Martin Luther King Jr. on Creative Living

Martin Luther King Jr. on Creative Living. By Michael G. Long. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004. 135 pages.

This book is about Martin Luther King Jr.'s advice on creative living for the purpose of making better persons and better communities. The author is the first to pull together in a systematic way the numerous scattered pieces of King's advice on creative living, the culmination of which is the achievement of the beloved community (30). In fact, beginning in chapter 2, one finds the term "beloved community" on a vast majority of the book's remaining pages.

King wrote a column for Ebony magazine called "Advice for Living." Here he answered a variety of questions regarding everyday living, such as marital relations, pre- and extramarital relations, the meaning of the Christian love ethic, the whiteness or blackness of Jesus' skin, faith issues, rearing children, preventing black children from hating white people, and crime in the Afrikan American community. Much of this book is heavily dependent on the advice that King gave in his Ebony columns.

This is actually two books in one. One is the basic text, clearly written for a more popular audience. The other is contained in the numerous, information-filled, explanatory footnotes. Here the reader gets a glimpse of the author's arguments with himself and other scholars on King, as well as a sense of the growing breadth and depth of Long's research and thinking on various aspects of King's thought and practice.

The book is comprised of the author's introduction and five captivating chapters. In the introduction Long urges us to see the whole King when trying to assess his legacy, not allowing charges of plagiarism and philandering to disproportionately color one's judgment of him. He admonishes that the whole King was much greater than these, and like the rest of us, King was "both sinner and saint." Furthermore, despite his shortcomings, King was second to no one in his faithfulness to his call and his commitment to working for justice for the least (5).

Significantly, chapter 1 focuses on King's conception of God as the ground of creative living, a recurring theme. God, for King, is always present. Chapter 2 discusses his advice for forging ahead, and learning lessons from the past that may enhance the present and future. In chapter 3 the author focuses on King's advice for making better persons and communities as the way to the beloved community. Chapter 4 stresses the importance of replenishing oneself through spiritual disciplines, including the need for rest, prayer, time for quiet reflection, reading, being with family and close friends, learning to wait, and discerning when to return to the valley to continue the struggle to establish the beloved community. This is not to say that King was perfect in all these areas, such as the advice to seek the right balance between work and family. This was sound advice, but because of King's relentless commitment to the civil and human rights struggle, it was virtually impossible for him to achieve such balance in his own life. However, he exhibited a good sense of the importance of this discipline.

The final chapter chronicles King's advice about the need to love life and to come to terms with the democracy of all democracies, death. Consequently, one should not only prepare to live life to the fullest but also to the well. It is therefore important to conquer the fear of death as thoroughly as possible. To this end King retained a deep sense of God within him. In addition, he taught that God does not require humans to be perfect, or that they achieve all of their highest ideals, only that they relentlessly strive toward them. In the end the infinitely loving and compassionate God will provide what is lacking.

As fine a book as this is, it raises several concerns for me. Although much of the advice King gave in the Ebony column was to the Afrikan American community, I wish Long had stated explicitly that the white community must be among the primary audience for this book, since many of the questions directed to King were triggered by racism and its devastating consequences, both for Afrikan Americans and whites.

Second, in one instance, the author implies that King was more concerned about praxis and social action than ideas (134). Based on his previous book on King, it is clear that Long understands that King was indeed a man of ideas. In the present instance, however, the novice might well conclude that this was not the case, and that King was less a thinker than a social activist. This, however, is erroneous.

A third concern arises after Long rightly observes that King was much influenced by the preaching of Daddy King. However, because Long immediately cites the social gospel influence of Benjamin E. Mays and George Kelsey at Morehouse College, one might get the sense that King learned nothing from his father and maternal grandfather about the significance of the gospel for addressing and eradicating social problems (11-12). Moreover, Long writes in a footnote: "King's liberalism, which is distinctly different from the relatively conservative theology of Daddy King, has two primary branches: the social gospel tradition preached by Benjamin Mays, and the formal personalist tradition..." (13n.l4). This is very misleading, inasmuch as King himself wrote about his father's and maternal grandfather's clear commitment to applying the gospel to the social ills crushing their people. My sense is that this part of Long's discussion simply got away from him momentarily. For, a third of the way through the book, the author, who seems to have forgotten his earlier failure to link Daddy King to the social gospel tradition, writes that King called to mind his father's "untiring efforts as a black Baptist preacher to change not only the souls of his church members but also their problematic social conditions, especially political and economic segregation." Long also here writes that King "remembered stories of the successful social ministry of his grandfather, Reverend A. D. Williams..." (39). It is important to remember that historically black preachers have been theologically traditional but generally progressive when applying the gospel to the social question. Long seems to have momentarily lost sight of this fact.