Montgomery Bus Boycott 47Morehouse College. Morehouse president Benjamin Mays introduced the
younger King to liberal Protestantism and persuaded him that the ministry
could indeed produce social change. Thus inspired, King studied at Crozer
Theological Seminary near Philadelphia and pursued a doctorate in theology
at Boston University. Encountering a wide range of western thinkers, King
was impressed by Reinhold Niebuhr, who maintained that evil was so power-
ful that it could only be defeated by coercion – including nonviolence – not
by appealing to reason or the altruism of elites. In addition, King accepted
Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic model, which held that the truth would emerge
from clashing opposites. Never an original thinker, King also borrowed
heavily from the writings of radio preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, Christian
Centuryeditor C.C. Morrison, Florida pastor J. Wallace Hamilton, and black
mystic Howard Thurman of Howard University, who believed fervently that
Christianity could transcend its own racism to bring social justice. In Boston,
King met his wife, Coretta Scott, a student at the New England Conservatory
of Music. She abandoned a singing career to help her husband pastor a
church in her native Alabama, where whites had burned down her father’s
home and sawmill.
To break the back of segregation, King had to mobilize the black peas-
antry in the South. He appealed to their deeply held Christian faith by prom-
ising brotherhood with whites, not retribution. He reinforced Jesus’ ‘creative
weapon of love’ with Gandhi’s tactic of nonviolence that helped the Indian
masses win independence from Britain. Nonviolence promised the powerless
a way – a painfully slow way – to end segregation by wielding the force of
moral authority against the brutal oppressor who controlled every aspect of
black life. But black southerners faced more forbidding obstacles than did
the Indians: blacks were a minority; the white oppressors were native to the
region; and the philosophy of nonviolence was unknown in the most violent
part of the country. In view of these handicaps, King had to convert enough
whites to support racial justice. He therefore pointed out that blacks were
simply demanding their rights as American citizens. If such democratic
appeals fell on deaf ears, King planned to provoke crises to force white south-
erners to reform their society.
In Montgomery, King despaired that blacks were incapable of changing
the city. He saw that the poor had been abandoned by black leaders who
fought among themselves and by the middle class bent on getting ahead. In
his own church, King admonished parishioners to register to vote and join
the NAACP, but he wondered whether he should challenge the status quo
right away. He was, after all, a young man with a new family to support.
Moreover, he was inclined to follow the law, not break it. When black leaders
anointed King, he had to convince the black middle class that their stand-
ard of living was too high a price to pay for segregation. By appealing to the