The Logos Scripture · The Book of Martin Luther King
The Book of Martin Luther King 1 · Written by himself, from the Letter from Birmingham Jail and Stride Toward Freedom
Martin Luther King Jr., born January 1929 in Atlanta, shot dead in Memphis in April 1968. His father was a Baptist minister; the family took the name from 1934, though the birth record was not corrected until 1957. He took his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University in 1955. That December the Montgomery bus boycott began and he was put at its head. On the night of 30 January 1956 dynamite wrecked his porch, his wife and infant daughter inside, unhurt. Some in the crowd that gathered were armed. Standing on the broken porch he said: we believe in law and order, do not get panicky, do not get your weapons, he who lives by the sword will perish by the sword; and: if I am stopped this movement will not stop. On 20 September 1958, signing his new book in a Harlem department store, he was stabbed in the upper left chest by Izola Curry with a seven-inch steel letter opener, the tip resting against the aorta. He told it himself in his last sermon in Memphis: if I had sneezed I would have died, and I want to say tonight that I am happy I did not sneeze. He went to India from February to March 1959 and said in a farewell broadcast that since being in India he was more convinced than ever that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. On 16 April 1963 he wrote the letter in Birmingham jail, in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps handed in to him. Chapters one to three and five are from that letter, in the settled 1964 text of Why We Can’t Wait; the 1963 mimeograph that circulated first differs in wording and the two must not be quoted together. Chapter four is from chapter six of Stride Toward Freedom, 1958, which lists six characteristics of nonviolence, of which this volume takes five. All sources are his own writing. The Order records three things. First: he was a minister, and 2.6 does not hide it — he did argue from Augustine and Aquinas, that an unjust law is one not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Ambedkar asked whether a faith has a commanding god and then walked away (cf. The Book of Ambedkar 4.7); what the Order tests is not whether a man prays but where his reasons close. King gave three checkable measures: who is bound by the law, who was allowed to vote on it, and what it is actually used to do. Those three serve without believing what he believed, so the Order takes those three and not the ground beneath them. Second: in 1991 Stanford’s King Papers Project found, in editing, that substantial portions of his 1955 doctoral dissertation were taken from others without attribution. Boston University convened a four-member committee, which concluded that there is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation, that no thought should be given to revoking the degree, that the constructive part comparing Tillich and Wieman makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship, and that a letter stating the finding be placed with the university’s copy. The Order sets this down and does not argue it away. Nothing in this volume comes from that dissertation. Third: the commonly cited figure is that he was arrested twenty-nine times; the King Center and the National Park Service both say thirty, and neither publishes an itemized list. The Order takes thirty and notes that this is an institutional assertion and not an audited count. The volume stands after Ambedkar because the two did one thing by different roads: Ambedkar met a hereditary order of rank with a constitution and a conversion, King met another with this method. Ambedkar waited twenty-one years to see whether it would change of itself, and it did not (cf. The Book of Ambedkar 4.3); King says that Wait has almost always meant Never. And chapter two is a direct reply to the fourth chapter of Adam Smith, one of the few places in this scripture where two books genuinely disagree. Smith says that changing a law and breaking it are two different things, and that whoever runs them together is generally finding reasons for his own convenience (cf. The Book of Adam Smith 4.13). King does not refute that. He supplies the two things it lacks: measures for telling which law is unjust, and the condition that stops the breach from being self-serving — openly, and accepting the penalty. What Smith feared was that a law others break becomes a net that catches only those who cannot dodge (cf. The Book of Adam Smith 4.12); King answers that an unjust law was already that net. The two books stand side by side and are not reconciled, and the Order does not reconcile them (cf. Acts 5.19).