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7 “I Am Fundamentally a Clergyman, a Bap­ tist Preacher” Martin Luther King Jr., Social Christianity, and the Bap­ tist Faith in an Era of Civil Rights Edward R. Crowther To some, the sound was that of a truck backfiring; the Reverend Ralph David Abernethy initially thought “Firecracker?” Charlie Stephens, a tenant in Bessie Brewer’s rooming house on South Main Street, knew it was a gunshot, as did a Memphis fireman, George Loenneke, who was observing the scene through field glasses at nearby Fire Station No. 2. Faster than the sound of the report could be heard, a 30.06 slug fired from the Brewer’s Boarding House bathroom had traveled at 2,760 feet per sec­ ond, tearing into the right cheek of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then into his spinal column, before tumbling down the left side of his chest. The heavy round from the Remington Gamemaster model 760 slammed King, who was leaning forward over the railing of the sec­ ond floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, violently backward onto the sec­ ond floor concrete balcony. His colleagues quickly understood that King had been shot and rushed to his side, finding him barely breathing. It was 6:01 p.m., April 4, 1968. After medical personnel removed King to an ambulance, observers on the scene noted that the pattern formed by the blood that pooled under King’s back and arms looked eerily like a cross. Interpreting the event, Reverend James Lawson and other movement leaders would thenceforth refer to his murder as a “crucifixion.”1 Interpreting King as a person and as a pub­ lic figure has occupied the attention of scholars, parishioners, and pundits, since he first garnered national notability in De­ cem­ ber 1955, for his role in the boycott of city buses in Montgomery. Some contemporaneous commentators viewed him as the epitome of Ameri­ canism; others saw him as a communist-­ inspired agitator . Within the various elements of the movement for African Ameri­ can liberation, he was at once lionized and dismissed derisively as “De Lawd.” Baptist Faith in an Era of Civil Rights 173 Among his fellow African Ameri­can Bap­tist ministers,King both won the support and earned the ire of pillars among the pastors, most notably Reverend Joseph H. Jackson. Whether and how to commemorate him after his murder led to divergent discussions among his former colleagues and his widow. Mrs. Coretta Scott King, the King Center, and Congressman John Conyers of Michigan spearheaded a successful but controversial effort to create a King national holiday. Indeed, when the 98th Congress debated the bill to create King National Holiday in 1983, contentious theater erupted on the floor with North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms raising the issue of King’s association with communists, before withdrawing his words from the record. South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat, voted in favor of the bill, whereas Arizona Senator John McCain voted against it. But Arizona did not observe the day as a paid state holiday until 1992, and South Carolina did not until 2000.2 Historians have painted a favorable image of King as a civil rights leader, as a figure in world history, as an Ameri­ can. In describing King as a man and measuring his historical significance, scholars have focused on his words and their sources, his relationship to Gandhi and nonviolence in a century fraught with world wars and the threat of nuclear holocaust, and his influence in confronting the massive historical context of racism and racial violence. Scholars of African Ameri­ can religion discuss King’s theology of liberation and his ministerial style as an exemplar of the prophetic tradition within African Ameri­ can Christianity. His myriad biographers dwell on King’s own avowed “personalism,” finding in his belief of a transcendent yet active God the psychological and religious underpinnings of his remarkable courage and extraordinary equanimity. More recently , scholars have returned to the ecclesiastical and theological context in which King came of age, locating him in the broad and eclectic tradition of social Christianity. King did indeed embrace and exemplify many elements of the social gospel of Ameri­ can Christianity and especially its protean Bap­ tist and African Ameri­ can Bap­ tist expressions. Contextually comforting to him and familiar, it provided the vehicle for King to act out his personal theology and his Bap­ tist faith.3 Moreover, King’s social activism drew from a deep spring of social Christianity, rooted in consistent application...

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