The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: vol. 2,-Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951-November 1955.

Carson, Clayborne, ed. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume II--Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951-November 1955. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 645 pp. $35.00.

The second volume of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951-November 1955, covers the last four years of what can be termed King's transition between his years as student/philosopher and as preacher/public citizen. Volume II offers a chronologically arranged presentation of his letters and student papers, providing a window onto his vast human resources network. The papers have been prepared for The Center for Nonviolent Social Change by a team led by Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project director Clayborne Carson. Under the leadership of its founder, Mrs. Coretta Scott King, The Center for Nonviolent Social Change plans to publish a multi-volume series to preserve the intellectual legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Volume II shows the confident son of a prestigious Southern black preacher claiming his spiritual and public space as well as cementing his social and professional relationships. He realizes his dream of pastoring a respectable middle-class church in his beloved American South. Volume II is divided into two sections: Boston University and Montgomery, Alabama.

In Part I, two Bostons emerge. The first is Boston University, with its academic Setting, where King was pursuing a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology, and the second is black Boston, Roxbury in particular, with its social setting. The two worlds rarely met. (In nearby Charlestown State Prison, Malcolm Little, another Baptist preacher's son, was also receiving/his education.) The meetings of the Dialectical Society, a black graduate study group, provided a site for intellectual exchange among black students and a few of their teachers outside of the classroom.

By day King was put through his theological steps in a liberal tradition at BU and Harvard under the tutelage of his advisors Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf. During the evenings and weekends, King polished his social graces in the church and civic world of Boston's black community. A natural leader and gifted speaker, King was in much demand at local churches and on the social circuit. A subtext of the volume is the pressure on King to marry the right woman.

Thanks to their social and fraternal networks, Southern blacks were able to negotiate the polite segregation of the Northeastern corridor. They traveled comfortably up and down the East coast and Midwest, staying in the homes of friends of their extended family. On the surface, King's letters give little hint of the indignities suffered by his friends and him behind "the color line" in America at mid-century. It is only when one realizes that King was in dialogue with people who laid the intellectual foundation to dismantle racial segregation in the United States--J. Pious Barbour, Nannie H. Burroughs, Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, Albert Dent, Sam Proctor, Kelly Miller Smith, and Major J. Jones--that the seriousness of his parallel education is bought into focus. Thurman, for example, put a human face on the social gospel with his landmark publication Jesus and the Disinherited (1949).

In Part II, King, twenty-five and recently married, is called to pastor Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the cradle of the Old Confederacy. He is the highest paid minister in the city. King succeeded Vernon Johns, whom he later invited to speak on 24 January 1954. During this rather uneventful first year, King, as his annual report indicates, was a dutiful shepherd, staying close to his flock and tending to his administrative responsibilities as leader of a prominent black church. His correspondence suggests that he did little visiting, in part due to the completion of his dissertation entitled "A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman"; however, the Chronology that precedes the text shows that he was very busy. Among those who visited the church during his first year were Martin Luther King, Sr., who preached the installation sermon (31 October 1954); Samuel D. Proctor; and Benjamin E. Mays. King also spoke at nearby Alabama State College, Southern University, Baton Rouge, and Fort Valley State College, as well as the Montgomery and Birmingham chapters of the NAACP.

One person who declined King's invitation to speak at Dexter in July 1956 was Joseph Harrison Jackson, the President of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. In the competition for the heart and soul of black America, Jackson moved from being a strong supporter of the Montgomerry bus boycott to an outspoken critic of the tactics of civil disobedience being utilized by King in the 1960s.

The most notable event of King's first year in Montgomery was the birth of his first child, Yolanda, but her birth would soon be eclipsed by the Montgomery bus boycott. On 2 March 1954, Jo Ann Robinson of the Women's Political Action Council, Rosa Parks of the Montgomery NAACP, and King met with city and bus officials to protest the arrest of Claudette Colvin, 15, for allegedly violating Montgomery's ordinances requiring segregation on city buses. King and the historic moment were soon to meet.

The biggest revelation of Volume II concerns the allegation of King's plagiarism. This is a bombshell for those who had conferred sainthood on King. In the Introduction, Carson notes that King's arguments were "also derivative, often relying on the appropriated words and phrases. In his essays, King acknowledged drawing from others as he refined his theological beliefs, but especially in the essays for DeWolf, he often failed to cite his sources precisely and appropriated the words of others without adequate attribution" (6). DeWolf assumed the role of King's "primary mentor," as he would for many other black students at Boston. Carson includes the original sources in the notes and leaves it to the reader to determine the seriousness of the appropriation.

Volume II is also notable for King's lack of reference to President Harry S. Truman's Civil Rights proposals to the Congress in the early 1950s; the McCarthy Commission, which launched large-scale political Warfare against, among others, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes; the 1954 Supreme Court Decision in Brown v. Board of Education; or the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. It contains a few letters from his parents, none between husband and soon-to-be wife, and several photographs interspersed throughout the text.

Notwithstanding King's ethical lapses, we see glimpses of greatness during this period of his life. In "Reinhold Niebuhr's Ethical Dualism" (9 May 1952), a commentary on moral man and immoral society, King presents in broad outlines the ideas that would inform his magisterial "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (16 April 1963). He delivers a powerful sermon on the hermeneutics of love entitled "Rediscovering Lost Values" at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954). Steeped in the black sermonic tradition with its soaring rhetorical flights, King combines the best of the Western theological tradition to critique modern man's failure to make the world "a brotherhood" (249).

In his essay "A Comparison and Evaluation of the Theology of Luther with That of Calvin" (15 May 1953), submitted for two courses at Boston, King wrote his social biography:

The reformation was inevitable and certainly we cannot point to any single

individual responsible for its coming. It was a development in the social

order. But in all fairness, we must give some credit to the individual. The

significance of the individual in such a period of history is that he stands

in the midst of the ongoing social movement and gives guidance

and direction. Such credit must be give to men like Luther and Calvin. (175)

And Martin Luther King, Jr.

Volume II of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. concludes with the twenty-six-old preacher standing on the precipice of greatness that began in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott. From the heart of the Old Confederacy, King helped usher in a new chapter in black protest in the United States. Like his fellow Southerners William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Margaret Abigail Walker, Martin Luther King, Jr., set out to redeem the land of his birth. They alert us to the contest for representation in a modern and democratic culture. Juxtaposing the invisible religion of black America with a restrictive American civil religion, King prepared himself to be not only a powerful reinterpreter of the text called AMERICA but also a sensitive and astute reader of black sacred history.