“In the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher.”
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. That dream, however, has no hope of being understood apart from King’s Baptist identity.
The son of a Baptist preacher, grandson of a Baptist preacher and great-grandson of a Baptist preacher, King viewed his Baptist identity as an inheritance bequeathed to him by his forefathers.
His great-grandfather, Willis Williams, preached in Antebellum Georgia and contributed to the emergence of independent Black Baptist congregations after the Civil War. In 1894, King’s grandfather A.D. Williams accepted the call as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, which would become a prominent site of religious and social life in Georgia. Williams’ son-in-law, Martin Luther King Sr., assumed the Ebenezer pastorate in 1931, when his son Martin was 2 years old.
Jonah Bissell
In 1947, Martin Luther King Jr. was ordained by Ebenezer Baptist and would go on to complete a bachelor of divinity degree at Crozer Theological Seminary (1951) and a Ph.D. at Boston University (1955). While finishing his dissertation, King assumed the pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery in 1954.
In the still segregated South, he was drawn toward civil rights, becoming a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1955, King accepted leadership of the first great nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States — the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., begun by the now famous Rosa Parks.
From 1957 to 1968, King traveled across the country, speaking to churches and other large gatherings, garnering support for what had become the largest single effort at civil rights since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
One of King’s most popular works is Why We Can’t Wait, a memoir recounting his civil rights campaign in Birmingham in 1963. In this work, one discerns 10 distinctives that display King’s fundamentally Baptist identity.
- Social justice: King recounts the participation of Southern Black ministers in his fight for racial justice in Alabama: “Black ministers, with a growing awareness that the true witness of a Christian life is the projection of a social gospel, had accepted leadership in the fight for racial justice.” Later, he declared that “only a ‘dry as dust’ religion prompts a minister to extol the glories of heaven while ignoring the social conditions that cause men an earthly hell.”
- Ecumenism: King described his movement’s attempt to gain support from a variety of figures: “We felt it was vital to get the support of key people across the nation. We corresponded with the 75 religious leaders of all faiths who had joined us in the Albany movement.”
- Freedom: The impulse toward freedom is evident in every nook and cranny of King’s life and work. He pleaded for strong, firm leadership by the Black minister “pointing out that he is freer, more independent, than any other person in the community.”
- Priesthood of all believers: Lay Baptists exercise autonomy and responsibility toward one another. Hence King writes: “It was the people who moved their leaders, not the leaders who moved the people. Of course, there were generals, as there must be in every army. But the command post was in the bursting hearts of millions of Black Americans.”
- Collective agency: Commenting on the notion of a voting bloc, King writes: “Development as a conscious bloc would give them more flexibility, more bargaining power, more clarity and more responsibility in assessing candidates and programs. Moreover, a deeper involvement as a group in political life will bring them more independence.”
- Preaching: King traveled nearly 6 million miles delivering homilies and speeches to garner support for the civil rights cause: “Somehow God gave me the power to transform the resentments, the suspicions, the fears and the misunderstanding into faith and enthusiasm.”
- Civil disobedience: In 1963, the city government of Birmingham tried to stifle the demonstrations of King and his campaigners by issuing an injunction directing them to cease activities until their right to demonstrate had been argued in court. Knowing the corrupt judicial system of Birmingham would forestall any efforts toward desegregation, King and his supporters for the first time disobeyed a court order.
- Religious freedom: Looking toward civil rights progress in the future, King writes: “One aspect of the civil rights struggle that receives little attention is the contribution it makes to the whole society. In winning rights for themselves Blacks produce substantial benefits for the nation.” This compares with the Baptist desire to promote freedom of rights and religion for all people.
- Responsibility: In a Baptist congregation, each person is responsible to and for one another. In relation to this, King writes: “Eventually the civil rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice. It will have enlarged the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness.”
- Faith: Finally, a major part of King’s campaign in Birmingham was voluntary incarceration. His movement had amassed thousands of dollars in bail funds as a result of King’s public speaking. Supporters thus “filled the jails” in faith that they’d be released shortly thereafter.
In sum, these 10 distinctives show Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist in his very core. His Baptistness provides a grid through which to understand his contributions to American society.
King’s heart for his Black brothers and sisters coupled with his distinctly Baptist sensibilities mark him as an exemplary agent of social change in American history.
Commitment to such principles in the face of such ills can make anyone an agent of change today. Baptists now can thus extend King’s legacy by remembering their roots and following God’s call wherever it leads.
Jonah Bissell serves as teaching pastor at First Baptist Church of Freeport, Maine (ABC-USA). He also is a Ph.D. student in religion at Boston University, specializing in religions of the ancient Mediterranean world.