Martin Luther King was a preacher,

a man from Georgia

New York Times, April 7, 1968

The first sentence of the Times’ editorial/obituary has been my “text” for more than twenty-five years. Among the many laments following his death none was more poignant than the realization that we would no longer hear his voice—its husky sadness, the tremolo, the soaring cadences, the ecstasy. Moved by the prospect of such a silence, I wrote The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America. Improbable as it sounds, I wrote a book to help readers hear a voice. I began with no theory other than a lively curiosity. I resolved to follow it wherever it led.

I was moved to study King for several reasons. As a white man, a Euro-Lutheran, and a northerner, I seemed barred by race, religion, and history from a genuine understanding of the iconic black Baptist preacher. He was everything I was not. How would it be possible for me or any person whose DNA does not bear traces of exclusion, insult, and rage to appreciate the black experience in America? Could I pierce the curtain of African American performance to glimpse the suffering, heartache, and hope that lay behind it? Could I appreciate the preface to black preaching? These were open questions when I began.

My research became an exercise in listening. Ultimately, two or three factors made it possible for me to continue. One was belief. Dr. King and I believed in the same God, read the same Bible, and were baptized members of the one catholic church. A cursory reading of Letter from Birmingham Jail shows that King loved the church—and was still looking for it.  

A second factor was a shared vocation. My own calling to preach offered an intuitive understanding of King, especially of his early years as pastor at Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama. We both believed in preaching and trusted its power to change recalcitrant hearts and behavior. I come from a great preaching tradition, though, unlike King’s, a vocally unresponsive one. Sermon time is quiet time in most Lutheran churches. In the black church, on the other hand, the sermon is amplified by the often-rapturous gifts of the speaker and the rhythmic response of the congregation. The sermon is the achievement of the group.

In listening to his sermons at the Dexter Avenue church and reading his pastoral letters to the congregation, I could sense a young pastor’s desire to make a proper “fit” with his congregation. This was something I too had experienced in my early ministry, much of which had occurred in a modest church building that looked a lot like the church on Dexter Avenue. This contributed to something like an imaginative bond with my subject. It’s a sense of partnership in ministry that has not faded.

Finally—and this is most important—the man himself was open to others. He would have been the last to exclude or obstruct a project born of intellectual curiosity and good will.  His pursuit of justice was forever accompanied by the hope of reconciliation. Even as he worked tirelessly on behalf his people, he never closed the door to others. He partnered with rabbis, Catholics, poor whites, secularists, radical peace activists, and many others, not merely as units of a coalition but as brothers and sisters.

The germ of the idea for The Preacher King occurred in a seminar at Duke Divinity School. One of the students informed me that she couldn’t find many sermons by Dr. King and the few she did manage to read for a class assignment were “pretty dry,” by which she meant boring. I had lived through the civil rights era and, while not an expert on King or black preaching, I knew that he was never “dry.” I decided to look into the matter.

I didn’t exactly plunge into the research; it was more a case of dabbing my toes in the water. I thought I could read Dr. King’s sermons and listen to a few tapes and, presto, a much-needed book about his preaching would appear. My reading was unproductive. King’s collection of sermons, Strength to Love, had been edited to expurgate anything that smacked of the preacher’s anger, militancy, socialism, or anything else that offended against mid-century American values. Instead, I focused my reading on the unedited sermons transcribed by secretaries at Dexter Avenue and Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where he served as co-pastor with his father. The tapes and transcripts provided a vivid picture of King the “brother pastor,” as he was called. They also revealed the “first draft” of his vision for the nation, a vision rooted in God’s deliverance of Israel and in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In one of his sermons he cries out, “Whenever God speaks, he says, ‘Go forward!’” I heard him struggling to make a coherent whole of competing fragments of his passion: justice, love, judgment, reconciliation. It was all there waiting for harvest. The sermons are the theological wellspring of his dream for America. He was making a social revolution in the mirror of the Bible and Christ’s gospel. No one has tried it since.

Reading leads to listening. I listened to every audio tape I could get my hands on. Listening in on the services at Dexter Avenue, Ebenezer, and other venues—sometimes on old reel-to-reel devices or surveillance recordings made by Alabama deputies—was like going to church. It was church. At the King Center in Atlanta I went through his travel diary and contacted the churches and synagogues where he had guest-preached. They generously sent me tapes and transcripts of his sermons. I listened for everything: his biblical insights, style, strategy, mood. I listened for the man. And I listened to the congregation singing him up to heights unknown to a Lutheran preacher. What a pleasure to hear “Daddy” King, sitting behind him with the elders, intoning, “Make it plain, M.L.”

In order to gauge how he was heard, I went to Montgomery and Atlanta and interviewed former parishioners. What I encountered in both churches was a protective, near-parental care for their young minister, to whom one parishioner, a retired beautician, referred as “our M.L.” At Dexter Avenue an elderly man who had been president of the congregation related how, when the young pastor returned from New York after a near fatal stabbing, the congregation greeted him with a publicly recited poem of welcome, of the sort that might have greeted a conquering hero on his return from battle. Another remembered his “Drum Major” sermon and how some in the congregation wept when they heard him speak of his approaching funeral.  I felt the stories added a layer of specificity to the preacher King that transcended the media portrait of the “slain civil rights activist.” It was a picture of a parish minister who had time for everybody, performed baptisms, made the budget, worried about attendance, and was not ashamed to share his discouragement with his congregation. It was a picture I could understand.

I also spoke with friends and former associates who deepened my understanding of how he learned to preach. I’ll never forget an afternoon spent with Gardner C. Taylor at his church in Brooklyn or with Wyatt Tee Walker in Harlem or C.T. Vivian in Atlanta. Dr. Taylor later became a friend who was destined to live out his days not far from my home in Durham, NC. Sometimes I was welcomed by the children of mentors who had provided guidance to the young man King. Juel Pate Borders, daughter of the great William Holmes Borders, helped me connect her father’s genius to young Martin’s aspirations. Almanina Barbour, whose father J. Pius Barbour was King’s fieldwork supervisor when he was a student at Crozer Seminary, lent me hours of instructive conversation. A lawyer, she worked closely with the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. She loaned me an office adjacent to hers in which to work, and even allowed me access to her father’s sermon files and his rich library, all with a view to helping me understand the importance of mentoring to even the most gifted of young men. I have devoted many pages of The Preacher King to that relationship.

Eventually, I would interview three of the men who were with Dr. King the night he died, two of whom were on the balcony when the shot was fired. One was Ralph David Abernathy who spoke to me in the study of his Atlanta church. He reminisced about his friend with great affection. It still troubles me that a few years later he would be the target of virulent criticism and engulfed the controversy surrounding his memoir And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. The second person was Bernard Lee. Lee was King’s personal assistant for many years. With Lee, King could confide his most intimate thoughts. It was fitting that he was with him at the time of death. Lee and I spent a long afternoon together in the Gallery Place Station in Washington, where cups of coffee led to dinner and a rich conversation. At the time of our interview Lee was acting as Mayor Marion Barry’s liaison to black churches in the DC metro area.

The third man was Jesse Jackson who was on a very different trajectory. He was running for President. He had come to Duke to speak to an excited audience of entering students. A school official had arranged with Jackson’s people for me to interview him after the speech. I was waiting for him in the green room after his spectacular presentation in which he had marched directly into the audience to embrace the legendary John Hope Franklin. In the green room he was surrounded by local leaders and supporters. It was a wild scene. As he was leaving, Jackson, who I had met before, gave me the high sign and the two of us jumped into the backseat of a chauffeured limo where I interviewed him as we drove the streets of Durham. He mainly spoke about King’s influence on him as a preacher, of the substance of his hope and his inimitable style. When we drew near the hotel but weren’t finished talking, Jackson said, “Keep driving.”

These interviews and many others went a long way toward answering the questions I had when I began my research. Was it possible to understand? Would my project be acceptable? On every occasion I was received with genuine interest and in a warm, accommodating spirit. For the most part, reviews of the finished product have echoed that reception.

Writing the book proved to be more than a formative experience; it was the most satisfying project of my intellectual life. Listening to the sermons, interviewing his teachers and friends, and learning more about the tradition of African American preaching opened my eyes to the great company the faithful who ensouled King and made the movement possible. If The Preacher King provides as much inspiration to a new cohort of readers as it did for me in writing it, I’ll be satisfied to see it in a new edition.