Ralph E. Luker

Martin Luther King, Jr., as Scholar: A Reexamination of His Theological Writings

What is the historical and biographical significance of the papers Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote as a divinity student at Crozer Theological Seminary and as a doctoral student at Boston University? Judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship, they are tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism. Moreover, even before the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Projects discovery of the citation deficiencies in the papers, only a few students of King had thought them deserving of the type of careful study that would have exposed those deficiencies. Scholars, seeing the papers through the distorting prism of Kings subsequent fame and martyrdom, usually considered them insignificant, except for the few clues they provide regarding the nonviolent protest strategies King later advocated., These papers disclose new meanings, however, when they are studied as evidence of Kings effort to construct an identity as a theologian and preacher rather than as undistinguished scholarship or as evidence of Kings adoption of ideas regarding nonviolent strategies of change. Kings appropriations of the words and ideas of others should certainly not be

The Social Gospel and the Failure of Racial Reform, 1877–1898

While American Society was coming apart in the 1960s, an impressive array of historians rallied to condemn what Rayford Logan called “the astigmatism of the social gospel” in race relations. Preoccupied by the ills of urban-industrial disorder, they suggested, the prophets of post-Reconstruction social Christianity either ignored or betrayed the Negro and left his fortunes in the hands of a hostile white South. The indictment of the social gospel on this count hinged upon the racism of Josiah Strong, the faithlessness of Lyman Abbott, and the complicity in silence of Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and the others.