2014 * Black History Month Tribute * 2014
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| Prof. Emmanuel Konde |
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s opposition to the injustice perpetrated on
African Americans was conditioned by the system of racial segregation and
discrimination into which he was born in the southern United States. This
abhorrence derived its ethos from personal experiences during his early teenage
years, which he recounted rather movingly in his autobiography. In as much as
King’s economic life was relatively comfortable compared to those of many
blacks anywhere in the country, this gave him no reason to adjust to the
degradation that Americans of darker hue were subjected to by their white
brethren. His rejection of racial injustice, as he explained it, was due
“partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very
idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and
self-respect.”
This sense of dignity was imparted to Martin by
his father, whom he fondly called “daddy” and about whom he wrote admiringly in
these words:
The
thing that I admire most about my dad is his genuine Christian character.
He is a man of real
integrity, deeply committed to moral and ethical principles.
He is conscientious
in all of his undertakings. Even a person who disagrees
with his frankness has
to admit that his motives and actions are sincere. He
never hesitates to
tell the truth and speak his mind, however cutting it may be.
This quality of
frankness has often caused people to actually fear him. I have
had young and old
alike say to me, ‘I’m scared to death of your dad.’ Indeed,
he is stern at many
points.
That the environment in which people are nurtured partly
determines their consciousness cannot be denied, and this was abundantly
obvious in King’s character—especially his uncompromising stance against
injustice that was given concrete form by his upbringing.
King’s upbringing, combined with the
revolutionizing Western education he acquired at Morehouse College and
beyond were instrumental in shaping his outlook. It was at Morehouse,
particularly during his first two years, that skepticism crept into King’s mind
and unshackled his body from fundamentalism. He could at that stage see the
disjuncture between what he had learned in Sunday school and what he was
learning in college. As a result of the new knowledge acquired at
Morehouse, King could not see the point of congruence between the facts of
science and religion. This intellectual transformation in the young King also
brought about in him a revolt against the emotionalism of Negro religion—the
shouting and stamping, which he did not understand and found embarrassing.
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| Rev.Dr. Martin Lurther King |
King had grown up very conscious of the variety
of injustice in American society. He had learned early in his life that
racial injustice and economic injustice were inseparable and had, in his late
teens, observed firsthand how economic injustice operated while working at a
plant that employed both blacks and whites. It is there that he came to
realize that poor whites were exploited much the same way as blacks.)
Unlike many of the unlettered black preachers
who preceded him to the pulpit, and even among his contemporaries who
collaborated with him in the struggle against the evil of racial segregation,
few were as well versed in Western ideas as King. His education had
prepared him intellectually for the role that destiny crafted for him. To
this end, he contributed his own lot by making the necessary effort to further
explore and acquire knowledge of the political, social, religious, and economic
ideas that made the West. At the propitious moment this knowledge became
handy, and King adeptly applied it to the task of combating a social system
bent on dehumanizing his people, with the dual-aim of changing both the people
and society.
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| walter Rauschenbusch |
King’s intellectual quest for a method to
eliminate social evil began in earnest in 1948, when he enrolled at the Crozer
Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. At that juncture King
undertook serious study of the works of the great Western social and ethical
philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill,
and Locke. One particular book that left an indelible mark on his
thinking was Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis.
This book provided him a theological basis for dealing with the social issues
that he had some personal early experiences of. Although King disagreed
with Rauschenbusch’s superficial optimism concerning man’s nature that ensued
from the nineteenth-century ‘cult of inevitable progress’,” he still felt that
“Rauschenbusch had done a great service for the Christian Church by insisting that
the gospel deals with the whole man—not only his soul but his body; not only
his spiritual well-being but his material well-being.”
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| Gandhi |
As King undertook
deeper study of Gandhi’s philosophy, his skepticism about the power of love
gradually dissipated and for the first time the potency of Gandhi’s philosophy
in the area of social reform became clearer. King had previously reached
the conclusion that the ethics of Jesus could only be effectively applied in
situations involving individual conflicts, especially the “turn the other
cheek” philosophy and “love your enemies” philosophy. After reading Gandhi,
however, King realized that he had been utterly mistaken. In Gandhi’s
emphasis on love and nonviolence King discovered the method for social reform
that he had been looking for. This brought to a close King’s search for a
method of social reform that combined both intellectual and moral
satisfaction. He had failed to get this from the utilitarianism of
Bentham and Mills, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social
contract theory of Hobbes, the ‘back to nature’ optimism of Rousseau, and the
superman philosophy of Nietzsche. In the nonviolent resistance philosophy
of Gandhi, however, King finally found it.
