Parting the Waters (16 page)

Niebuhr was turning against a strain of political and religious idealism that had been building since the epiphany of Count Leo Tolstoy, whose eyes had locked on three familiar words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Resist not evil.” “Why had I always sought for some ulterior motive?” asked Tolstoy. “‘Resist not evil' means never resist, never oppose violence; or, in other words, never do anything contrary to the law of love.” In his old age, the great Russian novelist was transformed into the intellectual father of modern pacifism. His book
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
had a profound influence on young Mohandas Gandhi when he was a student in England. Toward the end of Tolstoy's life, Gandhi corresponded with him and named his first commune, in South Africa, Tolstoy Farm.

In his book, Niebuhr attacked pacifists and idealists for their assumption that Gandhi had invented an approach that allowed religious people to be politically effective while avoiding the corruptions of the world. For Niebuhr, Gandhi had abandoned Tolstoy the moment he began to resist the color laws in South Africa. Gandhi's strikes, marches, boycotts, and demonstrations were all forms of coercion, which, though nonviolent, were contrary to the explicit meaning of “Resist not evil.” Niebuhr applauded what Gandhi was doing but not the sentimental interpretations that placed Gandhians above the ethical conflicts of ordinary mortals. For Niebuhr, such a belief was dangerously self-righteous as well as unfounded.

While Gandhi's methods were political and promised only a slight chance of improvement in the world, Niebuhr said bluntly, they belonged to “a type of coercion which offers the largest opportunities for a harmonious relationship with the moral and rational factors in social life…. This means that non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors.” Niebuhr amplified this gleam of hope as it might apply to the cause of the American Negro. If Gandhi's methods were somehow adapted to American conditions and then employed in a difficult, protracted campaign, they could make headway toward justice even against the selfish forces of the immoral society. After making several suggestions as to how a Negro nonviolent movement might proceed, Niebuhr concluded that “there is no problem of political life to which religious imagination can make a larger contribution.”

Like Niebuhr, King allowed his religious and political thoughts to run along the same moral edge. Questions about the existence and nature of God seemed to merge with a simpler, more existential question: Is the universe friendly? Although Niebuhr distinguished sharply between the realms of love, perfection, and God on the one hand and justice, reality, and man on the other, he tried with his theory of moral man and immoral society to place them along a single continuum. As King would paraphrase him in a student paper, “Justice is never discontinuously related to love. Justice is a negative application of love…. Justice is a check (by force, if necessary) upon ambitions of individuals seeking to overcome their own insecurity at the expense of others. Justice is love's message for the collective mind.”

For King, another immediate attraction in Niebuhr's book was its tension. Niebuhr combined an evangelical liberal's passion for the Sermon on the Mount with a skeptic's insistence on the cussedness of human nature. While giving free rein to his own internal battle on these issues, Niebuhr saw far more promise in Gandhi than most religious liberals, and he honed the Gandhian method to its most defensible combination of religion and politics. Both the linkage and the tension appealed to King, whose own small world had been a blend of opposites—serenity and ambition, knowledge and zeal, church and state, Negro and white. His most heartfelt speeches would always pit the sunny skies of justice against the midnight storms of oppression, in warring Augustinian phrases. Implicitly, a step toward or away from justice could affect his present judgment about whether the universe was friendly and therefore about the nature of God. Even as a student, King believed that religion was alive only at its edges, and that doubt was as important as belief. In a paper obviously influenced by Hegel and Niebuhr, King wrote that “if a position implies a negation, and a negation a position, then faith carries disbelief with it, theism, atheism, and if one member of the pair comes to be doubted the result may be disastrous to religion itself.”

In later years, King never tried to stem the rivers of ink that described him as a Gandhian. Part of his acquiescence was a product of public relations, as he knew that within the American mass market there was a certain exotic comfort in the idea of a Gandhian Negro. King mentioned buying a half-dozen books about Gandhi in a single evening, but he never bothered to name or describe any of them. He almost never spoke of Gandhi personally, and his comments about Gandhism were never different than his thoughts about nonviolence in general. By contrast, he invoked Niebuhr in every one of his own major books, always with a sketch of
Moral Man and Immoral Society
. He confessed that he became “enamored” of Niebuhr, who “left me in a state of confusion.”

“Niebuhr's great contribution to contemporary theology,” King wrote, “is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians.” This meant a great deal to King, but doubtless very little to most of his readers. He said little more in public. In private, however, he came to describe Niebuhr as a prime influence upon his life, and Gandhian nonviolence as “merely a Niebuhrian stratagem of power.” King devoted much of his remaining graduate school career to the study of Niebuhr, who touched him on all his tender points, from pacifism and race to sin.

 

On November 25, 1950, three days after King took his final exam in American Church History 153 (in which he was asked to discuss the evangelical campaigns between 1500 and 1760 to spread Christianity among American Indians), the Communist Chinese Army entered the Korean War in mass wave attacks. This intervention raised fears that the conflict would spread into a new world war, only six years after Hitler's defeat, and in the United States the new Chinese enemy fueled a hatred of communism as a global, inhuman conspiracy. The Justice Department, apparently spurred by Secretary of State Dean Acheson's outrage over a peace petition drawn up in Sweden, obtained a criminal indictment against W. E. B. Du Bois for circulating the petition in the United States without having registered as an agent of the Soviet Union.
The New York Times
vaguely identified Du Bois as “an author widely known in connection with Negro movements,” but the eighty-two-year-old founder of the NAACP and
The Crisis
was arraigned in handcuffs and faced trial more or less anonymously. Harry Belafonte—then an unknown New York actor of twenty-four, some two years older than King—was among those walking a scraggly picket line outside the courthouse. Belafonte had become enamored of Du Bois, and awakened to politics, by reading some of the Du Bois books that Negro sailors passed around during World War II. The Du Bois indictment pitched the NAACP into convulsions, even after a federal judge dismissed the case. Roy Wilkins straddled the issue by engineering one NAACP resolution condemning the indictment as an affront to Negroes, and others that warned Negroes of “so-called peace organizations” and empowered NAACP chapters to conduct internal purges against Communist infiltration.

Wars, conspiracies, and witch-hunts little affected the pace of student life at Crozer. Scott Enslin's teachings about the historical Jesus still shocked the incoming freshmen, who still pretended to be pool sharks as they brutalized the three tables under the chapel. One of the student leaders who helped them adjust to the Crozer atmosphere as it affected faith and recreation was M. L. King, who served that year as president of the student body. Mike and Mac still played pool until three o'clock on many mornings, often joined now by a new white friend named Snuffy. Professor Kenneth Lee “Snuffy” Smith, a Virginia Baptist, had just returned from graduate study at Duke to join the Crozer faculty. He was about McCall's age, just five years older than King, and so short that even King at five feet seven inches towered over him by half a foot. It was Smith who taught Niebuhr in one of his courses, and noticed the impact upon King. King wanted to read more Niebuhr, but the pace of his studies left him little time.

In the middle of the year, King grew fond of Professor Smith's steady girlfriend, Betty, the daughter of a German immigrant woman who served as the cook for the Crozer cafeteria. At first, the incipient competition between the two male friends—student and teacher, Negro and white—was absorbed in banter and professions of goodwill. After all, Smith had just returned from Duke on fire with the spirit of the Social Gospel, and the living of that creed ruled out jealousy. Nevertheless, an ugly tension deadened the camaraderie around the pool table soon after King openly began pursuing Betty. When he won her over, tempers flared.

King's friends nervously enjoyed the story of the seminary love triangle until he ruined it for them by turning serious. He said he had fallen in love, and that Betty was in love with him. Friends tried to make jokes about whose theological and racial liberalism was being most sorely tested—his, Smith's, or Betty's—but nothing worked. King was not laughing, and in time no one else was either. Making no secret of his distress over what to do, King asked for advice. Kirkland said bluntly that he should know better than to consort with the daughter of a mere cook, Negro or white. Marcus Wood cautioned him more diplomatically about the difficulties of finding a church that wanted a racially mixed family in the parsonage. Whitaker, older and perhaps wiser than the others, let King talk himself out. He listened as King resolved several times over the next few months to marry Betty, railing out in anger at the cruel and silly forces in life that were keeping two people from doing what they most wanted to do. Late one night, his clothes rumpled from an evening of romance on the campus grounds, King knocked on Whitaker's window, wanting to talk again. Whitaker led him through questions that were familiar by now, and King finally broke down. He could take whatever Daddy King might say, he told Whitaker, but he could not face the pain it would cause his mother.

King forced himself to retreat, and struggled against bitterness. Even as he did, a crude, literal trial of flesh and spirit threatened his best friend, Walter McCall, whose girlfriend charged him with bastardy. When all attempts to mollify her failed and it appeared that court could not be averted, a mortified McCall had to make a pained, confidential approach to a Crozer professor, asking him to testify that he was a seminary student in good standing, of such character and promise to the clergy as to make it extremely unlikely that he was the father of the child, or that he would abandon the child if he was. The professor so testified, and the court ruled in favor of McCall. The ethical ramifications of the case for McCall and for Crozer dictated that everything be handled as quietly and as delicately as possible. Snuffy Smith, among the few liberal professors who knew of it, seized on the not-guilty verdict, believing that it cleared everyone. Inasmuch as McCall all but acknowledged paternity in a later letter to King, however, the verdict may have meant, on the contrary, that Crozer's reputation for religious authority helped convince the court of a lie, thereby allowing McCall to escape his responsibilities to the woman and to his child.

This sort of morally radioactive situation has always given religious institutions a powerful incentive to seek quiet, private solutions in matters of sex and the clergy. When race is added as a third factor—as it was in this case by the fear that a McCall scandal would give ammunition to those who opposed Crozer's recruitment of Negro students—the combination becomes so unbearably sensitive that discretion and hypocrisy govern almost instinctively. Historically, such avoidance would help explain how some four million mulattoes came into being in the United States with practically no recorded cases of legal or ecclesiastical disgrace ever attached to members of the dominant white culture.

At Crozer, King came hard to the judgment that the price of a mixed marriage was higher than he was willing to pay for the love of one woman or the dream of the beloved community. He knew that the responsible course was to follow the unwritten family guidelines of the profession: that a minister must marry, that he must marry sooner rather than later, that his choice of a wife was important not only personally but also as it would affect his career, and that he must look for certain objective qualities in prospective mates. Among Negro ministers—who enjoyed enormous advantages over their white counterparts because of the preacher's greater prestige within the culture, and also because of a relative plenitude of female peers—the selection process seemed elevated at times to a minor affair of state. An underlying sense of urgency strained against a host of practical calculations that were almost political in nature. King told Whitaker he would be married by the end of his first year out of Crozer, even though at the time he had not settled on the bride.

 

In the summer of 1951, Reverend King was less happy with his son's decision to seek a doctorate than he had been three years earlier with his desire to go to Crozer. Seminarians might be overeducated to Daddy King's way of thinking, but at least they tended to preach in a church, whereas Ph.D.'s tended to teach in a university. This indeed was young King's plan. “For a number of years I have been desirous of teaching in a college or a school of religion,” he wrote in his application to Boston University. “The teaching of theology should be as scientific, as thorough, and as realistic as any other discipline. In a word, scholarship is my goal.” Reverend King pressed all his objections to the fullest but, as always, relented when young King insisted that he needed further learning. Then the father circled from surrender to generosity, agreeing to pay all his son's expenses in graduate school. He also gave him a new green Chevrolet for finishing at the top of his Crozer class. The Chevy had “Power Glide,” just like Horace Whitaker's car that King admired so much.