The Word of the Lord Was Upon Him

Before he was a civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. liked to remind people, he was a preacher. From the start of his ministry, King was enticed by transracial possibilities, preaching to white liberal Protestants at New York’s Riverside Church and Chicago’s Sunday Evening Club and through the sermons he polished for his book, "Strength to Love." In those guises, King often projected the most refined and worldly persona as he cited theologian Paul Tillich, quoted the verse of the Roman poet Ovid or observed didactically, “Hinduism. . .calls this tension a conflict between illusion and reality.”

The high-flown strains in King’s preaching were in keeping with his embarrassment at the pyrotechnics of the black folk pulpit and his own father’s “whooping.” With visceral distaste, the young King recoiled from one black preacher “just jumping all over the pulpit and jumping out and spitting all over everything and screaming with his tune, and moaning and groaning.”

Yet the sublime proclivities were never the whole of King’s homilies -- especially as the years ticked by. A member of King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church who heard him deliver a guest sermon in Birmingham was “stunned when. . .my pastor began to whoop.” He said, “Reverend King, you whooped today. . .I have never heard you whoop at Dexter.” King replied, “Well, the sisters at Dexter never talk to me when I am preaching like the old sisters did here today.”

Black congregations were hardly strangers to this earthier, fervent, more ethnic King. Maybe Willie Mays wasn’t such a great speaker, a folksy King observed, but “I say a brother that can hit a ball like that doesn’t need to talk. [Laughter].” At times while preaching, the fussy grammarian would drop his final consonants in a virtual drawl, “We [blacks] are in America. . .and we aint’ goin nowhere.” Bucked up by the call and shout of the congregation, his crescendos could dissolve the line between chanting, singing and preaching in ecstatic anticipation of the Kingdom to come. Recounting his crisis in the midnight hour when he put aside fancy theology for the God “my Daddy told me about,” an almost sobbing King wailed, that God “promised never to leave me, never to leave me, never to leave me.”

King’s more vernacular voice was a matter not just of style but of stories, often told with a black twist. Before whites, King straddled the line between the races—a tour guide translating the black experience to those outside it. In black churches King planted himself squarely on the side of “my people.” At Mount Zion Church in Los Angeles, King refused to revile black rioters in Watts but confessed, “I know the temptation [to become bitter] which comes to all of us.” In “Why Jesus Called a Man A Fool,” King’s tone was defiant, “It is the black man . . .who produced the wealth of this nation. (All right). . .And I know what I’m talking about this morning. (Yes, sir) The black man made America wealthy.” Never was King’s communion with his people more poignant than when he reprised the role of “that old slave preacher [who] would look at his people, he would say to ‘em . . . ‘all week long you’ve been called a nigger. But I wanna say to you,’”—and here King’s thickening dialect created the impression that he was speaking the slave preacher’s words along with him—“You ain’t no slave, you ain’t no nigger, but you God’s chillun.”

Did the intensity of King’s communion with other black people mean he was a stealth practitioner of “black theology?” Was the sublime persona King presented to white congregations not the real King but a deft confection? The answer to both is a resounding no.
King’s preaching was always a mix of ethnic and universal, passion and learning; only the precise blend varied. Quoting Keats and Carlyle, King never withheld his refined voice from black congregations; and he never banished his black voice in the loftiest of white Protestant settings. The aesthetic mix symbolized King’s theological expansiveness.

King referred to the “so-called black church” because it was a temporary adjustment to white Christians whose racial separatism mocked his faith that “in Christ there is no East nor West.” The black episodes in his homilies were interludes that circled back to affirm the transcendent worth of all God’s children. And for all his zeal for a social gospel, King preached a personal one too that sought to assuage anguish of the most universal sort.

“Ohhh,” King sighed in that prose poem of a sermon, 'The Interruptions of Life,' “I would say to you,/that Handel was down low. But just when he was about to give up, Handel created 'The Hallelujah Chorus' and 'The Great Messiah.'" Then King pleaded with the congregation, “Don’t jump, go produce a song!" In another sermon he asked, "Are you disillusioned this morning? Have you been disappointed?” and then tenderly reassured, “Don’t give up, because God has another light, and it is the light that can shine amid the darkness of a thousand midnights. . . .They put the light out on Good Friday, but God brought it back on Easter morning.”

In such moments, King was not a movement leader, learned scholar, or race man. He was a healer of broken hearts and fractured souls.

Jonathan Rieder is Professor of Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is author of the new book "The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King." Read an excerpt.

By Jonathan Rieder |  April 4, 2008; 6:40 AM ET
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