Saturday, November 14, 2009

Let the Trumpets Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The following quotes are taken from Let the Trumpets Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. the text used in Imam Shair Abdul-Mani's "Unmerited Suffering" class at the Islamic Center at NYU.

"At one point in his mid-teens, he did feel a call to preach, but fought it off. An emotional, fundamentalist ministry had little relevance to the modern world, he thought, and he wanted nothing to do with it." (13)

"But he had a serious side, too, an introspective side that made him seem aloof sometimes. He liked to read alone in his room to study the way authors and orators put words together. He asserted later that his "greatest talent, strongest tradition, and most constant interest was the eloquent statement of ideas." (14)

"That September he entered Morehouse in search of a useful profession that might enable him to help his people. He felt a burning need to heal blacks, to break their bonds, to emancipate them." (16)

"There there was Professor George D. Kelsey, director of the Department of Religion, who became King's favorite classroom teacher....Kelsey also contended that pulpit fireworks were both useless and obsolete and that the modern minister should be a philosopher with social as well as spiritual concerns." (17)

"Finally, he felt under the spell of Dr. Benjamin Mays, the college president and "a notorious modernist" in the eyes of the orthodox. As a preacher and theologian, Mays was out to renew the mission of the black church, charging in his books that too many preachers encouraged "socially irrelevant patterns of escape." (18)

"Mays challenged the traditional view of Negro education as "accomodation under protest" and champoined it instead as liberation through knowledge. Education, he told his students allowed the Negro to be intellectually free; it was instrument of social and personal renewal. Unlike most other Negro educators, Mays was active in the NAACP and spoke out against racial oppression. He lashed the white church in particular as America's "most conservative and hypocritical institution." (18)

"King was enormously impressed. He saw in Mays what he wanted "a real minister to be" - a rational man whose sermons were both spiritually and intellectually stimulating, a moral man who was socially involved. Thanks largely to Mays, King realized that the ministry could be a respectable force for ideas, even social protest." (18)

"He realized, too, that he could never be "a spectator in the race problem". He hoped, of course, to be involved through the church. But how, by what method and means, were black folk to improve their lot in a white-dominated country? In his study of American history - and King was developing an acute sense of the past - he observed that Negroes since emancipation had searched in vain for that elusive path to real freedom, too often finding themselves on a dead-end street without an exit sign. In the 1890's with Jim Crow segregation practices sweeping Dixie, Booker T. Washington advised Negroes to "let down your buckets where you are" and accept segregation, which the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld as the law of the land. Washington admonished his people to forget about political and social equality for now and to learn skills and trade to support themselves. By imitating white standards and values perhaps they could earn white people's friendship and preserve racial peace. But in King's judgement it was "an obnoxious negative peace" in which "the Negro's mind and soul were enslaved." (20)

"For the role of the church concerned him deeply. As a potential minister, he was more determined than ever to be like Benjamin Mays and serve God and humanity from his pulpit. As a consequence, King was not content simply to follow Crozer's [his seminary's] prescribed course of study. On his own, he began a serious quest for a philosophical method to eliminate social evil, a quest that sent him poring over the works of the great social philosophers, "from Plato and Aristotle," as he wrote later, "down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke." (23)

For information on King's study of Walter Rauschenbusch, Karl Marx, Lenin, pacifism, Nietzche, Gandhi, Thoreau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hegel, studies under Brightman and DeWolf, comparative religions, psychology, philosophy, George Berkeley, Charles Renouvier, Borden P. Bowne - see pages 22-40.

On Synthesis:

"For another thing, Hegel convinced King that the higher level of truth was found in a synthesis that reconciled an assertible proposition (the thesis) with another and seemingly contradictory proposition (the antithesis). Hegel's "truth as a whole" thus freed King from an either-or choice in his social and theological concerns and furnished him "a philosophical method of rational coherence." This meant forging "a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony." (37)

"By now, things were falling together for him. From divergent intellectual currents, he had fashioned the rudiments of a coherent "synthesis" theology and a positive social philosophy, one predicated on nonviolence and an awareness of the complexity of human existence. He hadn't all the answers, by any means. He realized how much more he had to learn. But how he enjoyed intellectual inquiry. He would love to do this for the rest of his life, to become a scholar of personalism, the Social Gospel, and Hegelian idealism, inspiring young people as his own mentors had inspired him. Yes, that would be a splendid and meaningful way to serve God and humanity." (39)

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