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The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Atlanta preachers, King was raised under the religious pieties of the black Baptist church. "King came out of a very fundamental, evangelical church," explains H. Malcolm Newton, director of urban studies at Denver Seminary. "They taught the Bible at Ebenezer Baptist Church [in Atlanta]. That was his roots."

King's intellectual curiosity and desire to understand the very unchristian race situation in the South (combined with his education at liberal northern seminaries) compelled him to ask questions that would stretch his theology far beyond fundamentalism. Nonetheless, on a practical level, King's Baptist heritage always shone through. "In the quiet recesses of my heart," he often said, "I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher."It was no accident that an effort as socially positive as the civil-rights movement began in the church, says noted New York pastor Suzan Johnson Cook, a member of President Clinton's Racial Advisory Board. "Martin Luther King proved that our faith and our struggle should never be separate. Faith and struggle—when coupled—make us more effective leaders."

"Dr. King taught us that Christianity could be a vigorous voice for conscience in this nation," adds Robert Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center, an ecumenical coalition of mostly African-American seminaries in Atlanta. "He showed us that the church did not have to marginalize itself. That it could play a major and necessary role in the public square."In August 1963, King's movement organized its massive March on Washington, the event that begat the legendary "I Have a Dream" speech and represented the pinnacle of his fame. A Nobel Peace Prize came in 1964. And there were rousing legislative victories as well, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

King's political efforts received criticism from white religious leaders from both conservative and liberal circles. His famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was actually a passionate response to eight "moderate" clergymen in Alabama who saw King's continued use of nonviolent resistance as "unwise" and encouraged him to let the fight for integration continue in the local and federal courts. Unlike those clergymen, King could not fathom a separation between his faith and politics. He wrote:

In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.

On a steamy July evening in 1967, James Earl Massey's plane touched down at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Massey, then the senior pastor of Detroit's Metropolitan Church of God, had been attending a clergy convention when one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history erupted in the Motor City. Incessant gunfire filled the evenings, rocks and bricks bashed downtown windows, storefronts were looted of their goods, flames consumed entire city blocks. When it was over, 43 lives and $50 million in property damage had been the cost. To get home, Massey had to drive through the riot zone. He made it safely, but the biggest challenge still lay ahead for Massey and other leading Detroit ministers who began working to restore peace to their tortured city. "Our church became an outpost for reaching out to people who had lost their homes to fires or had no food because stores had been destroyed." And Detroit was not alone. Racial uprisings had recently erupted in other cities as well—Los Angeles, Harlem, Cincinnati, and several others.

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44