The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (39 page)

Taylor rhythmically measures his speech, repeating the forces that cannot by themselves make for great preaching. He builds up tension for the ultimate release in the announcement of what constitutes the power of proclamation. “It is not in the tone of the voice. It is not in the eloquence of the preacher. It is not in the gracefulness of his gestures. It is not in the magnificence of his congregation. It is in a heart broken, and put together, by the eternal God!”

Taylor wrestles with some of the inevitable sadness that life brings—for instance, the suffering that comes with aging. “I have reached a very unflattering and unenviable time. I have more money than I have time. And that’s not good. It was much better the other way. But then I’ll take it—what can I do?”

As we discussed his fifty-two years of marriage to Laura, he said, “I sometimes see her lying in repose now, and [he pauses], a great sadness comes over me because I know one of us must leave the other. I don’t know which I fear the most. [He pauses again]. But, what can we do?”

Tragically Laura was struck and killed by a New York sanitation truck in February 1995. Despite this great loss, one suspects that Taylor will do what he has always done, whether life favored him or assaulted him. He will, as long as he is able, preach the Word of God. That has been his peculiar gift and burden, his bread and butter for more than fifty years. And out of his own suffering, he has shaped a ministry that has spoken to the hearts of men and women throughout the world. And because of his peculiar gift for making mortals see the light of God, no matter how dimmed by human frailty and failure, who can doubt that it will continue to shine on him in the hour of his greatest need.

AT A RECENT CONFERENCE ON BLACK MALES, I shared keynote responsibilities with two other speakers. One of them was a forty–something civil rights leader and Baptist preacher. It was February, known in my circles as “National Rent-a-Negro Month”
¹
in homage to the flurry of Black History Month activities that colleges and corporations cram into those twenty-eight days (as if no other time was appropriate to recognize black achievement). I hustled into the conference late, arriving just in time to hear the closing comments of the civil rights leader, who by now was “putting on the rousements”—firing the crowd up with
his astute analysis of the crises confronting black men. He was sailing fast now, punctuating his speech with powerful phrases he knew would elicit the audience’s approval, an old trick that we Baptist preachers use to send our congregations out to do the Lord’s work.

Just as the speaker reached the climax of his oration, I was whisked to the back entry of the stage to await my turn to speak, since all three keynoters were presenting in rapid succession. As I watched my colleague finish, I got an even better sense of the glorious rapport he had established with his audience, a sublime connection that gives both parties a rush that few other events can match. As he offered his husky-voiced parting thoughts, the crowd leaped to its feet, and so did I, gleefully grabbing him as he came off stage in a brotherly bear hug, wrapping him in the audience’s affection as their unofficial emissary.

“Hey, Doc, how ya doin?” my colleague brightly greeted me.

“Man, you tore it up,” I enthused. “I got a hard act to follow, boy.”

“Aw, man,” he graciously responded, “you know you gonna turn it out.”

“I don’t know, brother,” I shot back. “You look like you killed every
thang
in there. And what ain’t dead, you done put in intensive care.”

We both cracked up, bathing each other in the occasionally obnoxious mutual admiration to which Baptist preachers are eagerly given. As I was being introduced, my colleague offered his regrets about having to leave for another engagement. I readily understood, since I would have to leave right after my speech for the next town in my Black History Month tour.

As the crowd warmly greeted me, I let on that my colleague was difficult to follow but that I’d try to do my best (a Baptist preacher way of begging for sympathy and winning the crowd). My grasp at pity seemed to be working, as the crowd urged me on with “amens” and “go ’heads.” I slid easily enough into my speech, but at a crucial period—or, more exactly, at a crucial three-minute passage that I had used in many of my speeches over the past year—I felt the enthusiasm of the audience flag. Usually my passage drew uproarious guffaws and penetrating “humhs,” but now I was greeted with sprinkled laughter and moderate “huhs,” the kind that feel more obligatory than genuine. I pressed on, not giving it much thought, chalking the lukewarm response up to my poor delivery or to having misjudged my audience. But the rest of my speech went well. I too got a standing ovation and was grateful for the audience’s loving endorsement. But after my speech, I wondered again why my passage hadn’t gone over as hugely as it usually did. Not until later did I discover what had gone wrong.

Three weeks after my keynote speech, I had a speaking engagement in a nearby town. The woman who picked me up from the airport for the hour-long drive to the university remarked that she had attended the conference on black males and had enjoyed all of our speeches.

“I know you must have wondered why, when you got to a certain point in your speech, people didn’t respond as enthusiastically as you perhaps thought they would,” my host offered, impressing me with her savvy while piquing my interest.

“Yeah, I did wonder what had happened,” I confessed.

“Well, the speaker before you had gone through the same routine in his speech,” she revealed. “And since the audience had just heard it, their response was certainly muted.”

“O-h-h-h-h,” I said. “Now I get it.”

Although I was friendly with the civil rights leader, I took it as a matter of pride to point out to my host that
he
had ripped
me
off, and not vice versa. As soon as my host’s comments hit my ears, I recalled that the civil rights leader’s wife had heard me preach a few months before at a black Baptist church, and since her husband couldn’t attend, she promised that she would give him a tape of my sermon. I had used my dramatic passage in that sermon, and of course, he had obviously listened to the tape and lifted my passage for his speeches. In spite of my brief fit of ego, I couldn’t stay sore at my colleague. After all, Baptist preachers are always ripping each other off and using the stories, illustrations, phrases, verbal tics, mannerisms—and in some cases, whole sermons—we glean from other preachers. That’s how we learn to preach; by preaching like somebody else until we learn how to preach like ourselves, when our own voice emerges from the colloquy of voices we convene in our homiletical imagination. And in the end, the only justification for such edifying thievery among preachers is that the Word is being preached and the ultimate Author of what we say is being glorified.

In fact, the line I had used about the civil rights leader having “killed every
thang
in there” was torn straight from the transcript
²
of a thousand other conversations between black Baptist preachers congratulating one another for their rhetorical might. Then, too, I knew the humorous three-step rhetorical rule of citation by which many black Baptist preachers operate. The first time they repeat something they hear, they say, “like Martin Luther King said . . .” The second time they repeat it, they say, “like somebody said . . .” The third time they repeat it, they say, “like I always say . . .” None of this means that there aren’t rules of fair play—that one shouldn’t work exceedingly hard in preaching with a Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other (an idea ripped off from theologian Karl Barth),
³
that one shouldn’t hunt for inspiration in all sorts of unusual places, and that one shouldn’t feed one’s flock with the fruits of rigorous intellectual and spiritual engagement. At their best, the practices of black Baptist preachers
⁴
remind us that knowledge is indeed communal, that rhetoric is shaped in the interplay of a rich variety of language users, and that what is old becomes new again by being recast in forceful and imaginative ways.

All of this is crucial if we are to make sense of the recent revelation that Martin Luther King, Jr., borrowed other people’s words in his published and preached sermons.
⁵
Of course, nothing I have said can account for the even more disturbing charge that King was a plagiarist in his academic work. It is now clear that he plagiarized huge chunks of his dissertation and graduate school papers and that he carelessly cited sources in his seminary and undergraduate papers. This news is especially jarring to those who view King as an American original, a figure
whose social vision came wrapped in brilliant metaphors and memorable phrases. The notion that a figure who commanded the English language with such authority was in truth a borrower of other people’s words is too hard for King’s admirers to swallow. For many Americans, King’s example is law, his words scripture. In fact, King’s memory has become a racial Esperanto. His life has been made into a moral language that allows whites to translate their hopes and fears about black life into meanings that black folk intuitively understand. Much of King’s power hinged on his use of language, indeed, his use
as
language. His moral authority was largely rooted in his unique ability to express eloquently the claims of black freedom.

In that light, understanding what King did with language—that is, getting at his complex rhetorical habits and the presuppositions he brought to his spoken and written work—will give us a better sense of how to judge his achievements and failures. By explaining how King absorbed and recycled rhetorical sources and how he creatively fused a variety of voices in finding his own voice, one may be charged with excusing his verbal theft by “converting King’s blemish into a grand achievement.”
⁶
Worse yet, one may be charged with appealing to some mythic racial practice to justify his borrowing, but certainly not borrowed, genius. But that is to confuse explanation with justification. Such a conclusion clings desperately to the naive belief that we must ignore context and circumstance in making moral judgments.

King’s borrowing, and at times, outright theft, of others’ words must be viewed in two arenas: his sermons in the pulpit and in print, and his scholarly writing in the academy before that. The most sophisticated arguments to date about King’s use of language in the pulpit and in print have been made by scholars Keith D. Miller and Richard Lischer. Miller, in his insightful
Voice of Deliverance
, persuasively argues that King heavily borrowed from white liberal preachers in his published sermons to further the cause of civil rights.
⁷
He ingeniously seized on the ethical and political dimensions of white liberal sermons—including their emphasis on the Christian social gospel, their antimilitarism, their critiques of capitalism and communism, and even their inchoate antiracism—to cast his own arguments for black emancipation in terms that white liberal listeners would find irresistible.
⁸
By fusing his voice with white liberal voices, King practiced, in Miller’s term, the black oral art of “voice-merging,” an ancient practice in black religious circles.
⁹
Miller argues that in such circles, speech is seen not as private but as communal property. In black oral culture black folk learn to refine rhetoric and shape identity by joining their voices to the voices of their ancestors and their contemporary inspirations. Thus, King didn’t view such an art as verbal theft but as a time-honored, community-blessed tradition with deep roots in black culture.

Richard Lischer agrees in substance with this aspect of Miller’s argument. His brilliantly argued
The Preacher King
explores the rich rhetorical resources that King inherited as a prince of the black church.
¹⁰
While Miller analyzes King’s written sermons and speeches, Lischer pays close attention to King’s spoken word, poring over the unedited audiotapes and transcripts of King’s sermons and speeches.
Lischer argues that King’s real voice was edited out of his published sermons
¹¹
as he and his publisher sought to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Where Miller finds virtue in such a strategy, Lischer smells trouble. Not only is King’s spoken voice missing—a voice full of cultural allusion, racial wisdom, and black rhythms that were muted under the dogma of pen and page—but his theological and ideological evolution—a full-blown radicalism that was especially apparent in his highly personal, magnificently improvised, and deeply colloquial black sermonizing—is completely whitewashed. Lischer disagrees with the notion that “in his plagiarism King was simply adhering to the standards of African-American . . . preaching.”
¹²
He claims that it “is one thing to assert” that language is a shared commodity in black culture,
¹³
which he concedes, but “it is quite another to translate that generalization into a rationale for academic falsification.” Finally, Lischer thinks that Miller overstates the extent to which King borrowed.
¹⁴
After all, he argues, white liberal ministers borrowed freely from each other (Miller also makes this point).

Despite their disagreements, Miller and Lischer offer persuasive arguments about how King used his intellectual and rhetorical gifts to bring about social change. Both authors help us understand exactly how King went about the formidable task of drawing on black cultural and religious traditions while shaping a message of liberation that could sway the conscience of white America. By digging deep into the history of black oral traditions, they help us understand a much celebrated but little understood practice: black preaching. Their brilliant explorations of the mechanics, methods, and modes of black sacred rhetoric help us see that black preachers often give their listeners reason to hope and fuel to survive by spinning words into the Word. Black preachers coin phrases, stack sentences, accumulate wise sayings, and borrow speech to convince black folk, as the gospel song says, to “run on to see what the end is gonna be.” King had a genius for knowing what intellectual and spiritual resources to bring together, and to know when such a fusion would make the most sense and the greatest impact on his hearers.