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4 The Walter Rauschenbusch Factor While in seminary, Martin Luther King read and pondered the work of many of the great Western theologians and social philosophers in an effort to satisfy his quest for a sound theological foundation for his deepening social conscience. Of all the thinkers he read during his seminary and doctoral studies, King was greatly impressed with the philosopher Hegel, and the church historian and ethicist, Walter Rauschenbusch. He was enamored with Hegel’s dialectical method of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis as the best means to truth, and was fascinated with the Hegelian idea that growth comes through suffering and struggle.1 At Boston University, King studied Hegel in depth in a yearlong seminar taught by his academic advisor, leading personalist philosopher Edgar S. Brightman. When Brightman died unexpectedly in 1953, his protégé, thirdgeneration personalist Peter Anthony Bertocci (1910–1989), became the instructor. Bertocci reported on “how King in the seminar on Hegel ‘almost took over the class’ in his enthusiasm for Hegel’s insight that the master is dependent on the slave for his consciousness of himself as master.”2 As a civil rights leader, King was often criticized for taking too long in the decision-making process. However, it is quite possible that this was often a result of his desire to examine and weigh all sides of an argument before coming to decision. This was due, at least in part, to the influence of Hegel’s method of arriving at truth; of examining both thesis and antithesis in order to arrive at a synthesis or higher truth. Add to this King’s commitment to democratic process and coalition building and we are left with the image of one for whom important decision making in something as big as the civil rights movement is often a slow process. Even so, this practice was surely seen as questionable in the minds of detractors in the movement, for King strove to abide by certain ethical principles and to apply them to decision making regarding the civil 1. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 101. 2. John J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1982), 298n63. 77 rights struggle. He knew that in highly charged sociopolitical and economic matters, there could be no perfect application of these principles, especially if one were making such decisions in conversation with others. King knew that his approach to decision making was always a matter of negotiating and seeking to arrive at the best possible decision or outcome. Inevitably, such decisions would be based on compromise. To the critics this had the appearance of selling out. This was precisely the criticism made by the youthful SNCC activists and others when King made the decision (without informing them ahead of time) to turn the marchers around during the second march after the devastating “Bloody Sunday” tragedy on March 7, 1965 in Selma, Alabama. King had initially said that he would violate the federal injunction against marching to Montgomery, but during closed-door conversations with federal officials a compromise was struck that led to King’s decision (which stunned virtually all of the demonstrators) to march only to the place where the marchers were previously brutally attacked by police and deputized thugs (Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse), to kneel and pray, and then turn around and return to Selma. What the critics failed to understand and/or appreciate was that this approach to decision making was simply part of King’s dialectical method—of considering all relevant facts and ideas, and trying to arrive at a synthesis that reconciled the respective truths of participating members. For King, the synthesis was often a mediating position at best, one that all parties could live with. It was a decision or solution that gave all contending parties—as far as possible—something they sought. Because concern for the least of these was one of King’s operating principles, his aim was to always filter the contending claims and counterclaims through that lens in the hope that the outcome would favor the left-out more than others. And yet, the Kingian dialectic operated such that it was virtually impossible for any party to get all that was due them, or even most of what they desired. For King, the synthesis was generally a compromise between the contending parties. He was realistic enough to know that in the political arena this was the best that could...

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