ton University, Martin Luther King read Niebuhr's works with great interest and might have been expected to pay special heed to his analysis of coercive nonviolence as a political strategy well suited to the needs and abilities of American Negroes. It was Niebuhr's criticism of pacifism, however—and his criticism of the social gospel in general—that caught King's attention. By the late forties and early fifties, Niebuhr was so closely identified with "neo-orthodoxy" (in spite of his rejection of the label) that it was increasingly difficult for readers to appreciate the complexity of his thought or to recall his objections to the political implications of Karl Barth's theology. His attack on pacifism, directed with increasing vehemence against Christians who opposed American involvement in the European crisis of 1939-41, had created an uproar in religious circles that drowned out his earlier advocacy of coercive nonviolence as the most effective escape from the "endless cycle of social conflict." Accordingly King, whose political sympathies lay with the social gospel, came to regard Niebuhr not as a political ally but as a formidable adversary whose grimly realistic but intellectually compelling theology made it necessary to restate the case for pacifism in a more rigorous form.

King's intellectual development retraced the recent history of Protestant theology in the United States. Raised in the fundamentalist tradition of Southern Baptism, he studied sociology at Morehouse College, where "the shackles of fundamentalism," he later wrote, "were removed." Exposure to wider currents of thought made him wonder for a time whether religion of any kind was "intellectually respectable." ^* He went through a "state of skepticism" until a course in the Bible convinced him that biblical "legends and myths" expressed "many profound truths" in symbolic form. At Crozer, he read Rauschenbusch, whose works "left an indelible imprint," providing a "theological basis" for his social concerns. During his senior year at Crozer, a reading of Niebuhr caused him to reconsider his position once again. "The prophetic and realistic elements in Niebuhr's passionate style and profound thought were appealing to me," he recalled, "and I became so enamored of his social ethics that I almost fell

____________________

*	He began to wonder, that is, whether it could stand up in the face of the most rigorous achievements of the modern critical intellect. But he also "revolted against the emotionalism of Negro religion, the shouting and the stomping." "I didn't understand it," he said, "and it embarrassed me."

-388-