Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Prophetic Witness & Renewer of Society
April 4 · d. 1968
also known as Martin Luther King Jr., M.L. King, Dr. King
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) was a Baptist minister of Atlanta and Montgomery who led the American civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 until his assassination in Memphis. He preached the love of enemies from the age of twenty-three to the last night of his life, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and died on April 4, 1968, at thirty-nine. The Episcopal Church commemorates him on that day as Pastor and Martyr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was not born with that name. He was born Michael King, Jr., at noon on January 15, 1929, in an upstairs room of his grandfather's house on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. His grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams, pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church down the street; his father was the assistant there and would take the pulpit himself in 1931; his mother played the organ and directed the choir. In August 1934, after his father came home from a Baptist congress in Berlin and a journey to the towns where the Reformation began, the father changed his own name and his five-year-old son's to Martin Luther, after [Martin Luther](work:martin-luther) the Reformer. The birth certificate was not corrected until 1957, when the boy was twenty-eight years old.
He was quick. He entered Morehouse College at fifteen without finishing high school in the ordinary way, took his degree in sociology at nineteen, went north to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and then to Boston University for a doctorate in systematic theology. In Boston he met Coretta Scott, a musician from Alabama, and married her in June 1953 at her parents' home near Marion, his father officiating. She had the promise of obedience struck out of the service before it began.
While he was still a graduate student, at twenty-three, he wrote out by hand the outline of a sermon on loving your enemies. It survives. In it he says that the command to love even one's enemies, so far as it looks like a dreamer's wish, is instead a plain necessity if the world is to go on at all: "Love is the key to the solution of the world's problem, yes even love for enemies." He was still preaching that sermon sixteen years later, and it killed him.
In 1954 he was called, at twenty-five, to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He had been there about a year when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. The pastors and organizers of Montgomery met and elected the newest minister in town to lead the boycott that followed. It lasted about a year, roughly 382 days by the best count, and the buses were integrated at the end of it. Along the way his parsonage was bombed with his wife and infant daughter inside the house. Early in that year he kept a handgun for protection. Bayard Rustin, sent to teach him the Gandhian method, talked him out of it; by Rustin's own frank account, King's grasp of nonviolent tactics "was almost nonexistent when the boycott began." The man the world remembers as the great teacher of nonviolence had to be taught it, and consented to learn.
What followed came fast and came at a cost. He was stabbed in a Harlem department store in 1958 by a woman with a letter opener, the blade so near the aorta that a sneeze would have killed him on the table. In April 1963 he was arrested in Birmingham, and there, in the margins of the newspaper that had printed eight white clergymen's public rebuke of him, he began the letter that answers them. It was continued on scraps a sympathetic jailer supplied and finished on a legal pad, then pieced together back at movement headquarters, as he later put it, like a literary jigsaw puzzle. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," he wrote. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." That August he stood at the Lincoln Memorial before a quarter of a million people, and when Mahalia Jackson called out from behind him to tell them about the dream, he left his prepared pages and spoke of a nation where his four children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Understand what came with the honors. In November 1964 the Federal Bureau of Investigation posted him an anonymous package: a surveillance tape and a letter calling him a fraud, telling him there was only one thing left for him to do, and giving him thirty-four days to do it. He read it as an invitation to kill himself. Weeks later, in December, he stood in Oslo as the youngest man then to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and gave the whole of the prize money away to the movement. What he said there he had every reason not to believe: "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."
His last year was his loneliest. On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, he broke publicly with the war in Vietnam, and the coalition that had carried him turned on him. Life called the speech slander. The Washington Post wrote that he had diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people. The New York Times objected; the NAACP objected; Ralph Bunche, a fellow laureate, objected. Of the choice itself King said only that his conscience left him no other choice. He turned to the poor after that, and in the spring of 1968 he went to Memphis, where two sanitation workers had been crushed to death in a garbage truck and the men who did that work had walked off the job.
He knew. In February, from his father's pulpit at Ebenezer, he had preached on the human hunger to be first and had spoken his own funeral aloud: if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice, a drum major for peace, a drum major for righteousness, and all of the other shallow things will not matter. On the night of April 3, tired, speaking without a text to an overflow crowd at Mason Temple in Memphis, he said that it did not really matter with him now, because he had been to the mountaintop, and had been allowed to go up and look over, and had seen the Promised Land. He might not get there with them. But they, as a people, would get there. And then, with no more than that between him and the end: "And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man."
The next evening he stepped out onto the balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel and called down to a musician in the courtyard to be sure of "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at the meeting that night, and to play it real pretty. A single shot was fired at one minute past six. He was thirty-nine. Five days later a farm wagon drawn by two mules carried his casket three and a half miles through Atlanta, and the crowd along the route was counted somewhere between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand people. His last recorded words in public were the ones he had chosen for himself the night before, and they were not about a dream: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
You already know the sentence about the content of their character, and you may know little else he said. Notice what he actually preached, at twenty-three and at thirty-nine and every year between: that the person who can cut off the chain of hate is the strong one, and that this is not sentiment but the only arithmetic by which a world survives. Notice too that he had to be argued out of the pistol in his own house before he could teach it. The love of enemies was not native to him either; it was learned, chosen again each time it cost more, and finally paid for. Where has someone taught you something you did not want to learn, and are you still refusing the lesson because of who taught it?
The record of King's life is not the record of an ancient saint. It is dense, recent, and mostly undisputed on the facts that carry weight, and the difficulty is the opposite of scarcity: there is more evidence than any single account can hold, and it is not all of one quality.
The best of it is his own. King is the rare figure in this calendar whose words survive in his handwriting, in manuscript with the strikeouts preserved, and on audio. His personal papers, some ten thousand pieces, came within days of a Sotheby's auction in 2006 and were kept together only when private donors in Atlanta bought them ahead of the sale for $32 million; the mayor announced the purchase on June 29 of that year. A critical edition exists: in 1985 Coretta Scott King asked the historian Clayborne Carson to direct what became the King Papers Project, and Carson accepted on the condition that the family not control what the edition said. Its volumes began appearing in 1992.
The Letter from Birmingham Jail has a transmission history of the sort usually reserved for much older texts. Within a single year, 1963, it appeared in at least seven print witnesses with varying titles: excerpts in the New York Post Sunday Magazine in May, published without King's consent; the first full printing by the American Friends Service Committee that same month, as "Letter from Birmingham City Jail"; then Liberation, The Christian Century, The New Leader, The Progressive (as "Tears of Love"), and The Atlantic Monthly (as "The Negro Is Your Brother"). The New York Times declined it. King revised it himself for Why We Can't Wait in 1964.
Several things a reader may believe about King are documented to be otherwise. He was born Michael King, Jr.; the name Martin Luther was given him at five and entered on the certificate only on July 23, 1957. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" is not his sentence. It is Theodore Parker's, condensed by King from a passage in Parker's Ten Sermons of Religion (1853), and King quoted it inside quotation marks as inherited language as early as February 1958. "The time is always right to do what is right" is not what he wrote; he wrote "the time is always ripe to do right," inside an argument that time by itself cures nothing. Two sayings attributed to him everywhere, that faith is taking the first step when you cannot see the whole staircase, and that we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends, are in no primary King document that has been found. The second is very likely a folk mutation of a real sentence of his about the appalling silence of the good people.
Two matters are genuinely difficult and should be stated rather than smoothed. In October 1991, a Boston University committee found that portions of King's 1955 dissertation contained material appropriated without attribution. It declined to revoke the degree, holding that the dissertation still made an intelligent contribution to scholarship, and a letter recording the finding is permanently attached to the library copy. The finding came from the King Papers Project's own editors and the historian Ralph Luker, not from his opponents. Separately, in 2019 the biographer David Garrow published an article, after several papers declined it, arguing that FBI files suggested grave misconduct. His colleagues answered him on method rather than with silence: Peter Ling called him credulous in accepting the accuracy of reports produced by an agency whose stated aim, as the Church Committee found in 1976, was to discredit, disrupt, and destroy King. Jeanne Theoharis, Barbara Ransby, N. D. B. Connolly and Glenda Gilmore objected that a serious charge was resting on a handwritten note added to a typed report. The underlying recordings are sealed by federal court order until 2027. No one outside the original FBI chain can presently verify or refute the claim, and this page does not attempt to.
There is no canonization process behind this commemoration. No cause was ever opened in a communion that runs one, and King appears in no martyrology of that kind. What exists instead is a record of decisions, and it is unusually clear.
Two churches with calendars chose opposite ends of the same life. The Episcopal Church keeps April 4, the day of his death, naming him "Martin Luther King Jr., Pastor and Martyr, 1968." The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America keeps January 15, his birthday, as a commemoration of "Martin Luther King Jr., renewer of society, martyr, 1968," with the liturgical color red, proper to martyrs. Neither explains its reasoning. April 4 is kept here because the martyrdom, and not the nativity, is what the church is receiving.
There is also a standing commemoration rather than a dated one. On July 9, 1998, ten twentieth-century martyrs were unveiled in the niches above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, in French Richemont limestone, at a service attended by church leaders, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Duke of Edinburgh. King stands fifth of the ten, among Maximilian Kolbe, Manche Masemola, Janani Luwum, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Óscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Esther John, Lucian Tapiedi, and Wang Zhiming. The Abbey's own description of him is four words long: a civil rights leader who was assassinated. That a Baptist minister stands there, in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran company, is the plainest evidence that his memory has crossed out of American civic observance into the wider church.
His body has never been divided or moved far. He was buried at South-View Cemetery in Atlanta in April 1968, moved in January 1970 to the Auburn Avenue site that became the King Center, and laid in 1977 in the white marble crypt on the plaza between that Center and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Coretta Scott King was interred beside him in February 2006. It is one body in one place, within what is now a national historical park, and people come to it continuously.
The Nobel Foundation posts the text of the Peace Prize acceptance speech delivered at Oslo on December 10, 1964, from which the sentences on unarmed truth and on right temporarily defeated are taken; the same site carries the Foundation's biographical account of King, the source for the length of the Montgomery boycott and for the disposition of the prize money. Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute publishes diplomatic transcriptions of the manuscripts, including the earliest handwritten outline of "Loving Your Enemies," dated by its editors to August 31, 1952 and held as CSKC-INP, Sermon file, folder 1, from which the sentence on love as the key is quoted; the Institute also carries "The Drum Major Instinct," preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, citing A Knock at Midnight, edited by Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran (1998), pages 185-186, for the passage on the drum major, and notes there that the sermon adapts a 1952 homily by J. Wallace Hamilton. The University of Pennsylvania's African Studies Center hosts a full transcription of the Letter from Birmingham Jail of April 16, 1963, the source for the passage on the network of mutuality. NPR's audio-checked transcript of the March on Washington address of August 28, 1963, corrected in January 2024, supplies the line on the content of their character. The closing passage of "I've Been to the Mountaintop," delivered at Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, is quoted from americanrhetoric.com, whose text is transcribed directly from the audio recording. Theodore Parker's original of the arc of the moral universe stands at pages 84-85 of "Of Justice and the Conscience," the third sermon in Ten Sermons of Religion (Boston: Crosby, Nichols and Company, 1853). The National Park Service publishes the fourteen inscriptions of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial with their attributions, and Westminster Abbey's own account of the Modern Martyrs supplies the West Front names, materials, and date. All quotations of King remain under copyright to his estate.
The assassination is contested in a particular way that is easy to garble. Three bodies answered three different questions. James Earl Ray pleaded guilty on March 10, 1969, recanted within days, and sought a trial until his death in 1998. The House Select Committee on Assassinations reported in 1979 that Ray fired the fatal shot and that there was a likelihood of conspiracy, though not a governmental one and more probably involving Ray's brothers than any organization; it did not find that Ray acted alone, and popular summaries often say it did. A Memphis civil jury in December 1999, in a suit brought by the King family, found Loyd Jowers and unknown co-conspirators liable and awarded a symbolic $100. The Department of Justice, reviewing Jowers's claims in 2000, found no reliable evidence supporting them. Most professional historians accept Ray's guilt on the physical evidence; the King family has consistently maintained that he was a scapegoat.
Readings for a Renewer of Society
Exodus 3:7–12Psalm 145:1–13vRomans 12:9–21Luke 6:20–38
Almighty and everlasting God, you kindled the flame of your love in the heart of your servant Martin Luther King, Jr. to manifest your compassion and mercy to the poor and the persecuted: Grant to us, your humble servants, a like faith and power of love, that we who give thanks for his righteous zeal may profit by his example; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.