Ring Out Freedom: The Voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement

When he was doing research for his study Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind, John Ansbro asked Wyatt Tee Walker, chief of staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during several of the movement years, which writings most influenced King. Walker simply answered “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” Walker added that “[t]he basis of Martin Luther King’s ministry and mission was the ethics and morality of the Crucified Carpenter from Galilee. . . . [F]irst and foremost he was an unapologetic proclaimer of the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth.”1 These statements illustrate the centrality of religion in the activities of King.

But this centrality also provokes questions as much as it provides answers and it merits a careful examination if one wants to understand how King’s rhetoric works. The basic influence of the gospel and the ultimate grounding in Jesus Christ cannot be viewed alone. King’s faith was part of a public and societal struggle that had many different dimensions, and his rendition and “use” of his faith must be viewed within the realms that this context constitutes.

This first chapter is therefore concerned with this the most fundamental element of King’s rhetoric: How does he use religion and faith to signify, define, and understand? What are the consequences of using religion and faith in this way? How is his use of his religious faith related to the movement’s self-understanding and place on the American political scene and to King’s position between cultures? For these questions to be answered, the basic structure of the civil rights movement discourse as a whole must be analyzed and its fundamental workings must be mapped out.

The Structure of the Discourse

The classic dichotomy of idealism and materialism is a fruitful tool with which to explore King’s religious rhetoric. Idealism can be defined as the notion that reality is ultimately constituted by ideas, thoughts, and knowledge and that any change or progress in this world ultimately depends on these factors. Materialism can be defined as the notion that reality is ultimately constituted by the practical activities of man and that any change or progress in this world is finally dependent on material factors.

These notions can help to formulate a question that make visible the construction of King’s discourse of faith: In what ways does King let idealistic values determine his description of practical reality and what position does that practical reality—or materialism—have in relation to these values by which it is described? The question becomes even more helpful if the qualifications of the notions are enlarged with the caveat that it is meaningless to speak of objects or facts as existing independent from the concepts and terms by which we describe them, but it is also at least as problematic to, as idealism does, view these concepts and terms as reality in themselves. The dichotomy between idealism and materialism as here defined points to a deep ambiguity in King’s rhetoric, but the caveats can help us to understand how this ambiguity in itself is creative.

To further understand this ambiguity, let us turn to King’s speech “The Church on the Frontier of Racial Tension,” given before the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, in April 1961. The speech is both thematically and rhetorically quite typical of King’s public speaking before this type of audience. Its main theme is the place of the civil rights movement in relation to the responsibilities of the church, and its goal is to challenge the audience to realize that the church is and must be the central institution of the struggle. The criticism the speech offers is aimed mainly at the passive attitude still persisting within some quarters and the failure of some to realize the important part the church has to play as a vehicle for political and social change.

After an initial mention of how the civil rights movement is a part of a worldwide uprising against oppression in the forms of imperialism, colonialism, and segregation and how the world stands on the threshold of something “new,” King presents a historical survey explaining why the American civil rights movement was born at its particular point in time and what this moment consists of and will lead to. It is this explanation that provides an entry into the questions of this chapter.

At one point King states that:
“living with the conditions of slavery and later segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves, many came to feel that perhaps they were less than human, perhaps they were inferior. But then something happened to the Negro. Circumstances made it necessary for him to travel more: the coming of the automobile, the upheaval of two world wars, the great depression. And so his rural plantation life background gave way to urban industrial life, his economic life was gradually rising through the growth of industry and the influence of organized labor and other agencies, and even his cultural life was rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. All of these forces conjoined to cause the Negro to take a new look at himself”

The history behind the civil rights movement is thus explained in materialistic terms. But when King turns to the contemporary struggle, his definition of how change comes about is different. He then turns to the wisdom of the academic world:
“Professor Sorokin of Harvard University wrote a book some years ago entitled The Crisis of Our Age, and his basic thesis was that a crisis develops in a society when an old idea exhausts itself and society seeks to reorientate itself around a new idea. This is what we see today, the old idea of paternalism, the old idea that [sic] segregation has exhausted itself; and American society is seeking to reorientate itself around the new idea of integration, of person to person relations. This is something of the crisis we see.”

Here it is the death of an old and the birth of a new idea that stands at the center of change, an idea that will create and develop the new society. But it will not come to life on its own. Its birth involves a struggle, and when, in the speech, we reach this struggle and the future it will bring about, King adds yet another dimension. He says: “[L]et me say that we must have faith in the future, the faith to believe that we can solve this problem, the faith to believe that as we struggle to solve this problem we do not struggle alone. But we have cosmic companionship. Oh, before the victory is won, some people may have to get scarred up. . . . Who will be part of that creative minority that will stand firm on an issue will help us bring into being the Kingdom of God, knowing that in the process, God struggles with us. The God that we worship is not some Aristotelian Unmoved Mover who merely contemplates upon himself. The God that we worship is not merely a self-knowing God, but he is an ever-loving God, working through history for the salvation of man. So with this faith we can move on.”

There is no denying that King’s worldview is at base idealistic. Ultimately the universe is moral; it is created and upheld by the almighty God. This basic assumption is always present in his sermons, speeches, and writings. But how should we then regard his often-recurring materialistic explanations, of which the above is one of many examples? The contradiction is perhaps not too bewildering. Any ideology contains contradictions of different kinds, as does any thought and speech of a human being; who goes through life without contradicting him or herself? That both idealistic and materialistic explanations can be found in King’s rhetoric does not mean that they hold an equal position or that they create meaning at the same level. It is exactly this point that provides a way into the structure of King’s civil rights movement discourse.

If we formalize the three passages above we see the past as materialistic, the present as idealistic, and the future as religious. These three philosophies represent different layers of King’s civil rights discourse; they form a hierarchy that orders his system of belief. King’s rhetoric orders and understands the world through this hierarchy of values.

In the first quote, King states that the Negro’s changing self-evaluation had its main origins in the changing historical and material realities of the first half of the twentieth century. In the second quote, he continues the story by stating that this led to a struggle between two systems of ideas. His story ends in the third quote with the guarantee that this struggle will be won since the universe is upheld by an active God. This is a typical example of what may be called an actualization of a religious superstructure through a ladder of signification, a central feature of the civil rights movement discourse as a discourse of faith. The signification structure of the discourse has three different levels: the religious, the idealistic, and the materialistic. Each of these three modes of explanation is used in King’s rhetoric. But these three modes of explanation are also interconnected, and they are interconnected according to a certain order. In this sense, they can be understood as three rungs on a ladder, connected with each other by the sidepieces of the ladder. This order means that the modes of explanation have different definitional powers. The religious mode is the most powerful and therefore the highest rung of the ladder. It is there that the ultimate definition is always anchored. Thereafter come the idealistic mode, and lastly the materialistic. But, and this is what is central to the functioning of the discourse, since the modes are interconnected in the form of a ladder, the power of the ultimate definition also becomes a part of the other modes, which means that materialistic explanations become vested with the authority of God and his universe of idealism.

In this speech, King wants to describe the background of the civil rights movement, its current struggle, and the consequences of its coming victory. In that sense, the speech is highly representative of King’s project in general. In these three segments he explains the “whats,” the “whys,” and the “hows” of what he is doing and aiming for; these general positions are present throughout his entire public career. But there are still some interesting discrepancies to note that highlight the differences between materialism, idealism, and religious idealism: The material and historical explanation of how the civil rights movement came about is broad in scope; it describes the society in general in which the new Negro emerges. The idealistic definition of contemporary society takes a much more narrow view; the idea of segregation stands opposed to the idea of integration. Finally, the religious definition of the struggle provides a context to both the earlier explanations. It positions them inside its own frames of meaning and understanding. Such positioning is a defining characteristic of the discourse of faith.

The three levels of materialism, idealism, and faith are interconnected. They form a hierarchy in which each new level contains a further element of truth that posits the earlier definition. And on the highest rung of this ladder of signification stands faith (or, if one wishes to personalize it, God). In brief: Religion determines the ideals that determine the material reality; once this process has taken place, it is possible for religion to explain both ideals and material reality within its own sphere.

This is the function of the religious superstructure and the basic building block of the construction of the civil rights movement discourse as a discourse of faith. King’s concrete historical reality takes place within the framework of religious reality. A discourse of faith means that meaning is always given from above. A concrete situation is always determined by ideals that have their home and final end in faith.

This reveals how closely connected the discourse of faith is with the project of creating an discourse of inclusion, a process by which the discourse of faith is able to incorporate a totality, as opposed to separate parts, through its monopolistic claims that it is grounded in truth. Through its naming process, a discourse of faith can create frames around a content that is vastly diverse. But despite this diversity, when the discourse of faith is used successfully as it was, generally speaking, in King’s pre1965 rhetoric, it gives the speaker and also—and this is important—the ideologue almost the same power as Adam, who was given the power to name the earth’s inhabitants.