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Composing Martin Luther King, Jr.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Keith D. Miller
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Abstract

In “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” Martin Luther King, Jr., attributes his intellectual development to his reading of Marx, Gandhi, Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and other prestigious authors whose works he encountered during his graduate studies at seminary and at Boston University. To explain his responses to notable philosophers and theologians, King incorporates passages from seven writers whose names do not appear in the essay. While the network represented by these writers stimulated King's thought more profoundly than did the more respectable tradition that “Pilgrimage” invokes, the black church supplied him with the foundation of virtually all the ideas appearing in the essay. In addition, the black folk pulpit furnished the epistemology of voice merging that enabled King to compose an autobiographical essay and a self. Yoking black orality and print, King adapted the folk procedure of blending identities to create a magisterial public persona that could help reshape a nation.

Type
Special Topic: African and African American Literature
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 1: Special Millennium issue , January 1990 , pp. 70 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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