As I have stated before my late mentor Jesse was a close and long time friend of Dr. King. As a part of my ELM education I did write a paper about Dr. King. As an American Baptist Dr. King is a very important man to our denomination and most likely the most famous American Baptist Pastor of all time.
May this essay stand as a tribute to both Dr. King and my friend Jesse's memory.
God's Eternal & Undivided Blessings to you all,
Roy
On January 15, 1929 at 501
Auburn Avenue N.E., in Atlanta Georgia, Martin Luther King, Jr. was
born at the home of his parents the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr.
and Alberta Williams King. Martin was named Michael King at birth
but his name was changed to Martin Luther around the age of six. He
was one of three children born to the King family, his siblings were
Christine King Farris and the Reverend Alfred Daniel Williams King.
Martin Junior's maternal
grandfather the Reverend A.D. Williams was a rural minister for many
years prior to moving to Atlanta in 1893 to take over the ministry of
the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Under his leadership the church went
from around 13 members to being a prominent congregation in the
Atlanta area. The Williams' had one surviving child Alberta who
married Martin Luther King, Sr. in 1926 after a courtship of eight
years. Upon the death of Reverend Williams, Martin Luther King, Sr.
took over the Pastorate of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was after
he stepped into the Pastorate that he changed his name from Michael
King, Sr. to Martin Luther King, Sr. in honor of Martin Luther the
great German Protestant Leader.
In May of 1936 Martin Jr. was
baptized though he professed to it having had little impact upon him
at the time. He entered public school at the age of five and later
attended Booker T. Washington High School. There he was a apt
student and was able to skip both the 9th and 11th
grades. At the tender age of 15 he entered Morehouse College in
Atlanta in 1944.
Martin Jr. questioned
religion and was uncomfortable with more emotional displays of
religious worship. Young Martin had originally decided against
following his family vocation of the ministry much to his father's
disappointment. It was during his Junior year at Morehouse that
Benjamin E. Mays the President of Morehouse convinced Martin that
Christianity could be used as a vehicle for social change. A
subsequent class on Biblical Criticism taught by George Kelsey
renewed Martin's faith, and taught him “that behind the legends and
myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not
escape”. In the fall of Martin's senior year at Morehouse he
informed his father of his decision to pursue the Ministry which
greatly pleased his father.
During his final semester at
Morehouse Martin was ordained and went on to further his Christian
education at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania in
1948. It was at Crozer that my mentor the late Reverend Doctor Jesse
Brown met and became a close friend of Martin. Jesse was a year
behind Martin at Crozer, but roomed across the hall from him in the
dormitory. Jesse impressed Martin when he learned that Jesse had
spent the summer before enrolling in Crozer working in Harlem and had
a great interest in Civil Rights. As a result, Jesse and Martin
became good friends, they remained in contact and maintained a close
friendship up until Martin's death in 1968. At Crozer Martin
excelled and graduated as the valedictorian of the class of 1951.
It was in his final year at
Crozer that Martin adopted Reinhold Niebbuhr as his mentor. Niebbuhr
was to become perhaps the most influential individual on Martin's
intellectual and spiritiual path. Upon graduating Seminary he went
on to pursue his doctorate at Boston University. At Boston Martin
was further influenced by his associations with Edgar Brightman and
L. Harold DeWolf. Martin's studies towards his Doctorate in
Systematic Theology showed little originality and even his
dissertation showed outright and considerable plagerism in it's
construction. What he did demonstrate was an ability to draw on and
combine a wide breath of theological and philosopical thinking and
express them clearly. This ability served him well in his future
preaching and leadership in the Civil Rights Movement.
It was while a student at
Boston Univeristy that Martin met Coretta Scott a student at the New
England Conservatory of Music in Boston. The King's were united in
marriage on June 18 of 1953 in Marion, Alabama. The King's went on
to have four children, Yolanda, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott
and Bernice. While working on his dissertation Martin Jr. took on
the Pastorate on Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama
in 1953. In 1955 Martin successfully completed his Doctorate at the
young age of 25.
The now Dr. King's carreer
took a major turn the afternoon of December 1, 1955 when Rosa Parks
refused to give up her seat on the Cleveland Avenue Bus. Her arrest
culminated in the “Montgomery Bus Boycott”. Martin was selected
on the evening of her arrest by E.D. Nixon and other black leaders in
Montgomery to lead a new organization the Montgomery Improvement
Association (MIA) in the boycott of the busing system in Montgomery
by the black community. King's skill and fresh rhetoric energized
the civil rights movement in Alabama and catapulted Martin into the
spotlight.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
lasted 382 days and involved attacks being made upon the homes of
both Dr. King and E.D. Nixon. It was a time of general intimidation
and outright violence for the African American community in
Montgomery, but ultimately after successful lawsuits and serious
financial losses the city of Montgomery repealed their segregated
public transportaion laws.
In late 1956 the United
States Supreme Court ruled against the Alabama bus segregation laws
in the case Browder v. Gayle. After which King sought to take his
nonviolent civil rights movement to the entire South. King joined
with others in January of 1957 in founding the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) of which King became the founding
president. The SCLC sought to harness the moral authority and
organize the power of the black churches.
King's emergence as a
national leader was furthered by the 1958 release of his publication
of “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story”. With
prominence and fame came increased personal consequences. King's
home was fire bombed in several incidents, and in 1958 while signing
books Izola Ware Curry stabbed him and surgery was reguired to attend
to King's injuries.
In 1959 King spent a month
visiting the birthplace of Gandhi in India. Pofoundly moved by this
experience King redoubled his dedication to America's civil rights
struggle with the counsel of Bayard Rustin a student of Gandhi's
teachings on non-violent protest. Rustin was the primary organizer
of the 1963 March on Washington and was a trusted advisor and Mentor
to King during this time period inspite of the fact that Rustin was
himself a controversial figure. Rustin was alleged to have ties to
the Communist Party of the USA and was a known homosexual and because
of this King was urged by many to sever his ties to Rustin.
In early 1960 King and his
young family moved to Atlanta in order to take the position of
co-Pastor along with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church and to be
closer to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. King's move to Atlanta
coincided with the 'sit-in' movement in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The African American students would go to racially segregated lunch
counters and seat themselves in the white only areas. Once seated
they would refuse to leave unless served, thus subjecting themselves
to abuse both verbal and physical. The movement quickly gained
traction in other cities and by August 1960 they had successfully
ended segregated lunch counters in 27 southern cities.
On October 19th,
1960 Dr. King and 75 others requested service at a segregated lunch
counter in Atlanta and were refused. This event resulted in King and
36 others being arrested. Atlanta's mayor arranged for the charges
to be dropped however, shortly thereafter King was imprisoned for a
violation of probation in regards to a traffic violation. This
imprisonment affected the 1960 Presidential election when John F.
Kennedy contacted King's wife Coretta with concern over Martin's
harsh treatment. Kennedy's actions in securing King's release are
considered by some to have been instumental in his narrow victory
over Richard M. Nixon in that Presidential election.
In the early 1960's as the
southern protest movement gained speed King was under increasing
pressure from the more militant student activists such as the
participants in the Freedom Rides. Wikipedia gives the following
information concerning the 'Freedom Riders'.
Freedom
Riders
were civil
rights activists
who rode interstate buses into the segregated
southern
United States
in 1961 and following years to test the United
States Supreme Court
decisions
Boynton
v. Virginia
(1960) and Irene
Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia
(1946). The first Freedom Ride left Washington,
D.C.,
on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New
Orleans
on May 17.
Boynton
outlawed racial
segregation
in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that
crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the
Interstate
Commerce Commission
had issued a ruling in Sarah
Keys v. Carolina Coach Company
that had explicitly denounced the Plessy
v. Ferguson
doctrine of separate
but equal
in interstate bus travel. The ICC failed to enforce its ruling, and
Jim
Crow
travel laws remained in force throughout the South.
The
Freedom Riders challenged this status quo by riding various forms of
public transportation in the South to challenge local laws or customs
that enforced segregation. The Freedom Rides, and the violent
reactions they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the American
Civil Rights Movement.
They called national attention to the disregard for the federal law
and the local violence used to enforce segregation in the southern
United States. Police arrested riders for trespassing,
unlawful
assembly,
and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged
offenses, but they often let white mobs attack them without
intervention.
In
1961 through 1962 King's different tactics from the SNCC (Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) activists became apparent in
Albany, Georgia during a prolonged protest. King was twice arrested
at demonstrations promoted by the Albany Movement. When he was
released from jail and left town without any progress some activits
questioned his militancy and role within the protest movement in the
South.
In
Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 1963 King held a demonstration
which was extremely well attended by the black community. The local
police responded by arresting King and many of his supporters, and by
using dogs and fire hoses to suppress the disapate the demonstrators.
Due to the fact that the rally was attended by many families with
children this incident led to Martin being criticized by clergy
members both black and white for endangering the children who were in
attendance. While still incarerated in the Birmingham jail King
stated the following about his committment to nonviolence.
“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster
such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to
negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”
It
was on August 28th
of 1963 that Dr. King gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech
during a rally of over 200,000 people in the shadow of the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, DC. King’s speech was the culmination of a
wave of civil rights protest activity that extended even to northern
cities. In his prepared remarks King announced that African Americans
wished to cash the “promissory note” signified in the egalitarian
rhetoric of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Closing his address with: “I say to you today, my friends, so even
though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a
dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream . . . that
one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its
creed:‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal.’” He appropriated the familiar words of “My
Country ‘Tis of Thee” before concluding, “when we allow freedom
ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from
every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when
all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles,
Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the
words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last,
thank God Almighty, we are free at last’”
King
was clearly the most influential African American in the first years
of the 1960's, due to his ability to draw national attention to
racist authorities during the organized demonstrations and due in no
small part to the power of his “I have a Dream” speech. Time
magazine named him the “Man of the Year” in 1963 and he received
a Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
As
the struggle moved from desegregation protests to mass movements
seeking economic and political gains in the North as well as the
South, King’s active involvement became more limited.
King’s
influence was reduced even more by the increasingly violent nature of
black militancy in the period after 1965. Black radicals increasingly
abandoned the nonviolent methods of King in favor of the Black
Nationalism of Malcolm
X,
whose autobiography and speeches (published after his death) reached
large audiences after his assassination in February 1965. Unable to
influence the black insurgencies that occurred in many urban areas,
King refused to abandon his firmly rooted beliefs about racial
integration and nonviolence.
In
his last book written in 1967, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or
Community?”,
King
dismissed the claim of Black Power advocates “to be the most
revolutionary wing of the social revolution taking place in the
United States,” but he admitted they met a need among African
Americans he had not previously addressed. “Psychological freedom,
a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the
long night of physical slavery,” King wrote. “The Negro will only
be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and
signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation
proclamation”
King
continued to speak out in opposition of the Vietnam War even as his
influence declined. He made his position clear in his address
“Beyond Vietnam”, given on April 4th,
1967 at Riverside Church in New York. Even though his activity in
the anti-war movement diminished his role in national race policies,
King held firm to his conviction in Gandhian nonviolence and gocial
gospel Christianity as being the best vehicles for changing the
problems of black Americans.
On
the evening of April 4,
1967 while on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Dr. King
was assassinated by James Earl Ray. Just the night before King had
stated in a speech, “But it really doesn’t matter with me now,”
he declared, “because I’ve been to the mountaintop [and] I’ve
seen the Promised Land.” He continued, “I may not get there with
you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get
to the Promised Land.”
Until
his death King remained steadfast in his commitment to the radical
transformation of American society through nonviolent activism. In
his posthumously published essay, “A Testament of Hope” (1969),
he urged African Americans to refrain from violence but also warned,
“White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot
be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”
The “black revolution” was more than a civil rights movement, he
insisted. “It is forcing America to face all its interrelated
flaws-racism, poverty, militarism and materialism”.
Dr.
King received several hundred awards for his leadership in the Civil
Rights Movement.
Among
them were:
Selected
one of the most outstanding personalities of the year by Time,
1957.
Listed
in Who's Who in America, 1957.
the
Spingarn Medal from NAACP, 1957.
The
Russwurm Award from the National Newspaper Publishers, 1957.
The
Second Annual Achievment -- The Guardian Association of the
Police Department of New York, 1958.
Link
Magazine of New Dehli, India, listed Dr. King as one of the
sixteen world leaders who had contributred most to the
advancement of freedom during 1959.
-
Named
American of the Decade by Laundry, Dry Cleaning, and Die
Workers International Union, 1963.
The
John Dewey Award, from the United Federation of Teachers, 1964.
The
John F. Kennedy Award, from the Catholic Interracial Council of
Chicago, 1964.
The
Nobel
Peace Prize in 1964. At age 35, Dr. King was the youngest
man, the second American, and the third black man awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize.
The
Marcus Garvey Prize for Human Rights, presented by the Jamacian
Government. (posthumously) 1968.
- The Rosa L. Parks
Award, presented by the Southern Christian Leadrship Conference.
(posthumously) 1968.
Honorary
Degree
Dr. King was awarded honorary
degrees from numerous colleges and universities in the United States
and several foreign countries. They include the following:
- 1957
- Doctor of Humane Letters,
Morehouse College
- Doctor of Laws, Howard
University
- Doctor of Divinity, Chicago
Theological Seminary
-
1958
- Doctor of Laws, Morgan State
College
- Doctor of Humanities, Central
State College
-
1959
- Doctor of Divinity, Boston
University
-
1961
- Doctor of Laws, Lincoln
University
- Doctor of Laws, University of
Bridgeport
-
1962
- Doctor of Civil Laws, Bard
College
-
1963
- Doctor of Letters, Keuka
College
-
1964
- Doctor of Divinity, Wesleyan
College
- Doctor of Laws, Jewish
Theological Seminary
- Doctor of Laws, Yale University
- Doctor of Divinity, Springfield
College
-
1965
- Doctor of Laws, Hofstra
University
- Doctor of Human Letters,
Oberlin College
- Doctor of Social Science,
Amsterdam Free University
- Doctor of Divinity, St. Peter's
College
-
1967
- Doctor of Civil Law, University
of New Castle Upon Tyne
- Doctor of Laws, Grinnell
College, Grinnell, Iowa
