A Knock at Midnight, Sermon Delivered at the Installation Service of Ralph Abernathy at West Hunter Baptist Church
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: February 11, 1962?
Location: Atlanta, Ga.?
Genre: Sermon
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Career in Ministry
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Details
After orchestrating a letter-writing campaign urging the congregation of Atlanta’s West Hunter Baptist Church to extend a call to Abernathy, King delivers “A Knock at Midnight,” a sermon based largely on D. T. Niles’s homily “Evangelism,” at his friend and colleague’s installation service.1 King insists that although this nation was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal,” Americans are “still arguing over whether the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character.” He instructs the members of West Hunter to help those in need and to confront the moral failure of churches that have “left men disappointed at the darkest hour of life.” West Hunter, King maintains, is embarking on a “great experience” with a “great minister to the gospel” who has a “peculiar awareness” of “the problems that individuals face in life.” The following transcript is taken from an audio recording of the sermon.
[gap in tape] It is midnight in this parable, but I would like to remind you this afternoon, my friends, that it is also midnight in our world today. At points we are experiencing a darkness so deep that we hardly know which way to turn.2 Certainly, it is midnight in the social order. When we look out on the international horizon, we see the nations of the world engaged in a bitter and colossal contest for supremacy. There is a danger now that this contest will lead to the annihilation of the human family on this globe. Atomic warfare has just begun, and bacteriological warfare is yet unused. These things can destroy us. It is dark; it is midnight. This midnight in the social order expresses itself even in our own nation in race relations. While Russia is poisoning the physical atmosphere with fifty-megaton bombs [Congregation:] (Make it plain), the United States is still poisoning the moral atmosphere with the continuation of racial prejudice. And it is one of the ironies of history that in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal, we’re still arguing over whether the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character. It’s midnight (Yes) in the social order. (Amen)
But not only is it midnight out there; it is midnight in here. We preachers know that. Whenever I’m in town, I can hardly find enough hours in the day to counsel with people who are confronting problems. Psychopathic wards of our hospitals today are filled. People are haunted by day and plagued by night with crippling anxieties and paralyzing fears. It’s midnight in the psychological order. What are the popular books in psychology today? Man against Himself, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. What are the popular books in religion today? Peace of Mind (Make it plain), Peace of Soul.3 And who are the popular preachers today? Preachers who can preach nice little sermons on how to relax and how to be happy. And so we have retranslated the gospel to read, “Go ye into all the world, and keep your blood pressure down, and, lo, I will make you a well-adjusted personality.”4 [laughter] All of this is indicative of the fact that it is midnight (Yes) in the psychological order.
But not only that, it is midnight in the moral order. Midnight is a time when all colors lose their distinctiveness and become merely a dirty shade of gray.5 Midnight is a time when all moral values lose their distinctiveness. Morality becomes a thing that is measured in terms of what the people are doing. At midnight, absolute standards pass away. A dangerous ethical relativism comes into being, so at midnight, men begin to say that there is nothing absolutely right and absolutely wrong; it’s just a matter of what the majority of people are doing. So at midnight, men live by some such philosophy as this: everybody is doing it, so it must be all right. [laughter] And so we have come to feel that we discover what is right by taking a sort of Gallup poll of the majority opinion: everybody’s doing it, it is all right. Midnight is a time when everybody seeks to get by. (Well) Midnight is a time when men live by the philosophy that right is getting by and wrong is getting caught. (Yes) [laughter] So we see that today we live by philosophy that is somewhat different from the Darwinian survival of the fittest. It is now the survival of the slickest: do anything but just don’t get caught. And so nobody today is much concerned about the Ten Commandments; they are not important at midnight.6 Everybody is busy obeying the eleventh commandment: thou shall not get caught. [laughter] It’s all right to lie [laughter], but just lie with a bit of finesse. It’s all right to exploit, but be a dignified exploiter. (Yeah, Lord) [laughter] It’s all right even to hate, but dress your hate up in the garments of love and make it appear that you are loving when you are actually hating—just get by. (Yeah) [laughter] (Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes) This is the philosophy at midnight.
This is what we face in our world today: a threefold midnight experience. It is midnight in the social order, midnight in the psychological order, midnight in the moral order. But in the midst of this midnight experience, the deep darkness is interrupted by a knock in the parable. And in our world today, it is a knock of the world on the door of the church.7 This is it, West Hunter; this is it, Ebenezer; this is it, Friendship; this is it, Wheat Street; this is it for every other church here this afternoon. It is dark and it is midnight, but there is a knock. (Yes sir) And it is the knock of the world (Yes) on the door of the church. And no one is more conscious of this than the minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He knows that it is dark (Yes, Yes), but he has the strange capacity to hear the knock at midnight. Men all over this world are knocking. I just read two days ago in the New York Times an article by Harrison Salisburg who’s doing a series of articles on Russia. He’s saying that something strange is happening in Russia, starting out with its communistic dialectical materialism and its atheism—it felt that there was no God in the universe, but it said that the Russian scientists are now coming around to feeling that there’s something spiritual in the cosmos. And he said this is disturbing the Communist Party. They’re especially disturbed because so many young people are piling into the churches in Russia.8 He says they are disturbed because for forty years of propaganda against religion, for forty years of oppression, for forty years of trying to get rid of God and the church, the churches are now more packed than ever before. (Amen, Amen) Even in Soviet Russia, you can’t get rid of God because men know that they need God in the church at midnight. (Amen, Yes, Yes, Yes) Even if you try to push Him out of the front door, religion has a way of sneaking back in the back door. (Yes sir) [laughter] (Preach, Yes, Yes, Yes)
Men are turning, knocking on the door of the church at midnight. This parable said they wanted three loaves—this man wanted three loaves of bread, physical bread. Men and women today are seeking three loaves, not physical bread but spiritual bread.9 (Yes, Yes, Yes) Men are seeking the bread of faith. (Yes) Points so many people have lost faith in themselves, faith in their neighbors, faith in God. And in the midst of this, they are reaching out for the bread of faith. They want the bread of hope. Young people want this; old people want this. Living under the threat of nuclear and atomic annihilation, people are crying out today for a ray of hope. So many today feel like crying with the philosopher Schopenhauer that life is an endless pain with a painful end.10 Others feel like crying with Shakespeare’s Macbeth life is “a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.”11 (Go ahead) Others feel like crying out with [laughter] Paul Laurence Dunbar [laughter]:
A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in (Go on),
A minute to smile and an hour to weep in,
A pint of joy to a peck of trouble [laughter] (Go on),
And never a laugh that the moans come double;
And that is life!12 (Yes sir, Yes)
In the midst of this darkness and hopeless situation men are crying out today for the bread of hope. (Amen, Yes sir, Preach) Then they want the bread of love. (Yes) Three loaves they want (Yes): faith, hope, and love. [laughter] (Yes) And everybody wants a little love. (Amen) Oh [laughter], we are hovered up today in big cities in mass populations, and so often we live in systems that are oppressive and discriminatory. They take from us our sense of personhood and our sense of selfhood, and so many people feel that they don’t count, that they don’t belong. (My God)
With the depersonalization of modern life, all too often we feel that we are little more than numbers. (Well) When the mother goes to the hospital to have a child, she becomes maternity patient number 10–82. When the child is born, after he’s fingerprinted and foot-printed, he becomes number 12–65. Then when the child grows up and decides to go out and work in a big factory, he’s simply number 12–06. Or even if he becomes a little criminal in his tendencies, he goes into jail and he becomes 5–8–7–5 in Cell B. And even when he comes to the point [laughter] of his last days of death, he goes into Parlor B in the funeral home (Yes, Yes, Yes) and he is carried out by preacher 14, who preaches the sermon, and singer 19, and the flowers and the decorations become class B. [laughter] And this is how modern man finds himself (Yes) caught up in the depersonalization of modern life.13 This is where he is. (Yes, Yes sir) So he reaches out in the midst of this for the bread of love (Oh yes): I want to be somebody; I want to count; I’m more than just a number (Yes); I’m more than an index card. (Yes) I’m a child of God (Yes), and I want the bread of love. (Yes) This is what he’s looking for today. [laughter] This is what modern man is seeking. (Yes) He’s running to the church of God trying to find a little bread. (Amen)
But I want you to follow me a little more here. (Amen, Go ahead) This is an installation sermon, and I’m (Yes) trying to challenge the church and the Christian family and all of us this afternoon. (Yes Lord, Yes, Yes, Yes) I want you to follow me here. (Walk on, Preach, Walk on) Said when that man knocked on the door trying to get some bread, he knocked and he knocked, the man inside wouldn’t open the door. He said in substance, “I’m tired, I’m sleepy, the children are in bed, don’t bother me, don’t worry me now.” So this man outside was left disappointed at midnight. Oh, my friends, I hate to say this afternoon, so often the church left men disappointed at the darkest hour of life. (Well, Yes Lord)
Men have cried out in Asia and Africa for the bread of justice. Look at South Africa, if you will. (Yes) There you will find about 10 million black men dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated on 2 percent of their own land. (Yes) You know who stands out probably more than anybody else for the policy of apartheid, the policy of segregation in South Africa? Nothing less than the Dutch Reform Protestant Church.14 (Go on, Amen) Chief Lutuli and his followers have gone up over and over again to the church trying to get the bread of justice, and the church has said, “Leave me alone. I’m busy with my creeds; I’m busy with my worship of God. Leave me alone.” And these people have left—been left disappointed at midnight.15 (Amen)
We can come right on here to America. (Go on, Preach) When we stand on Sunday morning to sing “In Christ There Is No East or West” (Go on), we stand in the most segregated hour of Christian America.16 (Yes Lord) The most segregated school of the week is the Sunday school.17 How often has the white church had a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds? (Yes sir) This is the tragedy. (Yes) This is it. (This is it) Bread of social justice has not been provided by the Christian church in so many instances. (Yes) Yes, some of them will give thousands of dollars to Africa for the missionary effort—you know about it. (Yes) Southern Baptist Convention probably give more money for missions than any church that you can find anywhere. (Yes sir) I tell you, if this morning a young man came over to the United States from Kenya or from Ghana or from Nigeria, any point in Africa, and tried to worship in the First Baptist or the Second Ponce de Leon or the Druid Hill Baptist Church even in Atlanta, Georgia, they would put him out (Oh yeah) in spite of the fact that they send thousands of dollars to Africa.18 (Yes sir, Amen) Seem that I can hear the almighty God saying, “Get out of my face. Move away from me because your hands are full of blood. (Yes, Yes, Yes) I’m not interested merely in your dollars unless those dollars have human love within them. (Yes Lord, Yes) I’m not interested in your checks unless those checks are signed with the ink of compassion. (Yes, Preach) I’m not interested, my (Yes sir, Yes Lord) friend in all of your beautiful hymns and all of your long prayers. (No) You must discover that you must “let justice roll down like waters (Yes, Yes) and righteousness like a mighty stream.”19 (Yes Lord, Yes) That is what you must do.” (Make it plain) This is what God is saying even to the church today when we leave men disappointed. (Yes)
Now, I don’t want to stop with the white church. (No, Come on over) [laughter] Unfortunately [laughter], unfortunately, we have these differences—we have a white church and a Negro church. That day must pass. (Yes, Yes) I want to say that often the Negro church has left men and women disappointed at the midnight hour. (Yes, That’s right) Let nobody fool you. Now, you know there are two types of Negro churches that have left people disappointed. One of them freezes up and the other one burns up. (Yes, That’s right, Come on) [laughter] One of them is a church that boasts of the fact that it’s a dignified church. (Lord) It’s a church that says, you know, we, we don’t sing spirituals—no we don’t do that (No)—and we have so many doctors and so many lawyers and so many schoolteachers in our church (Only way to go) [laughter], and of course [laughter], we are dignified. [laughter] (Yes, Yes) This church [laughter] has often substituted a sort of a, a sort of social acceptance for the genuine power of the gospel. (Yes Lord, Yes Lord) This dignified church becomes a little more than a secular social club with a thin veneer of religiosity. (Look out) And it has so often left the warmth of religion, and the power of the gospel, wanting. (Yes) It has somehow lost the power of the whosoever-will-let-him-come doctrine.20 (Yes) [laughter] Oh, the church must never stand up talking about “certain kinds of people are in it” (That’s right, Preach); God’s church is for everybody. (Amen, Yes) It’s for the Ph.D.s and the no-Ds (That’s right); it’s for the ups and ins and the downs and outs (Preach); it’s for the rich and it’s for the poor; it’s for the young and for the old. (Yes) [laughter] But this church which freezes up is nothing but a social club. (Yeah) It leaves so many people disappointed. (Yes, Go on, Preach)
Then there’s another church that becomes little more than an entertaining center. The other one freezes up and this one burns up. It majors in gymnastics. (Yeah) [laughter] It confuses “muscle-ality” with spirituality. [laughter] So often, the members of that church [laughter] have more religion in their hands and their feet than they have in their hearts and in their souls. [laughter] (Yeah) They play with the gospel. (Yeah, That’s right, Lord) They think only about the volume of their voices rather than the quality of their service to humanity and to God. (Yes sir) I can hear the almighty God saying, “Both of these churches [laughter] leave men disappointed.” (Preach, Come on now) I can hear Him saying, “I’m not concerned about all of that, but what I am concerned about is that you will love mercy, and that you will do justice (Amen) and that you will walk humbly with your God.”21 (Yes, Yes) That’s what I’m concerned about. (Yes, Yes, Yes) So my friends, let us be sure here in this church and in this community all over, we will not leave men disappointed. (Amen)
There’s another point—I’m moving on toward my conclusion now. (Go on) But you know [laughter] it’s a strange thing—that man kept knocking; he didn’t leave. [laughter] That’s strange, isn’t it? (Yes, Yeah, Go on, Preach) The man wouldn’t open the door. [laughter] (That’s right, Amen) He was disappointed, but he kept knocking. (Yes) There’s a big word there: importunity. It says because of his importunity—that merely means because of his persistence (Yeah)—because of, because of his stick-to-it-ness (Yes, All right), because of his willingness to keep on keeping on (All right), finally that man opened the door. But I tell you—we may use our imagination here—why on, why he didn’t, I mean, why that man kept knocking, and we can say on the one hand that he was desperate and he needed some bread. That’s true. But I’ll tell you why he stayed there and kept knocking: he stayed there because he knew there was some bread in there. (Yeah) And no matter how much that man in there had disappointed him, he knew that there was some bread in there. He wouldn’t have stayed if he didn’t think there was any bread in there. But he stayed because, in spite of the disappointment that he faced, he knew that there was some bread in that house. (Yes, Yes)
Oh, if I can leave anything with you this afternoon as you embark on this great experience with a great minister to the gospel and a great man of God, let me say to you, West Hunter, that you have the bread of life here. (Yeah, Well, Amen) I can only urge you to keep the bread fresh. (Yeah) Don’t let it get stale on you (Yeah) because somebody will want it. Some young boy or some young lady will make a mistake one day; they will run around the nightclubs and pick up all of the bottles that they can find, trying to drown out a sense of guilt. (All right) One day they will discover that they can’t find it in the nightclub (Yes, Amen), and they will come back by here (Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes) to find the bread of forgiveness. (Yes, Yes, Yes, Amen) One day (Yes, Yes) someone will move toward the evening of life. (All right) They will be afraid of bad health and afraid of old age and afraid of death. They will try in many ways to grapple with it. One day they will come by here. (Amen, Yes) They will want you to give them the bread that will carry them across the chilly Jordan. They will want a little bread (Yes, Yes) that will tell them that death is not a period which ends this great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more loftier significance.22 (All right) They will want a little bread (Yes, Yes) to tide them over. (Yes) God grant that the church of God will always keep the bread fresh. (Yes Lord) If the church will do this, it would be a great church; it would be a powerful church.
God has blessed West Hunter. (Yes) He has given to you a man who’s had a peculiar awareness of the need for the bread of social justice. (Yes, Lord, Well) He’s given to you a man who has a peculiar awareness the problems that individuals face in life. (Yes) It is a marvelous thing to be able to move out right here (All right) and provide that bread on this corner. (Yes, Lord)
I’m closing now. There’s something implied here that I want to leave. He said he wanted some bread, but it is implied that he just wants enough bread to tide him over until the dawn (Amen, All right), just enough bread to tide him over until the dawn. He knew it was midnight; he knew it was dark. But, but something reminded him that daybreak was coming (Yeah, Yes, Lord), and he just wanted enough to hold him until, until daybreak emerged (Yeah), enough to tide him over until the dawn.23 This is our message to the world; this is what Ralph Abernathy has been preaching; this is what West Hunter has to say to Atlanta and to the members of this church: it may be dark; it may be difficult; it may be a dangerous world in which we live, but midnight is only a temporary phenomenon in the universe. (Yes, Yes) You know our slave foreparents used to deal with this problem. (All right) Sometimes they’d cry out, “Nobody knows the trouble I see (Yeah), /Nobody knows but Jesus.”24 (Yeah) It was midnight then. (Yes, Yes) Then they recognized something and they could sing, “I’m so glad (Yeah) the trouble don’t last always.”25 (Yeah, That’s it) Then they could cry out, “I got shoes, you got shoes (Go ahead), /All of God’s children got shoes. (Yes, Lord) /When I get to heaven going to put on my shoes /And I’m just going to walk all over God’s heaven” (Yeah, Go ahead) because daybreak is coming.26 (Yes, Lord, Yes, Well, Preach) Let it get dark in your individual life; let it get dark in race relations, but never forget that there is a God in this universe (Yes sir, Yes) who can transform dark and desolate valleys (Yes, Lord) into sunlit paths of joy (Yes), who can lift us from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. (Yes there is) This is our hope. This is the power of our gospel.
My friends from Montgomery will remember this closing experience that I would like to mention to you. We went through some dark days there in our struggle. (Yes, Yes, Well) We faced midnight so often. (Yes, Go on, Go on) And I can remember after we had struggled together for several months, walked the streets, we had developed a carpool—had, friends from over the nation had helped us to develop. Many of you from Atlanta and all over sent money down there so that we could buy station wagons and we could provide a carpool to help get people to and from work. Oh, Dr. Seay will remember; Reverend Abernathy and Brother Nesbitt and all people from Montgomery will remember. One day the mayor of the city came out in the paper and said: “We are tired of this mess, and we are going to file a suit in the court of Montgomery, Alabama, to bring an end to the carpool.”27 It was announced that the city commission would seek an injunction against a carpool.28 Now, we knew that they would get it; we knew the courts in Alabama. And I never will forget that morning when I read it in the paper. I started calling Ralph and others and asking, “What are we going to do now?” It was moving toward Monday night when we had our regular weekly mass meeting, and I stayed back in my den in despair and in a disillusioning moment, and I was, I was at the point that I was faltering and I, I didn’t have the strength to face the people and go to the mass meeting. I would speak every Monday night and try to give encouragement and hope and courage to the people along with the other leaders. This night I, I didn’t want to face them, for I knew that carpool would be enjoined, and all I could say was what’s going to happen now. We are, we are set back, and the people are going to lose faith in us, and all of this that we have done will be in vain. You can never know the lonely moments and the agonizing moments that a leader in a struggle like this goes through. (Well) And I remember it was getting toward eight o’clock and I finally mustered up enough courage to go on to the meeting. As I walked in that night, I could see that the people themselves were worried a little about this, and I looked into their eyes and I could see, figuratively speaking, clouds of sorrow floating in their little mental skies. I could see cold waves of pessimism flowing around that congregation in the Bethel Baptist Church. I got up and I tried to talk and I said, in substance, “We’ve come to many dark moments before. Often we didn’t see our way clear. We didn’t know the way out, but in our darkest moments, God always came to make a way out of no way.” (Yes, Yes Lord, Yes, Yes Lord) I said, “I know tomorrow morning that, that our carpool will be enjoined and I can’t exactly tell you now what we’re going to do, but, but God will make a way for us.” (Yes, Yes Lord, Well) Even after I said that, I could still feel that faltering element within myself and within the people, oh it was dark that night (Yes, Yes, Yes), blacker than a thousand midnights. (It’s true) It was midnight in Montgomery. (Yes)
Got up that morning, Ralph came by and picked me up, and we moved on down to the court with our wives and other friends. Since I was the chief defendant, they had me sitting at the table with the lawyers, and they started the case, and attorney [Arthur] Shores and attorney [Fred] Gray and the other lawyers argued brilliantly before Judge [Eugene] Carter, and yet I could see that Judge Carter was going to rule against us. The city argued that we were operating a business without a franchise, and they argued, and our lawyers argued that, that wasn’t true—that this was a nonprofit corporation, that this was a nonprofit situation. In all of the arguments, I could see which way Judge Carter was going to rule. Then it came to the point that it was about twelve o’clock. I was sitting there, and I had gone down at that moment in the deepest despair. (All right) I could see nothing but darkness even though it was physical daylight—darkness, midnight, was surrounding us. (All right) Then I started noticing that people were walking around in the courtroom. I looked over to the mayor, and I saw him walking back to a little room. Then I saw Commissioner [Clyde] Sellers, and he started moving back to a little room. (Preach on) [laughter] Then Judge Carter said, “The court is recessed for ten minutes.” [laughter] (All right) Then as I was sitting there at that table [laughter], Rex Thomas, the AP reporter, came to me and said, “Dr. King (Yes, Yes sir), I have a little statement that I want you to read. It has just come out, and we want a comment from you. We need your comment.” [laughter] And I took that little piece of paper [laughter]; it read something like this: “This morning [laughter] the United States Supreme Court unanimously declared bus segregation unconstitutional [laughter] in Montgomery, Alabama.”29 [applause] I say to you today (Come on), for it was midnight a few hours ago [laughter] (Yes Lord, Yes), somebody cried out, “God has spoken from Washington.” (Yeah) [laughter] Many times God has spoken. (Yes) So we left that court that day knowing that it didn’t matter what decision was rendered. (Yes, Amen) We didn’t need a carpool [laughter] anymore because we were going back to integrated buses. (Amen, All right)
Don’t you worry, my friends. (Amen) It may be dark, but daybreak is coming. (That’s right) Darker yet may be the night, right may often yield to might, but if you are right, God will fight your battles.30 (Yes) [laughter] (Yeah) Don’t worry tonight (That’s right); don’t worry this afternoon. (That’s right) Midnight is not here to stay. (Yes sir) “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— /Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, /Standeth God within (Yes) the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”31 (Oh yes) So this afternoon, I can walk around the city of Atlanta (Yes, Yes, Yes); I can fly around America (Yes); I can face temporary setbacks in the civil (Yes, Yes, Yes) rights struggle, but I can say to you, “Walk together, children. (Yes sir) [laughter] Don’t you get weary, for there is a great camp meeting in the Promised Land.”32 (Amen) [applause] (Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen)
1. Daniel Thambyrajah Niles (1908–1970) was a Sri Lankan evangelist and ecumenical leader. See Niles, “Evangelism,” Address at the second assembly of the World Council of Churches, 16 August 1954. Niles later published this sermon as “Summons at Midnight” (Niles, Christian Century 71 [1 September 1954]: 1037–1039). On his copy of Niles’s homily that he kept in his sermon file, King wrote “A Knock at Midnight.” Following the death of A. Franklin Fisher in November 1960, Samuel L. Spear, a parishioner at West Hunter, asked King if he might be interested in filling the vacancy. King declined but recommended Abernathy for the job (King to Spear, 16 December 1960, in Papers 5:581–582). Two months later, King wrote a letter to the chairman of West Hunter’s board of deacons highlighting Abernathy’s qualifications to assume the pastorate of the church (King to J. R. Butts, 8 February 1961, pp. 153–154 in this volume). On Abernathy’s behalf, King also solicited letters of recommendations from fellow pastors O. Clay Maxwell and Gardner C. Taylor (King to Maxwell, 9 February 1961; King to Taylor, 9 February 1961). Abernathy accepted the call to West Hunter in August 1961.
2. See Niles, “Evangelism”: “It is midnight in the parable. It is also midnight in the world today. The night is so deep that everything has become just an object to be avoided, and obstacle in the dark against which men must take care not to bump.”
3. King cites Karl A. Menninger, Man against Himself (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938); Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: Norton, 1937); C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933); Joshua Loth Liebman, Peace of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946); and Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949).
4. King parodies Mark 16:15–16: “And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” See also Halford E. Luccock, “Life’s Saving Tension,” in Marching Off the Map (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), p. 75: “They are almost on the verge of rewriting the Scriptures to read, ‘If any man will come after me, let him relax,’ or ‘Go into all the world and keep down your blood pressure.’”
5. Niles, “Evangelism”: “Besides, at midnight, every colour loses its distinctiveness and becomes merely a dirty shade of grey.”
6. Exodus 20.
7. Niles, “Evangelism”: “But, as in the parable, so in our day, the tense silence of the midnight is disturbed by the sound of a knock. It is the door of the Church on which somebody is knocking.”
8. King may be referring to the fifth in a series of eight articles by Harrison Salisbury: “Khrushchev’s Russia—5: Anti-Semitism and Religious Upsurge Are Said to Baffle the Soviet Regime,” New York Times, 12 September 1959.
9. Luke 11:5–6: “And he said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves; For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to set before him?”
10. Cf. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., 1891), vol. 3, p. 462: “In the whole of human existence suffering expresses itself clearly enough as its true destiny. Life is deeply sunk in suffering, and cannot escape from it; our entrance into it takes place amid tears, its course is at bottom always tragic, and its end still more so.”
11. Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 5, scene 5: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player /That struts and frets his hour upon the stage /And then is heard no more: it is a tale /Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.”
12. King quotes the first verse of Dunbar’s poem “Life” (1895).
13. Cf. Ralph Borsodi, This Ugly Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929), p. 199: “The modern mother is merely maternity case number 8,434; her infant after being finger and foot printed, becomes infant number 8,003. By virtue of the same mania for system, a modern corpse becomes number 2,432; while a modern funeral becomes one of a series scheduled for parlor 4B for a certain day at a certain hour, with preacher number fourteen, singer number 87, rendering music number 174, and flowers and decorations class B.” Borsodi (1886–1977), an agrarian theorist and modern critic, tested the idea of moving back to the land and embraced the concept of simple living.
14. Daniel François Malan (1874–1959), a former clergyman in the Dutch Reformed Church, instituted the country’s apartheid policies during his tenure as South Africa’s prime minister from 1948 until 1954.
15. Nobel laureate Albert John Mvumbi Lutuli (1898?–1967), chief of the Umvoti Reserve community near Groutville, South Africa, was a long-time leader of the African National Congress (ANC). At Lutuli’s request, King sent him a copy of Stride Toward Freedom (King to Lutuli, 8 December 1959, in Papers 5:344–345).
16. King evokes John Oxenham’s hymn “In Christ There Is No East or West” (1908).
17. National Council of Churches official Helen Kenyon labeled eleven o’clock on Sunday morning the “most segregated time” in the United States (“Worship Hour Found Time of Segregation,” New York Times, 4 November 1952; see also Robert J. McCracken, “Discrimination—The Shame of Sunday Morning,” The Pulpit 26, no. 2 [February 1955]: 4–5).
18. In 1961, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had 377 missionaries stationed in eight African countries and devoted almost $3.5 million of the $17 million Foreign Mission Board budget to these locations (Southern Baptist Convention, Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention 1962, comp. James W. Merritt [1962], pp. 125–137, 271–275). Despite their focus on cultivating Christianity abroad, Southern Baptists were divided over the issue of integration, as many congregations remained segregated. Druid Hills Baptist pastor and former SBC president Louie D. Newton indicated his personal support for a 1958 call by more than three hundred Atlanta area religious leaders in favor of public school integration, but two years later black college students were prevented from worshiping at his church (Claude Sitton, “Atlanta Clerics Bid South Yield,” New York Times, 23 November 1958; “Students Try ‘Kneel-in’ at 10 Churches,” Washington Post, 15 August 1960).
19. Cf. Amos 5:24.
20. Cf. Mark 8:34.
21. Cf. Micah 6:8.
22. Amos John Traver, The Christ Who Is All (Philadelphia: United Lutheran Publication House, 1929), p. 95: “Life is one, death is but a comma in the unending sentence … To change the thought demands a period, and that is just what we are too often making of death, a period.”
23. Niles, “Evangelism”: “Midnight is a difficult hour in which to be faithful or successful: but we shall find grace as we seek to minister to the real need of him who comes to us in the midnight. For the traveller by midnight who is asking for bread is really asking for the dawn.”
24. King quotes from part of the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
25. King refers to the spiritual “I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always.”
26. King references a verse from the spiritual “Going to Shout All Over God’s Heaven.”
27. W. A. Gayle (1895–1965) was mayor of Montgomery from 1951–1959.
28. S. S. Seay (1899–1988), pastor of Mt. Zion AME Zion Church from 1947–1962, and Robert D. Nesbitt (1908–2002), longtime clerk of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, were both members of the Montgomery Improvement Association’s executive board.
29. On 13 November 1956, the United States Supreme Court declared the segregation of Montgomery buses unconstitutional in the case of Gayle v. Browder, 352 U.S. 903 (1956). King retells this story in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 158–160.
30. King paraphrases the lyrics of Charles Albert Tindley’s “Some Day”: “Harder yet may be the fight, /right may often yield to might. /Wickedness awhile may reign, /Satan’s cause may seem to gain. /There is a God that rules above, /With hand of power and heart of love. /If I am right, He’ll fight my battle, /I shall have peace some day.”
31. James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis” (1844), stanza 8.
32. King paraphrases from the spiritual “There’s a Great Camp Meeting.”
Source: BAA-CSt-KPP, The Boffard Audio Collection: University of Tours, France, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.