The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Vol. III: Birth of a New Age - Review

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Dolan Hubbard

Claybome Carson, ed. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Vol. III: Birth of a New Age. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 566 pp. $40.00.

The third volume of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Birth of a New Age: December 1955-December 1956, covers the beginning of the age of Martin Luther King, Jr. (15 January 1929-4 April 1968) in America. These speeches, minutes, letters, and photographs chronicle King's emergence as a public figure on the national and international stage in Montgomery, Alabama--"the cradle of the Confederacy." We see King's growth as a leader through his interaction with people who became the Founding Fathers and Mothers of the modern Civil Rights Movement in America, though the focus was decidedly with the men who led the pulpit fraternity. These papers have been prepared for The Center for Nonviolent Social Change by a team led by Clayborne Carson. Under the leadership of its founder, Mrs. Coretta Scoot King, The Center for Nonviolent Social Change plans to publish a multi-volume series to preserve the intellectual legacy of Martin Luther King. Jr.

Volumes I and II present King in domestic society as an ideal son and brother, and as an ideal spouse and father. As a student and a preacher of growing renown, he is as concerned with the social registry of Black America as he is with the social justice agenda of the historic black church. However, in Montgomery in 1954, "the man and the hour have met" with a different outcome than William Yancey had in mind when he had introduced Jefferson Davis as the new president of the Confederacy in this capital city nearly one hundred years before with those same words in a spot near the red-brick Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that King was called to pastor. When Rosa Parks, a seamstress and former secretary of the local NAACP branch, was arrested on 1 December 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, JoAnn Robinson and the Women's Political Council initiated a bus boycott. The community responded with a mass meeting. Led by King, the 382-day Montgomery Bus Boycott was heard, and seen, around the world an d forever changed the course of American history.

Propelled by grass-roots groups and buttressed by a black middle class that reflected the growing self-confidence of the nation's historically black colleges and universities, the King in Volume III emerges as an American David. Like his Biblical counterpart, the twenty-six-year-old preacher, with his newly minted doctorate in Systematic Theology from Boston University, did not seek the position of leadership of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA); however, once called, he led the fight that eventually would break the backbone of the American Goliath of racism in Alabama. Two events in January 1956--his arrest and incarceration for allegedly speeding and the bombing of his house--brought King's personal life into the larger context of Black America's struggle for justice and dignity. Though the political situation is at times dark and tense, we experience a certain vicarious thrill in witnessing the growing self-confidence with which King engineers a successful resolution of the Montgom ery Bus Boycott.

Even in the midst of his darkest moments, King, like David, continually "strengthened himself in the Lord his God" (I Sam. 30:6) and lived in humility among his fellows (I Sam. 18:18, 23). He showed consideration and respect for the enemies of justice, while refusing to compromise on the community's ultimate goal, the end of Jim Crow laws. During 1955-1956, a time that catapulted him to international prominence, King, one can argue, was "a man after his [God's] own heart" (I Sam. 13:14). With the support of his community and progressive whites, King helped usher in a new era in the reconstruction of democracy in America.

King gave his initial Civil Rights address as President of the MIA to an overflow crowd at the spacious Holt Street Baptist Church on 5 December 1955. Caught on the horns of a dilemma, King wanted to address the weight of history (black people's anger over their degradation) without bringing down the wrath of the white city fathers in this rigidly segregated police state. He later recalled the questions in his mind as he considered what to say: "How could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds? I knew that many of the Negro people were victims of bitterness that could easily rise to flood proportions. What could I say to keep them courageous and prepared for positive action and yet devoid of hate and resentment? Could the militant and the moderate be combined in a single speech?"

Couched in Christian rhetoric, the speech not only set the tone for the Montgomery Bus Boycott but contained in broad outline themes that King would later refine into his Gandhian-influenced philosophy of non-violence. The pulsating core of his speech was the redemptive power of love. He reminded his audience that they were American citizens and Christians, loved democracy, were loyal to their country (to deflect charges of a Communist-led movement in Cold War America), and were the disinherited of this land. Here King echoed the Bible of black theology, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), by Howard Thurman, the spiritual father of the modem Civil Rights Movement. Additionally, King told the mass meeting that they were gathered at Holt Street Baptist Church because they were "tired," a word that cut to the core of their being. King later used this word as the leitmotif in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (16 April 1963), one of the great epistles in twentieth-century Christendom. Though he quoted Booker T. Was hington, King, hearkening back to Christian martyrs and to David Walker and Nat Turner, stressed that some members of the peace-loving community may have to die in the cause for freedom--which proved to be prophetic. In short, King signaled to these grandchildren of former slaves that "the road of submission and accommodation," as his Morehouse schoolmate Lerone Bennett, Jr., observed in What Manner of Man, "had been closed, perhaps forever." Overnight, King became a household name and much in demand as a speaker. With each small victory in the 382-day bus boycott, King, ably supported by Ralph David Abernathy, extended the horizon of the possible as he stood on the shoulders of ordinary people exerting extraordinary effort.