Teachers of a King

I produced the following reading for my students as part of my effort to help them better appreciate Martin Luther King.  This reading was preceded by our discussions of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  Although these readings and our discussions surprised my students and succeeded in expanding their understandings, we only succeeded in touching the tip of the iceberg.  Feeling the pressure to move on, we only studied the young King.  In the future I very much hope to help students examine the evolution of his thought.  

An excellent documentary of Bayard Rustin, called "Brother Outsider," is available to stream on Netflix.    

Education is something that is never finished.

When Martin Luther King was a young man studying at Crozer University, his advisor was a pacifist: King, however, was not.  In 1949, King heard the famous reverend and civil rights activist A.J. Muste lecture on Gandhi.  Muste had written a famous book called War Without Violence, in which he described how love could be used as a weapon to fight oppression.  After the lecture, the two men had a heated argument, with King passionately disagreeing that love and nonviolence could solve America’s racial and social problems.  One of King’s classmates later remembered, “King sure as hell wasn’t any pacifist then.”  One year later, however, King would hear another lecture from a man named Mordecai Johnson, and his ideas would change dramatically. 

In Martin Luther King’s book Stride Towards Freedom: the Montgomery Story, he writes that the philosophers he was studying at Crozer University caused him to doubt that the power of love could solve social problems.  In this following passage King describes how his mind was changed:  

…one Sunday afternoon I travelled to Philadelphia to hear a sermon by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University… Dr. Johnson had just returned from a trip to India, and, to my great interest, he spoke of the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.  His message was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.

Dr. Mordecai Johnson

Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously.  As I read I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance…  The whole concept of Satyagraha (Satya is truth which equals love, and agraha is force; Satyagraha, therefor, means truth-force or love-force) was profoundly significant to me. 

As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.  Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships.  The ‘turn the other cheek’ philosophy and the ‘love your neighbor’ philosophy were only valid, I felt, when individuals were in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations were in conflict a more realistic approach seemed necessary.  But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.

Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.  Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation.  In was in the Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.

King, inspired by Mordecai Johnson’s mixture of Gandhi’s and Jesus’ teachings, had come to believe in the power of nonviolence and love after all.  But his university education was just the beginning of his understanding of these subjects.  King had studied Gandhi through text, but he had yet to study nonviolent revolutionary methods through real-life action.  At the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, King’s understanding of Gandhi was more like a seed beginning to sprout than a fully-grown plant.  Luckily, he had much more experienced advisors who supported his growth.  Civil Rights scholar Nico Slate writes:

When Bayard Rustin visited King’s home during the early days of the Montgomery boycott [in 1955], he found armed guards on the porch and weapons scattered throughout the house.  Did this mean that King had yet to embrace non-violence?  Rustin later stated, ‘The fact of the matter is, that when I got to Montgomery, Dr. King had very limited notions of how a nonviolent protest should be carried out.’”

 

Bayard Rustin

Although King had studied Gandhi while attending university, Bayard Rustin had been to India and worked personally with Gandhi’s movement.  Returning to the United States, he helped organize the Freedom Rides of 1947.  When he met Martin Luther King, he immediately recognized his leadership potential.  Bayard Rustin was one of many African Americans that believed that America needed a “black Gandhi”… an African American prophet who could unify the people.  Bayard Rustin made it his mission to support King in becoming this prophetic figure.  Rustin became one of the main organizers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which became King’s organization (and is still run today by one of King’s four children, Bernice King.) 

There is a saying that a president, no matter how skilled, is only as good as their advisors.  The same was true for Martin Luther King.  He led a movement that struck a major blow to white supremacy.  But without teachers like Mordecai Johnson to help him develop his ideas, without men like Bayard Rustin helping him strategize every step of the way, without the historical giants of Gandhi and Jesus to stand on for vision, Dr. King would not have been the historical figure we know today.  To acknowledge this is not to diminish the standing of Dr. King – but to gain a realistic assessment of him as a human being. 

Dr. King remained committed to revolutionary love and nonviolence, to the teachings of Gandhi and Jesus, until his dying day.  However, his understanding of these ideas continued to mature.  Over the years, his understanding deepened and changed dramatically.  It is fair to say that the King of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was still young in his thinking.