Justified True Belief

(●) A Baptist pastor who took the oldest Christian argument about law and conscience out of the seminary and made it in public, where anyone could check the reasoning. + Most people meet Martin Luther King Jr. as a voice on a recording, saying that he has a dream. That is a fair place to start, and it is not where he started. He was a pastor, the son and grandson of pastors, and the work he is remembered for was argued the way a preacher argues: from Scripture, from the moral law written into things, and from the plain sense of what a human being is. The argument he made had a long pedigree. Augustine had written in the fourth century that an unjust law is no law at all. Thomas Aquinas, nine centuries later, had worked out why: a human law that is not rooted in the eternal law is a distortion of law rather than an instance of it. King quoted both of them, by name, in a letter he wrote from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and he was writing not to philosophers but to eight local clergymen who had told him publicly that he was moving too fast. That letter is why his name belongs beside the apologists rather than only in the history of American politics. He is the twentieth century’s clearest working demonstration that Christian moral reasoning can be conducted in the open, addressed to people who disagree with it, and win. He was also a man whose own record includes a plagiarized doctorate and vows to his wife that he broke, and an honest account has to carry both halves, since a witness described by half is not really being trusted with the truth. He was thirty-nine years old when he was shot.

(●) 1929 AD: He was born Michael King Jr. on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, into the third generation of a preaching family. + He was born on 15 January 1929 in an upstairs bedroom of a house on Auburn Avenue, a few hundred yards from Ebenezer Baptist Church. His mother, Alberta Williams King, had grown up in that house; her father, A. D. Williams, had built Ebenezer into one of the largest black congregations in Atlanta. His father, then known as Michael King, had come off a sharecropper’s farm in Stockbridge, worked his way through school, married the pastor’s daughter, and taken over the pulpit. The name came later, and it came from Germany. In 1934 Ebenezer sent the elder King to a Baptist World Alliance meeting in Berlin, and he came home so taken with the reformer whose country he had been travelling in that he began calling himself Martin Luther King and calling his five-year-old son Martin Luther King Jr. The change was informal for a long time. The birth certificate still read Michael until 23 July 1957, when someone crossed the name out in black ink and wrote the new one above it. By then the son had been famous for a year and a half. He grew up comfortable and grew up segregated, which in Atlanta meant both at once. A story he told more than once has a white playmate’s father telling the two boys, when they were about six, that they could not play together any more. A six-year-old has no category for that, and the fact that he was still telling it as a grown man says something about how long such a moment stays.

(●) 1948 AD: Ordained at nineteen, he went north to seminary and came back with Gandhi in his luggage. + He entered Morehouse College at fifteen, admitted early under a wartime program that was taking boys before they finished high school. Morehouse gave him Benjamin Mays, its president, a preacher with a doctorate who argued that a minister who could not think was no use to anybody, and it was under Mays that King stopped regarding the ministry as his father’s trade and started regarding it as his own. He was ordained at Ebenezer in February 1948 and graduated that June. Then came three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he was one of eleven black students and finished at the top of the class. He read Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist theologian who had insisted that the gospel has something to say about wages and slums and not only about souls, and he took from him the conviction that a religion concerned with a man’s soul and not with the conditions he lives in is a spiritually moribund religion. One Sunday in Philadelphia he heard Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, lecture on a trip he had just made to India, and King left and bought half a dozen books on Mohandas Gandhi. From Crozer he went to Boston University for a doctorate in systematic theology, finishing in 1955. Boston taught him personalism, the school of thought that holds that personality, the fact of being somebody rather than something, is the key to reality, and that God is himself personal rather than a force or a principle. He said afterward that personalism gave him his metaphysical grounding for the dignity of every human person, and that is the philosophical engine under everything he later said about segregation. In Boston he also met an Alabama farmer’s daughter from near Marion, studying voice at the New England Conservatory. He married Coretta Scott on 18 June 1953, on the lawn of her parents’ house, with his own father saying the words.

(●) 1955 AD: One year into his first pastorate, a bus boycott was handed to a twenty-six-year-old who had barely unpacked. + He had offers up north, and better ones, and he turned them down in 1954 for the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a small and well-dressed congregation a block downhill from the state capitol. It was the kind of first church a young man with a doctorate nearly finished could reasonably expect to leave after a few years for something larger. He wrote the last of the dissertation in the evenings. Coretta had a baby in November 1955, and by every ordinary measure the next stretch of his life was going to be a quiet one. The quiet did not last out the year. On 1 December 1955 a seamstress named Rosa Parks, who had been the local secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP, the country’s oldest civil rights organization) for a dozen years, declined to give up her bus seat and was arrested. Within four days the black community of Montgomery had organized a one-day boycott, and it worked so completely that the buses ran empty. So the leaders met to form an organization that could keep it going, and the organization needed a president. King was young, well spoken, and new enough in town to have made no enemies, which is exactly why they picked him: nobody had a reason to object to him yet. He had about twenty minutes to prepare the speech he gave that night at Holt Street Baptist Church, to a crowd that filled the building and then the street outside it. What followed was not a gesture but a siege. The boycott ran 381 days, and for all of them tens of thousands of people walked, shared cars, and got up an hour earlier, through a winter and a summer and another winter. King was arrested for speeding, indicted with dozens of others under an old anti-boycott statute, and put on trial. What ended it was not the walking but a lawsuit: on 13 November 1956 the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that Montgomery’s bus segregation was unconstitutional, and on 21 December 1956 King boarded a city bus and sat near the front.

(●) 1956 AD: A midnight phone call sent him to his kitchen table, and he got up from it with something he had not had before. + The threatening calls came in at a rate of thirty or forty a day. On the night of Friday 27 January 1956 he took one after midnight, a voice telling him to leave Montgomery if he did not want to die, and he could not get back to sleep. He went to the kitchen, put coffee on, and sat down with his head in his hands. What he described afterward is not a doctrine he worked out but something that happened to him at a table. He prayed out loud, admitting he was afraid and had nothing left. He wrote that at that moment he experienced the presence of the Divine as he had never experienced him before, and heard an inner voice telling him to stand up for righteousness, to stand up for justice, to stand up for truth, and that God would be with him to the end of the world. His fears began to go. He called it his vision in the kitchen, and he went back to it for the rest of his life whenever things got bad. Three nights later, on 30 January, a bomb went off on his front porch while he was speaking at a mass meeting. Coretta and the baby were inside and unhurt. An angry crowd gathered on the lawn, some of them armed, and King came out on the wrecked porch and told them to go home and put down their weapons, because the movement would not be won that way. Several people who were standing there that night said later that this was the moment they believed he meant what he had been saying.

(●) 1963 AD: Arrested on Good Friday in Birmingham, he answered eight clergymen in the margins of a newspaper, and that August told a quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial about his dream. + The years between had made him a national figure and nearly killed him twice. In 1957 he and other ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an alliance of black churches with pastors for its officers, and he was its president until his death. Then, in September 1958, while he sat signing books in a Harlem department store, a woman named Izola Curry stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. The blade came to rest against his aorta, and the newspapers reported the next morning that if he had sneezed he would have died. He recovered, spent a month in India in 1959 as a guest of Gandhi’s heirs, and in 1960 moved home to Atlanta to serve as co-pastor of Ebenezer alongside his father. Birmingham in 1963 was the hardest city in the South, and the campaign there was deliberately designed to provoke a response the country would have to look at. King was arrested on 12 April, Good Friday, for marching in defiance of a state court injunction, and put in solitary confinement. That same day eight white Alabama clergymen, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, published a statement called "A Call for Unity" calling the demonstrations unwise and untimely and urging the city’s black population to wait and use the courts. He answered them on 16 April, writing in the margins of that newspaper, then on scraps of paper smuggled in by a trusty (a prisoner trusted with the run of the jail), and finally on a legal pad his lawyers got to him. The Letter from Birmingham Jail is about seven thousand words, and it is not a speech. It is an argument, with distinctions, authorities and concessions, addressed to men who shared his Bible and his vocabulary and who would therefore have to answer it on its merits or not at all. Later that spring Birmingham’s police commissioner turned fire hoses and dogs on schoolchildren in front of the cameras, and on 28 August a quarter of a million people stood at the Lincoln Memorial and heard him depart from his prepared text.

(●) 1964 AD: He took the Nobel Peace Prize at thirty-five, and two laws he had spent a decade arguing for went on the books. + The Civil Rights Act was signed on 2 July 1964, and with it the legal segregation of hotels, restaurants, theatres and lunch counters, the whole apparatus of public accommodation, came to an end. Five months after that, on 10 December, King stood up in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize as the youngest person then named to it, and gave the prize money, roughly fifty-four thousand dollars, away to the movement. What he said there is worth hearing, because it is not what a man usually says when he is handed a medal. He was accepting the award, he told them, on behalf of a movement that had not won, and he refused to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life. The same year the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had been wiretapping him since 1963, mailed him a package of surveillance recordings with an anonymous letter telling him there was only one thing left for him to do, which he and Coretta understood as an invitation to kill himself. He did not go public with it. It is one of the ugliest things an American government agency is documented to have done to a private citizen in that decade, and it sat in his house while he was preparing to fly to Oslo. Then Selma, where the pattern worked one more time. On 7 March 1965 state troopers met a column of marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and beat them while the cameras ran, and the country watched it on television that night. On 21 March a protected march finally set out for Montgomery and arrived four days later, and the Voting Rights Act was signed on 6 August 1965. That is the high-water mark, and the ground shifted under him almost immediately afterward. When King took the movement north to Chicago the next year to campaign against segregated housing, he found a hostility he had not planned for. A crowd in Marquette Park threw a rock that hit him in the head on 5 August 1966, and he told reporters afterward that he had never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as the ones he was seeing in Chicago.

(●) 1968 AD: He went to Memphis for the garbage collectors and was shot on a motel balcony. + A year earlier, on 4 April 1967, he had stood in the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York and said that he could not go on speaking against the violence of the oppressed without speaking first to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, which was his own government, and that a time comes when silence is betrayal. The cost was immediate. Newspapers that had praised him denounced him, the White House cut him off, and the board of the NAACP passed a resolution calling any merger of the peace movement with the civil rights movement a serious tactical mistake. He did not take it back. He had concluded that a nation that spends on war what it will not spend on its poor is approaching spiritual death, and by 1968 he was organizing a Poor People’s Campaign to bring the poor of every race to Washington. Memphis was a detour. On 1 February 1968 two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in the barrel of a garbage truck they had climbed into to get out of the rain, and the city’s black sanitation workers went on strike carrying placards that read I AM A MAN. King came to speak, and a march on 28 March turned violent, which was the thing he most feared and had spent his life arguing was avoidable. He went back on 3 April to do it properly. That night, at Mason Temple, with a storm banging the shutters and a small crowd because of the weather, he preached without notes and finished by saying that he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the promised land, that he might not get there with them, and that they as a people would get there. The next evening, 4 April 1968, standing on the balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, he was shot in the jaw and neck by a rifle bullet fired from a rooming house across the street. He was pronounced dead an hour later at St. Joseph’s Hospital. He was thirty-nine. An escaped convict named James Earl Ray pleaded guilty the following March, recanted three days later, and spent the rest of his life asking for the trial he had given up and insisting he had been set up.

What He Taught

(T1) A law that contradicts the moral law of God does not bind the conscience. + Think about how a driver behaves at a red light on an empty road at three in the morning. Most of us stop, and if asked why, we would say something about the law, and something about the fact that stopping is a reasonable rule that keeps people from being killed. The two answers hang together. A traffic law is worth obeying because it serves something the law did not invent. King’s question was what happens when those two answers come apart, and the answer he gave is the oldest one in Christian political thought. He took it from Augustine, who wrote in the fourth century that an unjust law is no law at all, and from Thomas Aquinas, who explained in the thirteenth why that should be so. A human law, Aquinas said, has whatever force it has because it derives from a higher law. Highest of all is the eternal law, which is God’s own wisdom ordering each thing toward the end he made it for. No one reads that wisdom straight off, but a share of it lies open to any thinking creature, and that share is the natural law: the moral order a person can work out by thinking honestly about what human beings are, with no Bible open in front of him. The driver at the red light is drawing on it the moment he says the rule keeps people from being killed. A statute that contradicts it has the form of a law and not the substance, and the conscience is not bound by it. You can hear the obvious worry: a man who gets to decide which laws bind him has been handed a license, and every scoundrel with a grievance will want one. King heard it too, and he closed the door twice. First, he gave a public test, so that the judgment was never a matter of private taste. An unjust law is one a majority imposes on a minority without binding itself to the same rule, or one imposed on people who were denied the vote that would have let them help make it. Anybody can apply that test to a statute and see what comes out. Second, he broke such laws openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty, which he said was the highest respect for law rather than contempt for it. A man who accepts the jail sentence is not claiming to stand above the law; he is asking the law to look at what it has done. The pattern is older than he is. When the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council in Jerusalem, ordered the apostles to stop preaching, Peter answered that they must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29), and then stayed in the city to be arrested again.

(Q) "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law." + Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963. He is answering the charge that a man who asks others to obey the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling has no business breaking an Alabama statute. The next sentence in the letter puts it in the terms of Thomas Aquinas: an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law (T1).

(T2) Nonviolence is not passivity: it resists evil without becoming evil. + The word gets misheard, and King spent a good deal of ink on the misunderstanding. People hear nonviolence and picture someone doing nothing: turning the other cheek in the sense of going limp and hoping the trouble passes. What he was describing is closer to what a nurse does with an infection. She attacks it with everything she has, and none of her weapons are more infection. He set out six marks of it in his first book, and they are worth taking one at a time. The first is the one people get wrong first: it is not a method for cowards, because it does resist. It is passive with the body and strongly active in the spirit. The second concerns the goal. It aims to win the opponent’s friendship and understanding rather than to defeat and humiliate him, so what counts as winning is reconciliation rather than victory. The third is the distinction he had to make over and over: the attack is on forces of evil, not on the people caught up in them, which is why he kept insisting that the enemy was segregation and not the sheriff. The fourth is the hardest to hear, and he never pretended otherwise. It accepts suffering without returning it, on the conviction that undeserved suffering is redemptive. The fifth moves the whole fight indoors, ruling out violence of the spirit along with violence of the fist, so that hating the man across the street is already a defeat whatever your hands are doing. And the sixth is a claim about the universe itself, that it is on the side of justice, which he argued for in its own right (T5). The practical training was unglamorous and physical, and it is the part that shows what the six marks cost in practice. Before a march, volunteers sat in church basements and were shoved, screamed at, and had cigarettes stubbed out near them by their own friends, to find out whether they could take it without swinging. Anyone who could not was asked to stay home. Christians will recognize the source: not a technique borrowed from India, but the Sermon on the Mount running through Gandhi and coming back translated. King said as much. Gandhi, he wrote, was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.

(Q) "Nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist." + Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958), chapter VI, "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence". The first of the six characteristics he lists, and he opens it by saying it must be emphasized. The two sentences after it make the point again: the method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually, and it is not passive nonresistance to evil but active nonviolent resistance to evil (T2).

(T3) Love of enemies is a decision about what you will become, not a feeling about them. + Anyone who has been badly wronged has run into the honest objection, and it deserves to be stated plainly before it is answered. You cannot make yourself feel warmly toward a man who burned your church. You might as well be told to feel warmly toward a toothache. So when a preacher stands up and says love him anyway, most people conclude, not unreasonably, that Christianity is asking for a performance nobody can give. King’s answer was to separate the words the New Testament separates. Greek has several words we flatten into one. Eros is romantic longing. Philia is the affection of friends who like each other. Agape, the word in the Sermon on the Mount, is none of that: it is goodwill toward another person for that person’s sake, whether or not you like him and whether or not he deserves it. It is what a hospital gives a patient it has never met. So when Jesus says "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," (Matthew 5:44) he is not commanding an emotion, which cannot be commanded, but a settled intention that can be. Then King added the argument from consequences, which is the part people quote. Hatred is not a stance you take toward another person; it is a substance that gets into you. Returning it multiplies it, and the multiplication has no natural stopping point, so somebody in the chain has to absorb an injury without passing it on or the chain runs until everyone is dead. This is why he called love the only force capable of turning an enemy into a friend, and it is why Paul writes that the way to beat evil is not to be overcome by it but to overcome it with good (Romans 12:21). King preached this before it was tested on him, and then his house was bombed and he preached it again on the porch.

(Q) "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." + Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1963), from the sermon "Loving Your Enemies". He preached it at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery on 17 November 1957, the year after the boycott ended, and revised it for the book during a fortnight in an Albany, Georgia, jail in July 1962. The line just after it is the reason he thought the point urgent: hate multiplies hate and violence multiplies violence in a descending spiral of destruction (T3).

(T4) Segregation is a sin because it turns a person into a thing. + A vending machine is a thing. You put money in it, and what you want comes out, and nothing about the transaction requires you to wonder what the machine wants. A person is not like that, and everyone knows it in practice: the difference between asking a colleague for help and pressing a button is a difference you would feel immediately if someone treated you as the button. King borrowed the vocabulary from the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who had argued that a human being can stand in two utterly different kinds of relation. In an I-it relation you face an object, something to be used, catalogued, and got around. In an I-thou relation you face another somebody, and the encounter changes you as well. Buber’s claim, which King took over whole, is that the second is what a person is for, and that treating a person as an it is a lie about what he is. Add the Christian premise that had been running under King’s theology since Boston, that man is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and so has a worth conferred by God rather than granted by a state, and segregation stops being a policy question and becomes a theological one. He also took a line from Paul Tillich that sin is separation, and asked whether a separated society is not that estrangement made visible. Everything turned on that step. If segregation is merely inefficient or embarrassing, it can be traded away for something a society wants more, and a society always wants something more this year than it wanted last year. If it is a lie about what a human being is, then no amount of social convenience touches it, and the church that tolerates it has agreed to the lie. That is exactly what he told the eight clergymen: segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.

(Q) "Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an 'I-it' relationship for an 'I-thou' relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things." + Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963. The sentence sits in the middle of his argument about just and unjust law (T1), and it is the reason the segregation statutes fail his test: he has just written that any law which uplifts human personality is just and any law which degrades human personality is unjust.

(T5) Nobody is free while anybody is bound, because a personal God made us to need each other. + He liked to work this one out from breakfast. Before you finish the first meal of the day you have depended on half the world: a South American picked the coffee, a Chinese farmer grew the tea, a West African planted the cocoa, and you paid none of them a visit. Whether you approve of the arrangement or not, you are inside it, and the man on the other end of it is not a stranger to your life. He called this the network of mutuality, and he meant it as a description of the world rather than as a sentiment about it. Underneath sat the conviction he had picked up in Boston and never let go: that reality is finally personal. The universe is not an indifferent machine that happens to have consciousness rattling around in it. It was made by somebody, and made in such a way that justice is what it is built for and injustice runs against the grain. That is why he could tell exhausted people in a church basement in 1956 that they were not alone in the struggle, and mean something factual by it. When he said that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice, a line he adapted from the nineteenth-century minister Theodore Parker, he was not predicting that things go well. He had been stabbed, bombed and jailed, and he knew better. He was claiming that the effort is backed by the way things actually are. Christians will notice both what this gets right and where it needs filling in. It is a real inference from creation: if one God made all of them, the people on the far end of the coffee trade are kin, and the ledger of what you owe them is not empty. What King said less about, and what the New Testament says most about, is that the network is not held together by our recognition of it but by Christ, in whom the old divisions of Jew and Greek, slave and free do not determine who belongs (Galatians 3:28).

(Q) "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." + Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963. The clergymen had called him an outsider, an Atlanta man meddling in Birmingham’s business. This is the answer, and it arrives early in the letter, just after he has said that he cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham (T5).

(Q) "In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society." + Source: Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963. He is describing the early Christians, whom he says were small in number and big in commitment, and he is holding them up against the church of his own day, which he calls a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. A thermometer reports the temperature of the room; a thermostat changes it. The whole reception of King inside the church, in his lifetime and since, is an argument about which of the two the church has been.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The black church put its own preaching into public argument, and paid for it in its own house. + The movement he led was not organized in an office. It ran on mass meetings, which were church services with strategy in the middle: a hymn, a prayer, announcements about which corner the car pool was leaving from, a sermon, and an offering. The organization King presided over from 1957 was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and its officers were pastors, among them Ralph Abernathy of Montgomery and Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, who had a church bombed out from under him and kept going. When people say the civil rights movement came out of the black church, this is the concrete thing they mean. It also split that church, and the split was not a quarrel between good men and bad ones. J. H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest black denomination in the country, opposed direct action, the marches and boycotts and sit-ins that put ordinary people bodily in front of the thing they objected to, and he thought the courts and self-improvement were the proper roads. The disagreement was genuine, it was argued at conventions rather than whispered, and in November 1961 the ministers who backed King left and formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention. King went with them, and so did his father and Ralph Abernathy, and Ebenezer is a Progressive congregation to this day. Nothing about that fight was tidy, and it is a useful corrective to the memory of a united black church behind a single leader. What the movement gave back to Christian preaching was a demonstration that the Exodus and the prophets are about the world outside the sanctuary. King quoted Amos, on justice rolling down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, so often that the verse became a public possession (Amos 5:24).

(†) The letter became the standard modern text on when a Christian may disobey the law. + The Letter from Birmingham Jail is now taught in seminaries, law schools and ethics courses beside Augustine, Aquinas and the trial narratives in Acts, and it earned that place by being an argument rather than a complaint. It states the objection at full strength in the objectors’ own words, concedes what is true in it, marks off the cases where breaking a law is legitimate from the cases where it is not, and gives the test in public so that anyone can apply it and see whether the conclusion follows. King printed it the next year in Why We Can’t Wait, which is where most people first read it. Its usefulness has outlived the fight it was written for, because the question it settles keeps coming back in new clothes. A Christian in a country that forbids preaching, a nurse ordered to assist at something she believes is killing, a congregation told when it may gather: each of these needs to know how a believer decides that a law has stopped binding, and how he behaves once he decides it. King’s answer, that you disobey openly, lovingly, and accept the penalty, is a discipline rather than a loophole, and it is much harder to abuse than a claim of private conscience. He also aimed the letter at the people who were not stopping him and not helping him. His sharpest paragraphs are about the white moderate, more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers the absence of tension to the presence of justice and keeps setting the timetable for someone else’s freedom. Plenty of readers who agreed with him about Birmingham have felt that sentence land somewhere closer to home.

(†) The white churches that opposed him ended up quoting him, and some of them said so out loud. + In his lifetime the reception among white Christians ran from cooperation to open hostility. Billy Graham had already integrated his crusades and invited King to give the opening prayer at his New York crusade in Madison Square Garden on 18 July 1957, though Graham thought public demonstrations went too far and said so in print, telling the New York Times during the Birmingham campaign that his friend should put the brakes on a little bit. Evangelical journals of the period, including Christianity Today under its founding editor Carl F. H. Henry, argued in print that civil disobedience was the wrong instrument even where the cause was right and worried it would teach a generation contempt for law. Southern white congregations that had backed segregation from the pulpit mostly said nothing at all, which was the thing his letter was about. Then, over the thirty years after his death, the argument he had lost among white Christians was won. The Southern Baptist Convention, which had been founded in 1845 by churches defending slaveholding missionaries, passed a resolution in 1995, on its hundred and fiftieth anniversary, repenting of its racism and asking forgiveness of black Americans. Denominations that had kept quiet in 1963 now read the letter aloud in January. The change is real and it is worth naming plainly: an argument made from Scripture, in public, to people who initially rejected it, eventually convinced their institutions. The reach went well past America. Desmond Tutu, an Anglican archbishop under apartheid, worked with the same materials and reached similar conclusions, and Christians under Communist governments in Eastern Europe read King while planning their own marches. What travelled was not the slogans. It was the claim that a Christian may refuse a government’s law without picking up a weapon, and that doing so is an act of respect for law rather than a rejection of it.

(†) Where his own record will not bear the weight: a stolen doctorate, a broken vow, and a student paper that explained the creed away. + Honesty requires the other column, and in his case the sources for it are the scholars who admire him most. - The dissertation. When Clayborne Carson’s King Papers Project at Stanford began editing his student writing, the editors found extensive unattributed borrowing running back through the Crozer papers and into the Boston doctoral thesis of 1955. Boston University convened a committee, which reported in October 1991 that the dissertation contained substantial misappropriation from other authors. The committee judged that the thesis still made an intelligent contribution to scholarship and recommended that the degree not be revoked, and that a letter noting the improprieties be filed with the copy in the university library. That is where the matter stands. It is plagiarism, he did it as an adult, and no account of him should pass over it. - The marriage. King was unfaithful to Coretta, repeatedly. The FBI recorded it while trying to destroy him, which makes the bureau’s conduct disgraceful without making the underlying fact untrue, and his closest colleague, Ralph Abernathy, wrote about it in his 1989 memoir And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. King’s own preaching supplies the standard he failed: he told his Ebenezer congregation two months before he died that everyone has a drum major instinct, a hunger to be first and praised, and that it will wreck a man who does not put it in harness. Scripture is not squeamish about this pattern either; Nathan walked into the palace and told the greatest king Israel ever had that he was the man (2 Samuel 12:7). - The doctrines. As a seminary student he wrote a paper at Crozer, worked on between September and November 1949, arguing that the divine sonship of Jesus, the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection were the early church’s way of putting a lasting inner experience of Christ into the thought forms it had to hand. He judged the evidence for the virgin birth too shallow to convince an objective thinker, and treated the resurrection accounts as the outward form that inner faith took rather than as a report of what happened. He never published a retraction. Christians who take him as a teacher have to be clear that in that paper he stood outside the creed the church has confessed since the beginning, and that Paul had already ruled the question load-bearing: if Christ has not been raised, the preaching is in vain and so is the faith (1 Corinthians 15:14). None of that unmakes the argument. An argument stands or falls on whether it is true, and the case for the moral law above the statute was as sound coming from him as it is coming from Aquinas. It does mean the man is a witness rather than a saint, which is what he said about himself. Preaching on the drum major instinct at Ebenezer on 4 February 1968, two months before Memphis, he asked that at his funeral nobody mention the Nobel Prize or the other awards, and that someone say instead that he tried to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and love somebody.