategies of style by which he communicated his purposes for America. These roles he accepted and played with absolute fidelity. For example, when speaking prophetically, no unseemly aside, unmeant gesture, or hint of backstage behavior ever detracted from his role or diminished the high ground he had chosen for himself. Like a Greek actor, he moved across the stage speaking his lines with a passion appropriate to his mask. He never broke character. What sociologist Erving Goffman calls the “front,” which is a performer’s setting, appearance, and manner, remained in King utterly consistent.

In the Mirror of the Bible

This chapter discusses how Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the Movement was a calculated act of interpretation that mirrored the Bible’s imagery, stories, and characters: the morning star of freedom illumined the darkness of an ordinary Southern city. Baptist and Methodist Rotarians were assigned and grudgingly assumed the role of “the pharaohs of the South.” A festive parade of thousands along a state highway symbolized the Exodus from Egypt. Blood-spattered Negroes enacted the mystery of unmerited suffering. All of it was presided over by the black Moses who was willing to die for his people.

From Identification to Rage

This chapter considers the most complex element in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s strategy of style: identification. For the first decade of his career, King worked incessantly to align the aims of the Movement with the values of moderate-to-liberal white America. His goal was the merger of black aspirations into the American dream. To do this he had to convince black Americans that his methods represented their best interests, and he had to convince white Americans that his vision was consistent with their heritage and in their best interests as well. King carried out his mission of identification before a vast racially mixed audience. He campaigned for identification as a man of dark color in one of the most color-obsessed nations in the world. For all its unconscious cunning, King’s strategy of identification led ineluctably to the language of confrontation and to the evenatual abandonment of rhetorical strategy. With the nation’s involvement in Vietnam, he burned his bridges to his liberal supporters and refused to mask the true nature of the conflict.

The Strategies of Style

This chapter focuses on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speaking style. King’s style did not mirror a mysterious and inaccessible “inner man,” nor what King would have called his “personality.” Instead, it reflected a strategy for the public presentation of a message, which in turn was related to a larger strategy of social change. He did not preach and speak the way he did because “that is the sort of person he was,” but because he had a mission no less calculated or comprehensive than Demosthenes’s appeal to Athens or Lincoln’s to America. His mission was, as he put it simply in a 1963 sermon, “to make America a better nation.” Paradoxically, he pursued his high and serious purpose with a style whose first principle was the achievement of pleasure.

Apprenticed to the Word

This chapter describes the individuals who influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. as a preacher. It was from Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College, that King first heard the challenge “Clearly, then, it isn’t how long one lives that is important, but how well he lives, what he contributes to mankind and how noble the goals toward which he strives. Longevity is good . . . but longevity is not all-important.” King paraphrased this sentiment many times in his career, perhaps most poignantly in his speech in Memphis the night before his death. King also discovered three mediating influences who, like Mays, appreciated a good theological argument and, like King Sr., sat astride enormous urban congregations. These influences were William Holmes Borders, Sandy Ray, and Gardner C. Taylor.

Surrounded

This chapter describes Martin Luther King, Jr.’s religious environment. Twenty-one-year-old King characterized his religious environment as a “universe,” a socially constructed world that shaped his identity and outlook on life. The moral and physical center of that universe was the sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where his father presided from the pulpit and the son had been baptized. The sanctuary dictated the boundaries within which African-American Christians, including Martin Luther King, Jr., sorted out the relationship of suffering and hope. Throughout his career, King carried the sanctuary with him as a state of mind and soul; he also repeatedly returned to it like a grateful soldier home from the front.

Dexter Avenue and “The Daybreak of Freedom”

This chapter details the events that followed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s arrival in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954 when he assumed the pastorate of the most distinguished Negro church in the city, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Dexter was built during Reconstruction on the site of one of the city’s four slave pens. As a black church, it therefore occupies an incongruously central location in the old city of Montgomery. King approached Dexter Avenue Baptist Church as the first test of all that he had learned from the church and his mentors. Even before the Boycott of 1955–56, Dexter had proved to be every bit the challenge he was looking for.