Americans throughout the country are today commemorating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But how much do you really know about this great social leader and reformer? I admittedly didn't know much, and still don't. However, some time ago I was at my local thrift store perusing the book section, as I am wont to do. A book caught my eye: The autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Clayborne Carson (published 1998 by Intellectual Properties Management, Inc. in association with Grand Central Publishing).
The book completely remade my understanding of Dr. King. The basic narrative that they teach you in elementary school is all in there, but I was struck by how much more there is to the story. In particular, I was struck by the earlier, formative years in Dr. King's life. The autobiography, assembled from various sources and published posthumously, acquaints the reader with Dr. King's early personal, social, and intellectual life. It illustrates the profound depth and complexity of Dr. King's thought. It produced in me an appreciation of how Dr. King wasn't just born with an unusual resolve and appetite for social justice. Rather, he developed and cultivated it through his education and experience.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is remembered first and foremost as a civil rights leader and advocate for social justice, and rightly so. But we mustn't forget his equally important roles as a preacher, an educator, a critical scholar, and an everyday human being. Too often, Dr. King is remembered merely for his passion, eloquence and determination in the face of blatant injustice. But where did those qualities come from? By reviewing Dr. King's posthumous autobiography, we learn the backstory to Dr. King's ascent to become one of the greatest social reformers in the history of the world.
Two things stand out that are not brought up in your friendly neighborhood elementary or middle school. (1) Dr. King's Christian basis for reform, and (2) his scholarship in Western philosophy.
1) Dr. King's social agenda was underwritten by Christianity
The first overlooked issue is Dr. King's profoundly Christian and religious worldview. Yes, everybody knows that Dr. King was a reverend. But due to separation of church and state, schools just prefer not to get into that. Partly it is for fear of alienating those of different religious or nonreligious backgrounds, or for fear of accusations of indoctrination, particularly if the teacher is sympathetic to Dr. King's religious persuasion.
To be sure, I am deeply grateful for separation of church and state, one of the qualities that set the fledgling United States apart from old Europe. I support the blocking of interference by government in religious and private beliefs. But I feel that this has been carried to an extreme that misinterprets the spirit of the law. Separation of church and state does not mean that children should have no education about religion during public schooling, it only means that children should never be educated into any particular religion in public school.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a case in point. His role as civil rights leader tends to be unnecessarily stripped of the religious historical context. Schools are not going to inadvertently push children and adolescents toward any particular religious viewpoint by relating the historical facts of King's Christian profession. Schools should simply portray his historical background adequately and accurately, so that students have a realistic appreciation of where various impulses toward social justice have sprung from. While liberal and left-minded social critics take on increasingly agnostic attitudes as a rule, there is an impulse to communicate a social justice agenda that is underwritten by no religious preference one way or another. We come to presume that such an agenda should be consensual and unobjectionable to all. This is simply not the case. Try as you might, there is no skirting the issue of religion when it comes to dealing with social reform and civil rights. As soon as you make an appeal to the U.S. constitution (as the young King did in his award-winning essay, "The Negro and the Constitution"), you capitulate to a religiously-conceived document. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King's greatest criticism of Communism was that it was atheistic:
"I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secular and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian I believe that there is a creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence of all reality — a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter." (p. 20)
Religion has done much to both advance civil liberties as well as curtail them. Dr. King's historical trajectory is a nice counterexample to the association in some people's minds between Christianity and backward social conservatism. Fred Rogers is another. One thing is certain: Dr. King chose his Christian cosmology and negotiated its terms within Western liberalism.
I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything that came under its name. I was absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason. The basic change in my thinking came when I began to question the liberal doctrine of man. My thinking went through a state of transition. … The more I observed the tragedies of history and man's shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin. Liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Moreover, I came to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil I came to feel that liberalism had been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations. … Of course there is one phase of liberalism that I hope to cherish always: its devotion to the search for truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind, its refusal to abandon the best light of reason. Its contribution to the philological-historical criticism of the biblical literature has been of immeasurable value. (pp. 24-25)
Thus, for King, theology was a foundation but also a site of interrogation and even criticism. King wrote,
I guess I accepted biblical studies uncritically until I was about twelve years old. But this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and precocious type. At the age of thirteen, I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly. (p. 6)
Because of my own religious upbringing and arrival at doubt, I was particularly moved by King's depiction of his childhood religious questions, his eventual refusal of Christian fundamentalism for a more scholarly attitude toward the Bible, and his persisting and informed faith that conveyed warmth, maturity, and substance. It was a faith in the divine side of humanity tempered by the somber reality of human oppression.
Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them. (p. 261)
2) Dr. King's philosophy of non-violence was a product of voracious scholarly reading and criticism
Martin Luther King, Jr. carries the prestigious title of "Doctor." He was a brilliant scholar of the highest rate. This is not emphasized in elementary school simply because the intellectual material is not yet accessible. Unfortunately, most Americans do not study Dr. King later in life when they are educated adults and are capable of appreciating the sophisticated intellectual heritage that undergirded his philosophy of non-violent social protest.
Dr. King was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He completed his studies at Booker T. Washington high school and entered Morehouse College at the age of fifteen. By nineteen he would enter Crozer Seminary and complete the bachelor's three years later. He did graduate work at Boston University, completing the doctorate in theology and opting for a career as a preacher after he briefly considered becoming a university scholar and educator. As a preacher, he was an articulate and penetrating orator and educator whose sermons bridged his academic training and his empathy for everyday human situations and problems.
What I found most interesting about Dr. King's education was that he ardently devoured all of the best philosophy and social thought that he could gain access to. His reading ranged over Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, Locke, Thoreau, Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Gandhi. After a long intellectual search, it was this last thinker — Gandhi — who provided what King sought.
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. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking. The intellectual and mofral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contracts theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. (p. 24)
Nonviolence for King was far more than showing personal restraint in the face of oppression in hopes that a good outcome would result. It was a calculated, effective, and morally justifiable means of social transformation culled from the greatest sources of social thought history had to offer. When I recognized this fact, my understanding of Dr. King was transformed. He became, for me, the leading interpreter of all of Western philosophy and the supreme example of how rigorous intellectual training can prepare the soil for transformative changes when set to work and not hidden away in academic journals. It justified for me my own appetite for philosophy, even in my apparently innocent field of school mathematics reform.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s intellectual development was not who he read or what he concluded, but how he read. Every source that King encountered, he reviewed it holistically and critically, surveying its merits and appraising its flaws. He would so often find partial truths that needed sifting and sorting out, oppositions that needed reconciling. Such was the case with the tension between capitalism and Marxism.
In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers--from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yes and a partial no. Insofar as Marx posited a metaphysical materialism, an ethical relativism, and a strangulating totalitarianism, I responded with an unambiguous no; but insofar as he pointed to weaknesses of traditional capitalism, contributed to the growth of a definite self-consciousness of the masses, and challenged the social conscience of the Christian churches, I responded with a definite yes. (p. 21-22)
If Dr. Martin Luther King still has lessons to teach us in 2020, perhaps one of them is to read sources and critique arguments with both an unambiguous "no" and a definite "yes." That is how we learn; that is what it means to become educated. That is one way that society can slowly overcome its own shortcomings and remake itself. It is one way that we as individuals can gradually transcend the limited perspectives into which we are enculturated or indoctrinated. It is the way to produce empathy for another who is not like you and set in motion a dialectical relationship of confronting error and overturning misunderstanding. It is the path to mutual respect, tolerance, human empathy, and to substantive as opposed to nominal multiculturalism and social justice.