Four days after King’s death at age thirty-nine, Coretta King and Ralph Abernathy led thousands of people on a march through downtown Memphis, mourning King’s death and supporting the garbage workers’ strike. In her remarks that day, Coretta King spoke of her husband’s deepest yearnings, the covenant he had sworn to himself that, by sacrificing himself, dying if necessary, for a cause that was “right and just,” his life would end in the most redemptive way possible.15
Chapter 22
Redemption
One has to conquer the fear of death if he is going to do anything constructive in life and take a stand against evil.
—MLK, comment at news conference in Los Angeles, February 24, 1965
KING HAD EXPECTED to die a violent death, had accepted the fate as inescapable and reconciled himself to it. But he had not sought martyrdom. A martyr invites death in a quest for glory or heavenly reward. King wanted to live a long life, as he had declared movingly at Mason Temple. He wanted to live, but he had a higher calling. As Ralph Abernathy would say, “He loved life, and he wanted to live, but his commitment to the cause of Christ [and social justice]” was “much more powerful than his personal safety.”1
By the spring of 1968 King was risking his life in new and hazardous ways, expecting to sacrifice it, willing to pay the ultimate price, in pursuit of his cause. As he saw it, he was risking his life to save the millions of Americans whose lives he believed were being crushed by racial bigotry and poverty.
He had not always been that way. How he came to see his death at an early age as an inevitable and justifiable sacrifice for high moral purpose is a story of his religious soul-searching and sense of grand destiny.
Even Christian theology had not always defined his purpose. As a student at Morehouse College he did not profess a deeply religious faith. He disavowed the bodily resurrection of Jesus. He lost interest in the church as a career. He opted to study not for the ministry but for medicine and then, when that seemed unattainable, law.2
By the end of his senior year, though, he had yielded to his father’s wishes that he enter the ministry. He enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary and embarked on a path to become a Baptist pastor and scholar of theology. That was his goal.
In 1955, he accepted the pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, as his first job after satisfying most of the requirements for his PhD in theology from Boston University. His immediate goal was putting the final touches on his dissertation to complete the degree.
He chose the church in Montgomery with an eye toward improving race relations in at least one harshly segregated city of the Deep South.3 That was not, however, his primary reason for going to Montgomery. He envisioned the pastor’s job at Dexter as a way station. He would serve long enough to gain experience pastoring a church. He would check that box (“ministry to an African American community in a small Southern city”) en route to a career as a theologian. He would be an ivory tower scholar, a teacher, and a pastor. “When he first started to preach,” Andrew Young would say later, “Martin’s ambition was to teach at a top-notch seminary and become the preacher at a place like Riverside Church, the big church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”4
Nor had King always sought the end of poverty as his overriding mission or called for anything on the scale of massive, militant civil disobedience in the nation’s capital to force far-reaching political change.
As a college student, he showed little interest in politics. He was said to be bookish or frivolous, depending on who was recollecting his interests at that time. No one remembered him as political. Maxine Smith, who knew him as a sophomore at Morehouse when she was a freshman at nearby Spelman College, remembered him as studious, often lugging a load of books that he “carried under an umbrella.”5 Others recalled his penchant for frivolity, especially dancing and playing cards.6
By the time he reached Boston University for doctoral study he was exhibiting a serious political intent. He was intrigued by leftist political theory. In a letter to Coretta, whom he was courting at the time, he wrote that capitalism “has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” He went on, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there would be nationalization of industry.”7
If King’s misgivings about capitalism stayed with him beyond his student days, he kept his views to himself. He knew that his leftist notions would offend many Americans. He avoided sharp anticapitalist rhetoric, and he went to great pains to disassociate himself from communism. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, published in 1958, he leveled only a veiled critique of capitalism as inducing people to be “more concerned about making a living than making a life.”8 Communism he rejected flatly for what he regarded as its materialistic view of history, ethical relativism, and political totalitarianism.9
His affinity for leftist politics coincided with his interest in a theological doctrine known as the social gospel. The term social gospel crystallized a body of thought that had emerged in American theological circles during the first half of the twentieth century. The idea was to bring Christian ethics to bear on social problems, such as racial and economic injustice. When he was barely in his twenties, studying at Crozer, King embraced the social gospel as the core of his theology.10
As it turned out, his move to Montgomery allowed him to put the concept of social gospel into practice to an extent that must
