But a word is in order here about the title of Dorrien's 2017 book Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. In Dorrien's "Preface" (pp. ix-xii), he says, "They ["the mid-twentieth-century black church leaders"] did not break their nation of white supremacy or other forms of oppression connected to it. But they inspired and led America's greatest liberation movement" (p. ix).
Also in Dorrien's "Preface," he says, "This book is distinctly personal for me because it converges on the figure that propelled me into social justice activism and Christian ministry and then into an academic career. I came of age during the climactic years of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. seized my attention before I understood much of anything about politics or religion, and his contributions to the black freedom and anti-Vietnam War movements anchored my worldview when I entered college. In my twenties and early thirties, I worked as a solidarity activist and Episcopal pastor; in my mid-thirties I became an academic; today I have the same touchstone with which I began: the peacemaking and justice-making way of Jesus, as exemplified by King.
"In my early career I wrote books on post-Kantian idealism, Social Democratic politics, and Christian Socialism, and I puzzled over why early black Christian Socialists such as Reverdy C. Ransom and George W. Woodbey were completely forgotten. Why were there no books on the convictions that linked Ransom, Woodbey, and W. E. B. Du Bois to King? That was the wellspring of what became my interest in the broader black social gospel tradition. My friend and role model from the mid-1970s on, Michael Harrington [1928-1989], had worked with King and Bayard Rustin, and I was a sponge for Mike's stories about King's personality, movement leadership, and worldview. The King scholarship of that period did not capture the person that Mike described. More important, neither did it convey the southern black Baptist sources of King's genius, partly because it relied on King's seminary-oriented account of his story. The revisionist King scholarship of the late 1980s and early 1990s corrected the latter deficiency, yielding richer accounts of King's development and character" (pp. ix-x).
In Dorrien's Chapter Five: "Redeeming the Soul of America" (pp. 255-354), he says, "King told Harrington that he was leaning toward [Edward ("Ted")] Kennedy; Harrington begged him to hold back. They turned to political philosophy, and Harrington gasped at realizing that King was a flat-out democratic Socialist. King had not merely been influenced by social gospel Socialism or his friendship with [Bayard] Rustin; his worldview was Socialist: 'He understood that full civil rights for an exploited and hungry mass of black Americans constituted only a first step in the transformation of the intolerable conditions under which they lived.' The conversation made Harrington anxious before it yielded a bit of ideological pride. This could not get out; it would ruin King if people knew how closely he agreed with Rustin, Randolph, Harrington, and Rauschenbusch" (pp. 311-312).
Dorrien's quotations of Harrington are from Harrington's 1973 book Fragments of the Century: A Social Autobiography (Saturday Review Press, pp. 108-115). Subsequently, Harrington also published the 1988 book The Long Distance Runner: An Autobiography (Henry Holt).
In Dorrien's Chapter Six: "Nightmare Fury and Public Sacrifice" (pp. 355-441), he says that "King and Johnson officials cited Michael Harrington's The Other America [Poverty in the United States (Macmillan, 1962)] as the book that launched the so-called war on Poverty" (p. 367).
Later in Dorrien's Chapter Six, he says, "King reached out to Harrington for help, who agreed with Rustin that King needed a political victory, not a sprawling shantytown spectacle in the nation's capital. Harrington was stunned by King's battered condition. The King he had known was ebullient, warm, funny, and self-confident. Now King seemed grimly sad to Harrington and barely recognizable - a tortured figure who looked seriously ill. But Harrington could not say no to King, so he set aside his personal opinion to work on the Washington campaign, scheduled to begin on April 22, 1968" (p. 424)
For further discussion of Harrington, see Dorrien's article "Michael Harrington and the 'Left Wing of the Possible'" in Cross Currents, volume 60, number 2 (May 26, 2010): pp. 257-282.
Now, also in Dorrien's Chapter Five: "Redeeming the Soul of America" in his 2017 book, he says, "To some degree King's faulty citation practices reflected his boundary situation as a product of the oral culture of black church preaching, which prized repetition, imitation, call-and-response dynamics, and the rhetorical expression of religious authority through the preacher's gift for synthesizing the words of many voices. King grew up in a folk culture that viewed speech and ideas as communal property, but he knew that his graduate papers violated basic academic standards" (p. 276).
Subsequently, Dorrien says that King "preached from the same barrel of sermons throughout his career. From the beginning he riffed on them differently in different contexts, constantly revising and improving his stock sermons. Some were already staples for him when he arrived in Montgomery [Alabama, for his first posting as a pastor]. By the end of his first year in Montgomery, almost the entire corpus existed. Each had set pieces that King inserted into other sermons as the occasion demanded or the Spirit moved him. Churchgoers and movement veterans would cheer as soon as he got rolling on one, much like a singer performing a medley of her hits. 'I Have a Dream' was one of them three years before the March on Washington. 'I've been to the mountaintop' was a staple from January 1957 onward, which he used whenever he was especially down or anxious. King's favorite sermon, 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,' was already his favorite when he gave it as a trial sermon at Dexter Church [in Montgomery, Alabama]. It won plaudits and the job at Montgomery. He gave it many times and every year afterward, notably at Purdue University in 1958, addressing the first National Conference on Christian Education of the newly formed United Church of Christ, and at St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1964, on his way to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. He kept giving it until the end, which meant, for King, that he never stopped composing it" (pp. 280-281).
In addition, Dorrien says, "Long after King won the job at Dexter with his favorite sermon, 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,' [his close friend the Reverend Ralph] Abernathy teased him about his sermon research, the bulkiness and smell of his books, and the mess they made. 'Three Dimensions' was based on a gem of nineteenth-century liberal New England preaching, 'The Symmetry of Life,' by Boston Episcopal bishop Philip Brooks. King's first four paragraphs closely paraphrased Brooks without acknowledgment, at Dexter or later. . . . Brooks elaborated a vision of humanity growing in consciousness, adapting to heredity and environment, and realizing its spiritual nature as a glorified collectivity infused by God. That was too Hegelian and foreign to black church experience, so King substituted Rabbi Joshua Liebman's popular rendering of self-love: one cannot love others without loving one's own self. King rounded out his section length [as a dimension of life] with a set piece - the 'street sweeper' - about taking pride in ordinary occupations. He rounded out the breadth theme by contending that the fates of white and black Americans were tied together. He rounded out the height theme by circling back to Brooks, urging congregants to reach up to God. King's height section featured a Platonic/personalist excursus on unseen realities, echoing every personal idealistic thinker from [Borden Parker] Bowne to [Edgar] Brightman to [L. Harold] DeWolf: 'You can never see my personality.' Every self knows itself in immediate experience and knows other selves only through their effects. Every self is thus as formless and invisible as God, just like all the meanings by which we live and the motives that move us. In later versions, King ramped up the sermon with references to contemporary black American life and took a shot at fashionable death-of-God theologies of the mid-1960s. But in every version, as in Brooks' sermon, there was only one reference to Jesus and no hint of an otherworldly biblical god reaching down to save human souls. . . . One reason that King gave this sermon so many times and liked it so much was that it spoke reliably to the disparate audiences he addressed. . . . It was a thoroughly personalist sermon in general and specific senses, recycling trademark idioms and claims of the personalist tradition" (pp. 285-286).
King went to Boston University for his doctoral studies in theology precisely to study personalism under Brightman there. After Brightman died, DeWolf took over as King's advisor, and he served as the director of his doctoral dissertation.
King's sermon "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life" was published in his book The Measure of Man (Christian Education Press, 1959, pp. 39-49; reprinted by Augsburg Fortress, 2001).
Bishop Philip Brooks' sermon "The Symmetry of Life" was published in his book Selected Sermons, edited by Will Scarlett (Dutton, 1949, pp. 195-206).
The selection that King borrowed by Rabbi Joshua Liebman is from his book Peace of Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1946).
In Dorrien's Chapter Six: "Nightmare Fury and Public Sacrifice," he says, "On February 4 [1968], King adapted a sermon by the evangelist Wallace Hamilton [1900-1968], 'The Drum Major Instinct,' to his own situation and moment. The sermon was based on Mark 10: 35-45. Two disciples asked Jesus for seats next to him in heaven; the other ten disciples were angry when they heard about it; and Jesus declared that whoever wishes to be great must be the servant of others. King liked that Jesus did not rebuke James and John for their ambition, which King called 'the drum major instinct.' Harnessing this instinct was 'the great issue in life,' he declared. For the most part the drum major instinct was a baleful thing; King spent most of the sermon dwelling on it: 'I must be first. I must be supreme. Our nation must rule the world. And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I'm going to continue to say it in America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.' Americans were criminals in an unjust war: 'We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it.' King circled back to Jesus, saying that to be great, one has to serve others. Everybody can serve others, King reasoned, so, according to Jesus, everybody can be great. One doesn't have to be a genius or highly educated: 'You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.'
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