As a child King attended Atlanta Public Schools, first
David T. Howard Elementary, then Booker T. Washington High School, where
he was quarterback of the football team. In 1945, at the age of
fifteen, he entered Atlanta's Morehouse College. Subsequently he
attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania and
Boston University, where he earned his Ph.D. Because King lived
a life informed by a complex intellectual understanding of the world,
his educational influences deserve a place in his biography. A
true picture of these, however, is difficult to sketch, because,
later in his life, both he and his advocates presented multiple
different pictures of his development, in order to strengthen his
symbolic value as a leader. King was known to emphasize different
influences, depending on his audience, focusing on white theologians
and philosophers before white audiences, and black religious experience
before black audiences. Whether or not one influence was more
decisive than another, it is clear that both were highly formative.
At Morehouse College King was an unexceptional student,
characterized by teachers as an underachiever. Intellectually
unsatisfied by what he perceived as narrow-mindedness in the black
southern Baptist church, he was not yet devoted to a life of service
to God. He studied sociology and considered going into either
law or medicine. At Morehouse King first read the essay Civil
Disobedience by the American Transcendentalist
Henry David Thoreau, and was reportedly quite moved by its emphasis
of justice over law.
Also at Morehouse, King felt the influence of a friend
of his father, the president of the school, Benjamin E. Mays.
Mays began to reconcile King to the church. By the end of his
time at Morehouse, King had decided that social action was his
calling, and that religion was his best means toward that end.
He gave his first public sermon at the age of seventeen, and was
ordained a minister and served as assistant pastor to his father
at Ebenezer Church.
In September 1948 King began his studies at Crozer, where, unlike
at Morehouse, he excelled as a student. Crozer was the first integrated
school King attended; he soon became the school's first African
American student body president and later graduated at the top
of his class. It was here that he awakened intellectually, reading voraciously,
particularly in theology and secular philosophy; and it was here
that he was exposed to currents of thought that guided his thinking
for the rest of his life.
King read Plato, Aristotle, Luther, Locke, Kant, and Rousseau.
Of especial influence were Hegel, from whom he took an understanding
of the complexity of truth and history; Marx, who greatly affected
his view of capitalism; Walter Rauschenbusch, whose notion of a
social gospel–a church responsible for seeking social justice–King
adopted, and Reinhold Niebuhr, whose pessimistic view of the corrupting
influence of organizations on individuals King kept in mind later,
as he gained prominence as a leader.
At a lecture at Crozer by A.J. Muste, a well-known American pacifist,
King received his first exposure to the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi,
which he would later adapt and employ, but which he initially regarded
with some skepticism. Indeed, well into King's first bouts of
activism he showed only a partial commitment to the philosophy of
pacifism, carrying a gun during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Whether
King began to adhere to the principles of non-violence at Crozer
or a at a later point, however, the majority of his intellectual
influences were in place by the time he graduated from Crozer in
1951 as a Bachelor of Divinity.
King undertook the final stage of his formal education
at Boston University, to which he had won a fellowship on the basis
of his performance at Crozer. At BU King refined his conception
of God, incorporating tenets of personalism, a theological doctrine
that stressed the personal nature of God and one's relationship
to God, as well as the sanctity of human personality as a reflection
of God's image. King's later rhetoric often incorporated these
ideas. Although some critics have argued that King's doctoral
thesis, entitled A Comparison of the Concepts of God in
the Theology of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Weiman, contained
plagiarized passages, King successfully received his PhD in 1955.
One of the most important developments in King's life
in Boston occurred outside the classroom. In 1951 he met Coretta
Scott, his future wife, a fellow Southerner who was studying voice
at the New England Conservatory of Music. Initially Coretta had
hesitations about being involved with a minister, but King was
forthright in his courtship; indeed, on their first date he told
her she had all the qualities he sought in a wife. They were married
on 18 June 1953 by Martin Luther King, Sr., on the lawn of Coretta's
family home in Marion, Alabama.
When King finished his coursework at BU, he took a post
as the minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,
Alabama. It was an established church of well-educated middle-class blacks
with a history of civil rights protest activity. At first King
had mixed feelings about the position and considered work elsewhere, possibly
at a place in which he could teach as well as preach. His salary
was the highest black ministerial salary in town, however, and
Montgomery, as the old capital of the Confederacy and thus a bastion
of racism, probably seemed a suitable testing ground for a practitioner
of a social gospel. At the end of 1955 Coretta gave birth to a
baby girl, Yolanda Denise, whose arrival may have contributed to
the couple's decision to stay.
