There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King Jr.

by Lewis V. Baldwin

Overview

The sources of Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s phenomenal and prophetic impact on life in America and beyond have never been adequately understood. In this path-breaking volume, Lewis Baldwin traces King's vision and activism not to his formal philosophical and theological development but directly to his roots in Southern black culture, where King spent most of his 39 years.

King's appropriation of the Bible, Gandhi, American participatory democracy, Boston personalism, and the theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Social Gospel makes sense, Baldwin argues, only against his visceral and abiding identification with black culture and the black Christian tradition. Working directly with the trove of King's sermons, speeches, and unpublished papers, Baldwin has reconstructed the pain and joy, the defeat and triumph King experienced in his formative family relationships, in the black church, in his childhood and education, in his marriage and children, in segregated black Atlanta, and in his leadership of America's civil rights movement.

Baldwin's through research and engaging writing finally give us what King had but Scholars have missed: the sense of place that grounded his vision of the "beloved community."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780800624576
Publisher:	Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Publication date:	02/01/1991
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.93(d)

About the Author

Lewis V. Baldwin is professor emeritus of religious studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1991); To Make the Wounded Whole: The Cultural Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1992); and Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010).

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Cast Down Your Bucket: Back Home to an Old Southern Place

Walk Together, Children: Family Heritage

How I Got Over: Roots in the Black Church

Up, You Mighty Race! The Black Messianic Hope

Standing in the Shoes of John: A Bearer of the Black Preaching Tradition

Conclusion

Index

Editorial Reviews

Lewis (religion, Vanderbilt Univ.) has written a competent, if uncritical and derivative study of the origins of King's philosophy and civil rights activism. He focuses on three major influences: sense of place (the South), idea of community, and Christian optimism. To Lewis, King was far more deeply affected by the Southern black church than by any higher theological studies in the North. Lewis sees his work as a corrective to studies which overemphasize formal theology and underplay culture. In fact, works on King by scholars like David Garrow (Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. & the Southern Leadership Conference, 1955- 1968 , Morrow, 1986), Stephen Oates (Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King Jr., LJ 7/82), and Taylor Branch (Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, LJ 1/89) have emphasized the importance of Southern black religion in King's life and career, presenting a balanced view of King's roots. Lewis gives us a useful summary rather than a major contribution. Recommended primarily for large university and public libraries.-- Anthony O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, Ind.

Library Journal