Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Pilgrimage to Nonviolence

How a national hero was shaped by the humanities

Photo by Sins S on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., recently. Not merely because of yesterday’s national holiday in his honor, but because the news cycle about Claudine Gay’s plagiarism in her dissertation and other scholarly essays recalls a similar revelation about King’s dissertation and speeches, including “I Have a Dream.” 

Dr. King was not exposed by political activists bent on dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. It was Clayborne Carson, the man hand-picked by Coretta Scott King to oversee the King Papers Project at Stanford University, who broke the unwelcome news. Indeed, King’s slipshod documentation ran counter to his teachers’ perception of him as a serious student. David Garrow puzzled over this paradox decades ago in The Washington Post, noting that the rhetorical culture of the ministry, where imitation is commonplace, runs directly counter to academic protocol. 

By all accounts, Dr. King’s plagiarism was far more egregious than Dr. Gay’s, which makes the why of it even more baffling. It’s possible that King’s reasons were similar to Stephen Ambrose’s, when a related scandal broke about borrowed language in his novel The Wild Blue. Ambrose never said this explicitly, but the creative Zen that drives fiction writing is not dissimilar from the transport that defines good preaching. The writer or preacher who does not fall under their own enchantment is unlikely to cast a lingering spell on a reader or parishioner. 

I suspect that most of us who cultivate an inner life lose track of where we learned some of our most cherished lines. It makes me wonder: is it the footnotes and quotation marks that matter most in the pursuit of truth, or is it the feeling that we get from a satisfying story or essay, the visceral sense that wisdom tastes good? 

Maybe it matters that I got that last phrase, “wisdom tastes good,” from Christopher Cessac’s Republic Sublime, winner of the 2002 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. But Cessac assuredly borrowed it from someone else, perhaps even from Jonathan Edwards, who wrote, in his 1734 sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” that there is something physical about intellectual understanding. In fact, the following passage might be the simplest expression of my teaching philosophy, if I were to substitute “truth” or “knowledge” for “God”:

Thus there is a difference between having an opinion, that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former that knows not how honey tastes, but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind. So there is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the latter only by seeing the countenance. When the heart is sensible of the beauty and amiableness of a thing, it necessarily feels pleasure in the apprehension. It is implied in a person’s being heartily sensible of the loveliness of a thing, that the idea of it is pleasant to his soul, which is a far different thing from having a rational opinion that it is excellent. 

I recognize a similar sentiment in Cessac’s phrase, which distills Edwards’ idea nicely (if not as elegantly). And so I carry the two writers in my thoughts without footnotes — just the happy sense of their amiableness within me.

But I really set out today to write about an essay that ought to be referenced more often on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” was first published in 1960 in The Christian Century as part of the series “How My Mind Has Changed.” It is my favorite of all of Dr. King’s writings because it hews so closely to my own intellectual journey. And part of me wishes that someone would commission a similar series now, in our branding-addled age, when the whole world seems to be afflicted by what Dr. King styles as a “dogmatic slumber.”

“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” retraces King’s steps through his theological training at Crozer Theological Seminary. After a Baptist childhood, where he was steeped in the doctrine of original sin, King experienced a rebirth at Morehouse College, where he embraced liberalism. He writes that at the beginning of seminary, he was “absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason.”

As King continued his studies, he reflected on historical atrocities that defied liberalism and seemingly intractable social problems, or “collective evil[s].” The world as it was didn’t seem to match his worldview. So he came to feel that “liberalism had been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism.” Yet King could not embrace neo-orthodoxy, which claims that human will is too feeble to overcome our baser natures and that goodness requires divine intervention.

King’s theology began to emerge as a blend of his voracious reading. Answers to the puzzles of history and the ongoing threat of meaninglessness could only be found in a new vision: a little liberalism, a little neo-orthodoxy, a little of Sartre’s existentialism. Many of these questions converged in Atlanta, where King had long been troubled by racial discrimination, which he saw as one of the logical outcomes of economic inequality. One of my favorite lines in “Pilgrimage” is this observation, which Christian nationalists ought to ponder carefully:

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

There was nothing radical about Martin Luther King, Jr., at this stage in his development. But all that changed when he discovered Mahatma Ghandi. Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha, a “truth-force” or “love-force,” led King to couple his theological training with social activism. I know of no better expression of Dr. King’s philosophy than his belief “that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Ghandhian method of nonviolence [is] one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”

King makes me wonder whether there are comparable humanist doctrines of love. As a fledgling non-theistic Quaker, I’d like to think so, but I fear that my own sense of brotherly love remains limited either to the immediately personal or to hypothetical abstractions. “Pilgrimage” reminds me that there are still many dimensions of love left for me to discover.

If Dr. King had never tested these theories with his own activism, we would never have heard of him. But one might also say that “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” reveals the enduring power of a liberal arts education, as well as its unpredictability. King the seminary student could never have foreseen the practical value of his studies. Yet there is no denying that the examined life pushed him to supplement theology with social ethics, and that his deep intellectual roots gave him authority in the pulpit. If King had never read Reinhold Niebuhr, Jean Paul Sartre, or Immanuel Kant, would his congregation in Montgomery, Alabama, have trusted him with leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Whether his parishioners recognized the connection or not, Dr. King was crystal clear about his vision as an outgrowth of his education: “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.”

When I taught “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” I typically brought my guitar to class to play a few 1960s protest songs. Few students had ever heard “Bourgeois Blues” or “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” which was sad for its reminder of how quickly each generation is forgotten and delightful for me as a teacher who loved introducing young people to enduring art. But singing in class was more than a gimmick. I wanted to impress upon my students how radical King’s message was for his time, how radical it remains now. The saintly image that we have of MLK, Jr. has preserved his commitment to nonviolence with a penumbra of passivity. We forget that he saw love as a weapon. How out of place a “Make Love, Not War” placard would be at one of today’s rallies, which are driven more by anger, even hatred, than by any abiding belief in reconciliation. And how is that working out for us? 

King’s vision remains mostly theoretical for me, but I still wonder, when I look at ongoing struggles for justice, if the power of King’s synthesis of Christ and Ghandi might yet endure. Perhaps we are just too impatient to allow nonviolence to mature.

King adds an important caveat near the end of “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”:

[T]he nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally, it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.

The questions that drove Dr. King throughout his intellectual journey remain as urgent as ever. Is human nature more evil than good? Can we trust reason and our better lights to guide us out of systemic injustice and endless wars? Can the heart of an oppressor ever be changed by anything other than force? Does war sometimes serve a “negative good,” or is the choice today as clear as the one Dr. King saw in 1960: “no longer [a choice] between violence and nonviolence,” but between “nonviolence and nonexistence”? 

Dr. King’s conclusion to “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” retreats into platitudes about the opportunities that crisis affords. But I must remind myself that he wrote the essay in 1960. King had lived through the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to be sure, but most of his 30 arrests took place after that date. Dr. King’s blend of Christ and Ghandi had not been fully tested, which is perhaps why he could write such a pat ending as this: “I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.” Would he have agreed with his own words in 1968, if he could speak from beyond the grave? Would he make the same claims if he had lived into old age, like other survivors of the Selma protest, including U.S. Representative John Lewis?

What rings true to me, what draws me back to “Pilgrimage,” is the hunger that drove Dr. King through his studies, the integrity that prevented him from aligning with any one thinker or resting within a particular tribe, and the creative conclusions that resulted from his search. Humanities departments everywhere should be telling his story, not the sanitized one about martyrdom, but the one about intellectual hunger. Martin Luther King, Jr., is more than a symbol of civil rights, more than a data point along the moral arc of the universe. He represents the power of the liberal arts to meet the challenges of the present time by combining partial truths into something new, an innovative synthesis of what has been formerly thought and said. 

Joshua Doležal

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The Recovering Academic

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