The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Word that Moved America
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a spellbinding orator and it is evident that he honed these skills in the pulpit in his capacity as a Baptist minister. This book is a full-scale study of King as a preacher and draws on tape-recordings and transcriptions of unpublished sermons, and interviews with King's parishioners and colleagues. Preaching to congregations was never something King did "on the side," or dabbled in when he wasn't busy being a civil rights activist. Not only was preaching integral to King's identity but the material of his Sunday morning sermons found its way into his mass-meeting speeches and civil addresses. When King spoke in civil settings, he transposed the Judeo-Christian themes of love, suffering, deliverance, and reconciliation from the shelter of the pulpit into the arena of public policy and behaviour. The book argues that King's religiously informed rhetoric helped create a fragile and temporary consensus among white and black Americans and contributed to legislation that has changed the fabric of daily life in America. King's Sunday morning sermons were far from identical with his civil addresses, however, and, in the book's view, the more intimate, unpublished "private" sermons necessarily tell us far more about what King "really" believed about his God and the ills of the nation - from issues of personal morality to the massive problems of racism and war.
