Martin Luther King, Youth and Schooling, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 1 & 2

How did the youth and schooling of Martin Luther
King prepare him for his civil rights activism?
Was his family involved in the ministry and civil rights
struggles?
How did his study of philosophy and the social justice
gospel prepare him for his future as a civil rights
leader and orator?

In his biography of Martin Luther
King, David Levering Lewis
quoted Clarence Darrow, the
famous defense lawyer in the
Scopes Monkey Trial of the
Twenties:
“No other offense has ever been
visited with such severe penalties
as seeking to help the
oppressed,”
and Walter Rauschenbusch,
“The championship of social
justice is almost the only way left
open to a Christian nowadays to
gain the crown of martyrdom.”

Our thumbnail includes a picture of the statue of Booker T
Washington at his old high school.
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Martin Luther King was building on the efforts of prior generations of
black leaders. The first generation of black leaders included Frederick
Douglass, a former slave who escaped slavery in the 1830’s, and who
learned how to read mainly through his own initiative. His oratory
inspired black and white abolitionists, and his slave autobiography was a
best seller. Many whites at the time had a hard time accepting that a
former slave was capable of such an intellectual achievement.
Booker T Washington was a second-generation black leader, he learned
how to read after he was emancipated as a teenager at the end of the
Civil War. He was asked to organize the Tuskegee Institute, a black trade
school. He sought to give blacks a good education in the trades so they
could earn both a living and the respect of the white man through thrift
and hard work.

https://youtu.be/yxDnJ6sBoJc
https://youtu.be/7VkzhyNnuQk
https://youtu.be/DAEg463i-Tc
https://youtu.be/M0sx85oMRQA

WEB Du Bois, a third-generation black leader, was born during Reconstruction,
grew up in Massachusetts, and was granted scholarships to attend college at both
Harvard and Berlin, eventually earning a doctorate at Harvard. He was more of a
journalist and historian than an administrator, writing a groundbreaking history of
Reconstruction that became the dominant historical interpretation in the Civil
Rights era of the Sixties.
Not only was WEB Du Bois the editor and main contributor of the NAACP magazine,
the Crisis, but he also contributed many articles to the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and
many other monthly magazines and leading newspapers, shaping public opinion in
favor of Civil Rights. Martin Luther King differed in that he was more of an orator
than a writer, although he also wrote many magazine and newspaper articles, but
oratory was the more important skill in the age of television. His televised speeches
and appearances likely reached far more people than did the writings of WEB Du
Bois.

https://youtu.be/x212gx1lNIA
https://youtu.be/J3TnQyig6Nk
https://youtu.be/CK4V3e-TPFU
https://youtu.be/JeRCM4PAqPk

WEB Du Bois was a co-founder of the NAACP. The tensions
between Booker T Washington, the Great
Accommodationist, and WEB Du Bois, the activist, remain
today. Booker T Washington spent much of his time
fundraising for Tuskegee and other black colleges, which
meant that he could not veer from his accommodationist
stance without endangering his funding from wealthy
white industrialists in the North.

Although WEB Du Bois was the mouthpiece of the NAACP in its
early days, as time passed, their attorney Thurgood Marshall,
who later was appointed a Supreme Court Justice, concentrated
on challenging the Jim Crow system in the federal courts. As the
Civil Rights movement matured, it relied less on white liberals as
blacks became more involved in the administration of the civil
rights organizations, and the NAACP had to compete with other
civil rights organizations. These trends continued as the Civil
Rights movement matured during Martin Luther King’s lifetime.

https://youtu.be/N2ZqixUxPmo https://youtu.be/Ntjl4xqQSfw
https://youtu.be/MNhkq69CIfo https://youtu.be/YwgrKvIjoc0

Young Mike, or Martin Luther King Jr

Reflecting on this childhood: although his father
preached at a prestigious black Atlanta church,
Martin Luther King Jr, called Mike in his childhood,
did not want to follow this calling when he first
attended college. Initially, Mike dismissed the
ministry as not being intellectual, as being too
archaic to address contemporary problems.

The biographer David Levering
Lewis observes that “the King
family belonged to what is known
as the school hard preaching, of
which cult of personality, and
occasional pinch of exploitation,
and sulfurous evangelism are
indispensable ingredients.” Martin’s
maternal grandfather founded the
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta,
and his father, Martin Luther King
Sr, grew it into one of the largest
and most prestigious black Baptist
Churches in Atlanta.

His family was known for their involvement with civil
rights. After the disastrous 1906 Atlanta race riots,
his maternal grandfather was one of the charter
members of the local NAACP chapter. He helped
defeat a local bond issue that did not fund any new
black schools and advocated building Booker T
Washington High School, the first black school in
Atlanta for secondary education.

His father, Martin Luther King Sr, did not tolerate
racial effrontery and particularly did not like being
called BOY by policemen. He was resolute, once he
beat up his father for drunkenly abusing his mother.
Even in the depths of the Depression, when two-
thirds of black males were unemployed, he was able
to purchase a brick house for his family. His major
weakness was that he doted on his three children.

Jimmy Carter
and Rosalynn
Carter sing with
Martin Luther
King, Sr., Coretta
Scott King,
Andrew Young
and other civil
rights leader
during a visit to
Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta

Unlike other smaller Southern cities, there was a sizable
black professional class in Atlanta, including professors,
businessmen, insurance executives, and professionals like
doctors, dentists, and morticians.
Like WEB Du Bois, he discovered that his white playmates
distanced themselves from him once they started
advancing in school. The parents of two of his white
playmates forbade them to associate with him when they
were old enough to attend elementary school.

Attending the Black Morehouse College

When he enrolled in the black Morehouse College, his first
interest was in medicine, a field that he was not
temperamentally suited for. Mike developed a love for
philosophy, both ancient and modern. He was both attracted
and repelled by Marx, but Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience
affected him deeply. He then decided to pursue a major in
Sociology, much as WEB Du Bois did.
Mike was not involved in student government, though he
belonged to the interracial college chapter of the NAACP. He was
also active in the oratorical forum and won a prize in oratory.

Mike published an article in
the school newspaper on
The Purpose of Education,
where he concluded that
“the function of education
is to teach one to think
intensively and critically.
But education which stops
with efficiency may prove
the greatest menace to
society. The most
dangerous criminal may be
the man gifted with reason
but with no morals.”

Attending Integrated Crozier Seminary

A family friend, Reverend Barbour, was an influential alumnus of
Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and he suggested
that Mike earn a Bachelor of Divinity degree at Crozer. This was a
mixed-race school, perhaps at the time it was half-white and
half-black, as Dr Wikipedia says its prominent alumni are split
between the races. He would occasionally dine at the house of
the seminary president. WEB Du Bois had also dined with many
professors, as colleges and seminaries had far fewer students
then than they do now.
Mike did not want to be seen as a typical Negro by his mixed
classmates.

Lewis writes, “Mike dressed
impeccably,” “and studied relentlessly.”
He did not want to be too friendly or
smile too much, he did not want to be
“thought of as a happy-go-lucky darky.”
Mike remembers, “I was well aware of
the typical white stereotype of the
Negro, that he is always late, that he’s
loud and always laughing, that he’s
dirty and messy, and for a while, I was
terribly conscious of identifying with
it.”

Gandhi spinning yarn, in the late 1920s
In his Psychology of Religious Personalities
class, Mike was introduced to Gandhi’s
philosophy of nonviolence, and he also read
the works of Reinhold Neibuhr. As Lewis
writes, “Neibuhr contended that the
pacificism of Gandhi could succeed only if
the oppressors shared the morality of the
oppressed. The British in India were wise,
fundamentally decent, and tired. Gandhi’s
campaign made sense there.” In the post-
war era, enough Southerners had dulled
the harsh racial attitudes sufficiently so that
real civil rights reform would be possible
when confronted by nonviolent protests.

Mike was especially attracted to the Social Gospel of
Walter Rauschenbusch, and the philosophy behind
Pope Leo XIII’s papal decree of Rerum Novarum,
which advocated a balance between capital and
labor, so the working man could live in dignity,
earning a fair share of profits. This encyclical was the
inspiration for the Catholic doctrine of the
preferential option for the poor.

Mike would later write,
“It has been my
conviction ever since
reading Rauschenbusch
that any religion which
professes to be
concerned about the
souls of men and is not
concerned about the
social and economic
conditions that scar the
soul is a spiritually
moribund religion.”

Mike read many philosophical works and
participated in debates in the Philosophical Club. He
was distressed over the works of Nietzsche. He
intensely studied the works of Karl Marx for some
months.

As Lewis writes, “Mike was pained
by Marxism because it was the most
compromising of Christian heresies,
arising out of the failure of the
Christian church to resist the social
exploitation and moral indifference
rampant with the growth of
industrial capitalism.” Mike wrote,
“with all its false assumptions and
evil methods, communism grew as a
protest against the hardships of the
underprivileged.”

Unlike WEB Du Bois in his latter years, and like
many black leaders of his day, Martin Luther
King was careful not to seem sympathetic with
communism in these Cold War years. For his
doctoral dissertation, he investigated the
divergent theisms of the theologians Henry
Wieman and Paul Tillich.

This is how the
Bolsheviks rule
in the Cossack
villages.

Women, Go into Cooperatives, 1918
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918

Like WEB Du Bois, Mike fell in love with a white lady he met in a café.
They were planning on getting married, but both sets of parents pleaded
with them to call off the marriage because of the immense
complications faced by interracial couples. In the Jim Crow era, it would
mean that Mike could never serve as a pastor to either a white or black
congregation.
Mike was introduced by a friend to his future wife, Coretta Scott. At first,
she was reluctant to date someone who was preparing to serve as a
minister, but his persistent wooing enticed her to accept his marriage
proposal. Although she would later become active in the Civil Rights
struggle after his assassination, when she was younger Mike convinced
her to concentrate on being a housewife.

Coretta King with her husband MLK and daughter Yolanda, 1956

In our reflections on Levering David Lewis’ biography of
Martin Luther King, we will concentrate on the major
iconic events of his struggle for great Civil Rights of blacks,
including the Montgomery Bus Boycott when he rose of
national prominence; the bombings and brutality of the
Birmingham Boycott, his March on Washington and his I
Have a Dream speech at the Reflecting Pool in
Washington, DC, the bloody march on Selma, his fight for
more equitable housing in Chicago, and finally, when his
life was cut short by his assassination.

David Levering Lewis was a professor who lectured in both Ghana and in
leading American universities. He was preparing to write a biography of
Martin Luther King a year before his assassination, it was published
sixteen months later. KING, a Biography, is a joy to read, but since it was
one of his first published books, his style of writing falls slightly below
that of his biography of WEB Du Bois, which he wrote fifteen years later.
After you finish reading his biography, you must read the preface, as it
offers additional commentary of the various phases of his life.
One scandal that close examination of his life revealed long after his
untimely demise was the undisputable fact that his doctoral thesis was
plagiarized. Lewis was disappointed to learn this, he wrote an academic
article discussing this topic.

Lewis states in the preface of his biography:
“A picture emerges of King the young
graduate student cavalierly submitting
essays and dissertation chapters that were
mosaics of the works of others,” which may
have been fine had he simply credited them
in the footnotes. Lewis concludes: “In
retrospect, perhaps I could have been more
scrupulous in my assessment of King’s
graduate student performance,” as the book
went through several editions. “The same
should have been true of his apparently
delinquent professors,” although plagiarism
was harder to catch in a pre-computer age.

What makes this plagiarism mystifying is how his professors praised his
scholarship. We also know that although Martin Luther King was not only well-
read, that he also took these teachings to heart; nevertheless, he was not an
original thinker, that was not his gift.
Another scandal was Martin’s numerous affairs. These were known during his life,
though they were not often mentioned in the press. The FBI discovered them
when they wiretapped him, they made sure to tell his family and supporters to
damage his reputation. This weakness he shared with WEB Du Bois, and in fact, Du
Bois’ second wife was one of his former illicit lovers. The lovers of WEB Du Bois
were also intellectual admirers of his works, whether that was true for Martin
Luther King is hard to say.
In his preface, Lewis also reviews the many biographies that followed his, including
the thousands of pages trilogy by Taylor Branch that follows the life and events of
all of the civil rights leaders of the day.

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Martin Luther King, Youth and Schooling, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 1 & 2

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