The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“You don’t know me,” Martin Luther King, Jr., once declared to those who criticized his denunciation of the Vietnam War, who wanted to confine him to the ghetto of “black” issues. Now, forty years after being felled by an assassin’s bullet, it is still difficult to take the measure of the man: apostle of peace or angry prophet; sublime exponent of a beloved community or fiery Moses leading his people up from bondage; black preacher or translator of blackness to the white world?

This book explores the extraordinary performances through which King played with all of these possibilities, and others too, blending and gliding in and out of idioms and identities. Taking us deep into King’s backstage discussions with colleagues, his preaching to black congregations, his exhortations in mass meetings, and his crossover addresses to whites, Jonathan Rieder tells a powerful story about the tangle of race, talk, and identity in the life of one of America’s greatest moral and political leaders.

A brilliant interpretive endeavor grounded in the sociology of culture, The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me delves into the intricacies of King’s sermons, speeches, storytelling, exhortations, jokes, jeremiads, taunts, repartee, eulogies, confessions, lamentation, and gallows humor, as well as the author’s interviews with members of King’s inner circle. The King who emerges is a distinctively modern figure who, in straddling the boundaries of diverse traditions, ultimately transcended them all.

"This largely admiring but flawed analysis explores King, with his 'extraordinary performances,' as chameleon, consummate showman, exalted Mosaic leader, treacly icon, postethnic man and crossover artist. Sociologist Rieder (Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism) argues that King's powers of rhetoric allowed him to straddle and dissolve boundaries between black and white and draws patronizing distinctions between King's 'black talk' and 'white talk' (King 'even went so far as to use the word 'ontological' in one homily'). Perhaps in an avoidance of academese, Rieder slips into the gossipy ('despite his cavorting, King did not stray with white women') and the flippant ('Surely King's love of ribs and chitterlings was out of sync with the vegetarianism of the 'little brown man,' as King sometimes referred to Gandhi'). While acknowledging that the work of sociolinguist Dell Hymes 'informs this entire book,' Rieder does not show how he uses Hymes's model. Rieder ends up with a commonplace argument — that King used different voices in talking to intimate friends and public audiences, in speaking as pastor and as political figure ('His oratory in the meetings was a means to ends... quite different from those at play in church contemplation or backstage talk with friends'). No news that." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"We have heard a lot in recent weeks about the distinctive language and theology of the African-American church. Exposed to snippets of Jeremiah Wright's sermons, white Americans heard unpatriotic rants tinged by bitterness and paranoia. To black Americans, on the other hand, the Chicago pastor's preaching expresses righteous indignation over injustice, a voice that comports with the prophetic role... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) that history has assigned to the black minister. After all, black churches owed their existence to the racism that permeated white denominations, and black ministers possessed the independence to preach a gospel of freedom. The black church has been rightly proud of its commitment to the brotherhood of man, and it has never been truly segregated in the sense of excluding white people. At the same time, however, the black church has encouraged racial solidarity, black leadership and even black nationalism.

As Jonathan Rieder recognizes in 'The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me,' Martin Luther King Jr. embodied the tension between the moral universalism of the black church and its racially specific character. Leading a movement dedicated to the destruction of racial barriers, King extolled the ideal of integration in hauntingly beautiful language. Yet King's own organization was specifically designed to be a black organization, not an interracial one. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference rested upon a base of African-American churches. It accepted help from whites but insisted that primary leadership rest firmly in black hands.

Early studies of King all but ignored his roots in the black church. Instead, impressed by his erudition and captivated by his dream, biographers emphasized how the study of theologians and philosophers — Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hegel, Marx — shaped King's outlook. After all, these were the very thinkers whom King himself cited when he wrote about his 'pilgrimage to non-violence.'

As the ideal of integration faded, however, a new wave of King scholars downplayed the debt that he owed to these white intellectual heavyweights. They argued that King owed far more to black religious culture than to his formal studies at seminary and university. His academic credentials turned out to be less than they appeared: His Ph.D. thesis was heavily plagiarized. Much of what he published, moreover, bore the fingerprints of ghostwriters. In stressing his debt to white thinkers, therefore, King engaged in a kind of intellectual name-dropping intended to impress white, middle-class sympathizers. In reality, his core values had already been formed before he left home, thanks to his upbringing in Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his father was pastor. King was first and foremost a black Baptist preacher who, these scholars contend, derived his homiletic techniques from an African-American preaching style that had its roots in slavery.

Rieder, a professor of sociology at Barnard College, rejects the terms of the polarized debate over the 'real' King. Focusing on the words King spoke in public and in private, and examining his interactions with the blacks and whites who were closest to him, Rieder shows that attempts to define King in terms of white and black influences distort the man and his message. Whether speaking to blacks or to whites, King articulated a consistent moral vision that drew upon the Bible, the tenets of liberal Protestantism, the insights of philosophy and theology, and an idealism that was quintessentially American.

What, then, did blackness mean to King? In pursuing his moral vision of a 'beloved community,' King did not reject his racial heritage or identity. Although he straddled the black and white worlds, the black one remained more personal and intimate. While he attended Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, his closest friends were other black students. The inner world of SCLC was one of 'race man ideologies, black Christian nationalism,' and 'a mystique of manliness.' His closest colleagues were other black ministers, in whose company King indulged in mocking racial banter and black machismo. He extolled racial pride and empathized with 'the bitterness of fellow blacks.'

Yet King's blackness, Rieder argues, was more style than substance, and it 'never came close to a full-fledged "black theology."' Moreover, King never regarded black identity as fixed or sufficient. He struggled to overcome his own anti-white feelings. Deeply attached to the black church, he frankly criticized its shortcomings. Although to white ears his preaching sounded black, King actually derived many of his sermons from white ministers. Far from confining his philosophical references to white audiences, he drew upon his erudition to educate his staff, his parishioners and the ordinary blacks who attended the mass meetings of the civil rights movement. He regularly brainstormed with a group of secular-minded New York intellectuals. His closest adviser was a Jew. By the conclusion of this invaluable study, Rieder's argument is wholly convincing: The key to King's leadership 'lay in the substance of his arguments and the commitments that animated it.'

Adam Fairclough, author of 'To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr.,' is the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Professor of American History at Leiden University in Holland."

Reviewed by Adam Fairclough, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Jonathan Riederis Professor of Sociology at <>Barnard College, Columbia University.