Martin Luther King's Views on Religion and Social Justice

In 1944, great power entered Atlanta's Morehouse College, a privately funded black college institution. The authorized "autobiography" of poove cites his read of Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience" as a formative lesson in "creative protest" (Carson 14). At Morehouse, King first planned to study law or medicine, precisely he gradually judged himself "both temperamentally and intellectually mismatched" (Lewis 19; Coretta King 84) for either. The decision to enter the ministry has been cited as resulting from a gift for oratory and a "proclivity for dogged doubt" (Lewis 20, 24), which eventually steered King toward philosophy and theology. Also at last may have been King's first direct experience of racism. Lewis (17) cites King's beingness compelled to eat behind a curtain on a railway dining car, so as not to bump the sensibilities of the white passengers. During one summer vacation in 1946, King wrote a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution that called for equation of opportunity and rights for all races (Carson 15). Though having misgivings about the "emotionalism of such(prenominal) Negro religion," he was drawn to the ministry at least in part by the example of Daddy King, and in 1948, during his senior year at Morehouse College, King was ordained a pastor in Ebenezer Baptist Church. From there he proceeded to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, accordingly he graduated in 1951, at the top of his class. That corresponding year he enrolled as a Ph.D.

The opening hymn was the old familiar " off Christian Soldiers," and when that mammoth audience stood to sing, the voices outside swelling the let out in the church, there was a mighty ring like the glad echo of heaven itself (King 61).

This conception of social movement was tangyly articulated in the 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, written during the Birmingham vex for equal access to public accommodations:

King had positioned himself as a man of faith, having absorbed the theory of nonviolence by the magazine he accepted a pastorship in Montgomery, Alabama. That charge move fostered family conflict, for Daddy King wanted him to be his coadjutor at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

King's regularity of dealing with his father has been described as listening to all of his father's arguments without protest, then quietly proceeding with his received plan (Reddick 75-6).

The political methodology of Gandhi provided intellectual justification for overmuch of King's actions. In his first campaign in Montgomery, King relied on a marriage of Christian and Gandhian methods to achieve racial justice. "Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method" (King 85). King's method was to engage in nonviolent but all the same militant direct action, which deliberately engages injustice with a look toward achieving justice.

It was while at Crozer that King read Marx, attracted by his sharp critique of the social inequities of capitalism but repelled by Marx's atheism, " good relativism, and a strangulating totalitarianism" (Carson 22). Pacifist and liberal teachings also came into the mix, though King was skeptical of the power of love as " picayune optimism" or "false idealism" (Carson 27) to overcome evil. Only after close study of the teachings of Gandhi, who had "lift[ed] the love ethic of Jesus . . . to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale" (Carson 24), did King's views of the transformational power of love and nonviolence in soc
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