The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age

by Patrick Parr, David Garrow (Foreword by)

Overview

2018 and 2019 Washington State Book Award Finalist (Biography/Memoir) • Excerpted in The Atlantic and Politico • TIME Magazine – One of 6 Books to Read in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Death 

Martin Luther King Jr. was a cautious nineteen-year-old rookie preacher when he left Atlanta, Georgia, to attend divinity school up north. At Crozer Theological Seminary, King, or “ML” back then, immediately found himself surrounded by a white staff and white professors. Even his dorm room had once been used by wounded Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. In addition, his fellow seminarians were almost all older; some were soldiers who had fought in World War II, others pacifists who had chosen jail instead of enlisting. ML was facing challenges he’d barely dreamed of.
 
A prankster and a late-night, chain-smoking pool player, ML soon fell in love with a white woman, all the while adjusting to life in an integrated student body and facing discrimination from locals in the surrounding town of Chester, Pennsylvania. In class, ML performed well, though he demonstrated a habit of plagiarizing that continued throughout his academic career. But he was helped by friendships with fellow seminarians and the mentorship of the Reverend J. Pius Barbour. In his three years at Crozer between 1948 and 1951, King delivered dozens of sermons around the Philadelphia area, had a gun pointed at him (twice), played on the basketball team, and eventually became student body president. These experiences shaped him into a man ready to take on even greater challenges.
 
Based on dozens of revealing interviews with the men and women who knew him then,The Seminarian is the first definitive, full-length account of King’s years as a divinity student at Crozer Theological Seminary.

Long passed over by biographers and historians, this period in King’s life is vital to understanding the historical figure he soon became.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641602280
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,060,295
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Patrick Parr has written about Dr. King for magazines and newspapers such as Seattle Magazine and the Japan Times. David Garrow is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the King biography Bearing the Cross and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

Table of Contents

Foreword David J. Garrow xi

Note to the Reader xiii

Prologue: On a Bus in Georgia, April 1944 1

Year I Genesis

1 Young and Alone 17

Term 1, September 14-November 24, 1948

2 Breaking Free 45

Term 2, November 30, 1948-February 16, 1949

3 Finding a Voice 65

Term 3, February 22-May 6, 1949

Year II Exodus

4 A New Devotion 83

Term 1, September 13-November 23, 1949

5 Mordecai's Fire 97

Term 2, November 29, 1949-February 15, 1950

6 Chosen to Lead 119

Term 3, February 21-May 5, 1950

Interlude: The Summer of 1950 131

Year III Revelation

7 Forbidden Love 143

Term 1, September 12-November 22, 1950

8 The Recommended Plagiarist 171

Term 2, November 28, 1950-February 15, 1951

9 A Divine Cause 191

Term 3, February 20-May 4, 1951

Epilogue: Beyond Crozer 211

Appendixes

A Crozer Incoming Class of 1948 227

B Events from ML's Student Body Presidency 229

C A Brief History of the Crozers and Old Main 233

Acknowledgments 239

Notes 243

Selected Bibliography 273

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

02/12/2018
Historian Parr’s debut work of nonfiction is a true life bildungsroman, in which the protagonist, a young man by the name of Martin Luther King Jr., grows up to be a world famous theologian and preacher. The book looks specifically at a formative yet largely overlooked period in King’s life, beginning in 1948, when the then 19-year-old left his home in Atlanta, Ga., and headed north to attend divinity school at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa. Parr provides an in-depth account of the curriculum, which included introductory courses on the history and literature of the New Testament, practical and technical courses such as one on how to conduct a sermon over the radio, and more radical courses like Christianity and Study, in which King studied Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel, which he often echoed later in his career when preaching to white audiences. Parr enriches the discussion of King’s formal studies with insights into King’s relationships with professors and fellow seminarians, and even discusses King’s shortcomings as a student (Parr notes, for example, that King’s poor grasp of citation rules would not fly today). Often overlooked or relegated to mere footnotes in previous biographies, Parr highlights this short, influential period in King’s life, fleshing out the details of courses, teachers, mentors, pals, and dates, and presenting a fresh portrait of King, the “rookie preacher.” Photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"King's three years at the Crozer Theological Seminary, south of Philadelphia, marked an important turning point in his life and are well worth the exclusive focus they get in this compact, readable and well-researched book."
—The Washington Post

"More than anything else, it's Mr. Parr's willingness to dig that impresses and makes The Seminarian an original, much-needed and even stirring book about King's formative years at Crozer...Mr. Parr deserves credit for leaving no page in King's academic record unturned."
—The Wall Street Journal

“Without question the most original and important book about King’s life to appear in more than a quarter century.”
—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross and Rising Star

"Parr is a wonderful guide through this pivotal season of King’s intellectual development, spiritual formation, and youthful angst. We feel the young seminarian’s anxiety as he arrives at a predominantly white school, we witness his encounters with the North’s less flamboyant but equally treacherous brand of racism, and we experience the heartbreak of his short-lived romance with a white student... Grounded in exhaustive, primary-source research, the narrative bounds forward with an energetic curiosity that resembles the bright and restless spirit of its young protagonist."
—Christianity Today

“Parr provides a delightful (and deep) exploration of King’s formative years, a period that even the most committed scholars have undervalued or overlooked altogether. King’s years at Crozer are recounted here with such clarity the reader nearly sits next to him through every class and social engagement, so that a mere glance to the right and we fall in among his many classmates who are interviewed here.  The Seminarian is for the scholar and general reader alike who want to learn how a kid from Atlanta slowly matured into our nation’s greatest civil rights leader.”
—W. Jason Miller, author of Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric

“Not only an engrossing biographical study but an essential source for anyone with a serious interest in the formative years of Martin Luther King Jr.”
—Clayborne Carson, editor of A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Concern about such whitewashing is part of what motivated Patrick Parr to write The Seminarian...Parr has done some impressive digging in the historical record and there is no doubt that scholars writing about King will find The Seminarian useful. The book should also attract students and faculty at seminaries and divinity schools, who will be interested not only in the particularities of King’s experience at Crozer but also in the fascinating picture that emerges of a mid-20th-century theological education." 
—The Christian Century

"The Seminarian is a clear-eyed and honest account of some transformative experiences in the life of the gifted young man who would become a cultural icon."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Historian Parr's debut work of nonfiction is a true life bildungsroman...Often overlooked or relegated to mere footnotes in previous biographies, Parr highlights this short, influential period in King's life, fleshing out the details of courses, teachers, mentors, pals, and dates, and presenting a fresh portrait of King, the 'rookie preacher.'"
—Publishers Weekly

“Parr accounts more fully for Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminary education than has any complete biography of the civil rights icon.”
—Booklist 

"This book provides by far the most thorough and detailed treatment of Martin Luther King's experience in seminary. Anyone interested in King should be thrilled that Patrick Parr pored closely over the seminary records and interviewed surviving members of his cohort of seminarians (plus his sweetheart). Count this volume among the small number of indispensable books about King.”
—Keith D. Miller, author of Voice of Deliverance and Martin Luther King's Biblical Epic

“Seminary training doesn’t always dictate the course of leaders’ lives, sometimes even steering them directly opposite. Yet the time is always formative. Through his careful research, Patrick Parr has produced a stunning piece of work illumining this little-known part of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s journey of stumbling through learning to integrate theology, life, and the real world as he grew into the great American leader he became.”
—Jason S. Sexton, Editor, Boom California

"Through scrupulous research and interviews with King’s peers...Parr puts the reader in the classroom with King...Worrying about grades and girls, this ML is as familiar as a student of today." —Akron Beacon Journal
 


"The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age is unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library 20th Century American Biography collections in general, and Martin Luther King Jr. supplemental studies reading lists in particular."—Midwest Book Review


“Written in a smooth and eminently readable style and providing unprecedented and important material, The Seminarian is certainly a go-to book for anyone researching King’s life.”—PopMatters


“The chief value of Parr’s book is to remind us that King was once a questing student who learned new things, made mistakes, shot pool, had girlfriends, and laughed.” —New York Review of Books
 

From the Publisher

2018-01-22
The experiences of and changes in Martin Luther King Jr. during his three years (1948-1951) at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.Parr, a historian who has written about King in Seattle Magazine and elsewhere, debuts with a work that focuses sharply on a somewhat neglected period of the Nobel laureate's life (1929-1968), the period when he left home—and paternal expectations—in Atlanta, traveled north, and began discovering who he was and what he must do. The text, sturdily chronological, features some key biographical details: for each term, we see the class schedule of King (whom the author refers to as "ML" throughout—as did King's intimates); the course descriptions from the Crozer catalog; and detailed information about his professors and classmates. Quoting occasionally from the papers King wrote at Crozer, the author is fearless about recording and commenting on King's patent plagiarism; he was fond of writing extensive passages, sometimes almost verbatim from his sources, and neglecting quotation marks or any form of citation. Although Parr doesn't excuse King's academic deceit, he does note that King's professors never did anything about it. The author also explores King's personal life during these years: his friends, his leisure activities (including pool and basketball—good at the former, not the latter), and his love life, including a rather extensive relationship with the white daughter of Crozer's cook, a relationship that worried friends and others. The late 1940s and early 1950s, even in the North, were not especially tolerant of interracial dating. Parr concludes with King's admission to the doctorate program at Boston University and finishes with some updates on key characters and on Crozer itself, now merged elsewhere, its campus closed.A cleareyed and honest account of some transformative experiences in the life of the gifted young man who would become a cultural icon.

Kirkus Reviews