Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s rich and complex sermons convey his intense love of the black community, said Barnard sociologist Jonathan Rieder, who spoke Wednesday in front of a small audience in Lewis Library about his research on the powerful styles and themes of the preacher’s public and private words.
Rieder, whose lecture was titled “ ‘I’m Gonna Be a Negro Tonight’: Martin Luther King’s Preaching in the Black Pulpit,” said he gave the speech because “I still find it fascinating to keep uncovering the richness which I always respected. But the more I studied, the more I [discovered] I didn’t know.”
He said his objective was “to take you into this world of blackness as King performed it before black congregations.”
He first explained the “partitions” that King fashioned between his performances inside and outside the pulpit.
Behind the scenes, the famous orator commonly used slang terms and colloquialisms with his “preacher buddies,” Rieder said. “Despite the mask of dignity that was central to King, backstage there was a very different [and] looser King that was part of the repertoire.”
In his pulpit appearances, however, “King [was] an angry black man,” Rieder explained, adding that King channeled his fervor into non-violence and tried to “sublimate racial vengeance into forgiveness.”
King’s powerful love of black culture reflected this passionate side, Rieder said. He listed four dimensions in the preacher’s sermons in which this potent love appeared, the first of which was the “voice” and inflections King used.
“Simply the sound of King, the cadence, and the lilt, and the accent give some hint of the expressive traditions of Afro-Baptist traditions,” Rieder said. He noted that, for this reason, reading the sermons can be disappointing because it doesn’t carry the intensity of King’s voice.
Rieder next noted that King often “shift[ed the] meaning of pronouns” to advance a sense of “ethnic identity.” He explained that King developed a black “us/we” and used “brother” in the “ethnic sense.”
In his sermons, Rieder said, King also embraced his love for the black community through stories with “black twists” and through veneration of ancestors, often expressing not just his love, but also his admiration, for the slave.
Rieder concluded by noting the dangers of associating King’s “earthy” side with his blackness and his “eloquence” with his white audiences.
“King never withheld his learning from the folk pulpit,” Rieder said, explaining that King inserted references to Immanuel Kant in his speeches in front of black audiences and included a “black vantage point” in his speeches in front of white audiences.
The lecture was sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion. Rieder is the author of “The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.”
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