existed with a painful awareness of evil, and this too derived, surely, from the black church and more generally from the sufferings of black people in the South. "We are gravely mistaken," he said in 1967, "to think that religion protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Life is not a euphoria of unalloyed comfort and untroubled ease.... To be a Christian one must take up his cross."

Niebuhrian realism and the distinctive brand of fundamentalism preached in the black churches of the South thus tempered King's liberalism. By his time, liberalism was the unchallenged lingua franca of American public life, and King had to speak it if he expected to address a national audience. But he also spoke the language of his own people, which incorporated their experience of hardship and exploitation yet affirmed the rightness of a world full of unmerited hardship. Alone among the political leaders of his day, he found it possible to address diverse audiences at the same time, from the simplest to the most sophisticated. When the need arose, he could speak the language of liberal optimism, severely qualified by Niebuhrian realism; but he also knew how to explain the deeper sources of hope to people who had every reason to resign themselves to hopelessness. He became a liberal hero—the last liberal hero?— without pulling up his roots. If his career constantly invites comparison with that of Lincoln, whom he admired, it is not only because both men found themselves caught up in the central American tragedy of Negro slavery and took much of the moral burden of slavery onto their own

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happy childhood in the home of one of Atlanta's leading ministers and a pillar in the black community. King's inheritance included both suffering and security, as is evidenced by two contrasting formulations of his childhood memories. "Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort," he wrote in Stride toward Freedom (1958), "I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me." In one of the sermons collected in Strength to Love (1963), he gave quite a different account of his early years: "The first twenty-four years of my life were years packed with fulfillment. I had no basic problems or burdens. Because of concerned and loving parents who provided for my every need, I sallied through high school, college, theological school, and graduate school without interruption. It was not until I became a part of the leadership of the Montgomery bus protest that I was actually confronted with the trials of life." Neither of these accounts can be ignored in accounting for King's strength of character.

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