Most people know him as Martin Luther King Jr., but he was born Michael King Jr. — “Mike” to his friends for the rest of his life. His father, the influential Atlanta pastor Martin Luther “Daddy” King Sr., renamed them both after returning from a trip to Europe where he was inspired by stories of the great Reformer.
On this weekend of remembering the younger King’s birthday, I’m reminded of my own slender ties to him: We share the date Jan. 15 — his birthday, my wedding anniversary — and we both pursued graduate study at Boston University, he in the 1950s and I two decades later.
Joe Marlow
Those are light threads, to be sure. But while writing my first book, I discovered a far sturdier connection between King and another BU figure — one few would expect: William J. Bennett.
Bennett, born in the Bronx during World War II, grew up street‑wise and scrappy. After his father left, his mother moved the family to Washington, D.C. Bennett went on to Williams College, where he studied philosophy and played offensive line. His older brother, Robert, had to talk him out of joining SDS during the campus unrest of the 1960s.
Graduate school brought Bennett to the University of Texas, where he earned a Ph.D. in political philosophy under the mentorship of John Silber. After a brief stint teaching, he enrolled at Harvard Law School, then returned to work for Silber when he became president of Boston University. Bennett later served as U.S. secretary of education, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and became one of the country’s most prominent conservative public intellectuals — known for his sharp elbows and sharper arguments.
King’s path could not have been more different. A preacher’s kid with all the expectations that came with being “Daddy King’s” son, he entered Morehouse College at 15, then Crozer Theological Seminary and finally Boston University for doctoral study in systematic theology. After BU, he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. —just as the bus boycott erupted. His leadership there propelled him into the center of the Civil Rights Movement and ultimately into the heart of American history.
William Bennett speaks at the 2017 Values Voter Summit, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Friday, October 13, 2017. (Photo by Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
King’s assassination in 1968 did not diminish his influence. His ideas continued to shape the nation — and, unexpectedly, they shaped Bennett. Although the two men never met, Bennett encountered King’s writings as a graduate student and returned to them throughout his career. What emerged was a deep admiration rooted not in political convenience but in Bennett’s conviction that King embodied the highest ideals of the Western moral and democratic tradition.
That conviction became public in 1984 when Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, released To Reclaim a Legacy, a report lamenting the decline of Western civilization in the undergraduate curriculum. The report included a list of works that, in Bennett’s view, “virtually define the development of the Western mind.” Alongside Plato, Augustine, Shakespeare and Madison, Bennett placed two works by Martin Luther King Jr.: “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the “I Have a Dream” speech. King was the only 20th‑century American besides William Faulkner to appear on the list.
For Bennett, King was not merely a protest leader. He was an heir to the Western canon — a thinker who drew deeply from Christian theology, classical philosophy and the American founding, and who returned those resources to the nation with renewed moral force.
Bennett’s later writings reinforce this view. In Our Children and Our Country (1988), he repeatedly invokes King as one of the “towering figures” of American history, placing him alongside Washington and Lincoln as the great articulators of the American creed in their respective centuries. Washington established the principles, Lincoln preserved them, and King renewed them.
“What drew Bennett to King was not politics but character.”
What drew Bennett to King was not politics but character.
King’s nonviolence was not merely strategic; it was moral. It demanded courage, discipline, self‑control and love — virtues Bennett spent his career championing in works like The Book of Virtues. King’s vision of the Beloved Community, rooted in justice and human dignity, resonated with Bennett’s belief that America is a moral project requiring continual renewal.
Both men rejected cynicism. Both believed America’s founding ideals were noble and the nation must strive to embody them more fully. Bennett saw in King a model of civic courage — a leader who confronted injustice without hatred, who combined prophetic critique with patriotic hope, and who called the nation to live up to its own best promises.
By elevating King within the Western canon, Bennett made a claim about American civilization itself: That its greatest voices are those who summon the nation back to its highest ideals. King, in Bennett’s view, was one of those voices — a prophet of justice whose legacy belongs not only to the Civil Rights Movement but to the enduring moral tradition of the West.
Their “meeting of the minds,” although separated by race, religion, temperament and politics, demonstrates something rare and needed: that good things happen when people of good faith listen across their differences.
King spoke, Bennett listened and our nation is better for it.
Joe Marlow is a theologian, historian, educator and writer now retired in South Lyon, Mich., with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and their two dogs. His third book — Against the Grain: Historical Interpretation and the Messiness of Truth — is to be published early next year.