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In 1961, MLK taught a college class. Its syllabus might be contentious today

Roosevelt Montás February 26 2022 17-22 minutes 2/26/2022
Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr talking to a group of student sit-in organisers at a table in his office in Atlanta, Georgia, September 1961
Martin Luther King Jr meeting student activists in Atlanta in September 1961, the year he also began teaching his ‘Social Philosophy 1’ course at Morehouse College, his alma mater © Donald Uhrbrock/Getty Images

Late in 1961, Martin Luther King Jr took a breather. The previous five years had been a gruelling slog from which he had emerged as the most important voice in the civil rights movement — the Martin Luther King Jr of history. As pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, he had led a months-long bus boycott that captured the country’s imagination and inspired resistance to segregation laws throughout the south. Riding the momentum that the bus boycott had generated, King moved to Atlanta in January 1960 to serve as assistant pastor at his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and to focus on leading the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the umbrella organisation he had helped found three years earlier to co-ordinate the national movement for civil rights.

But in the fall of 1961, he slowed down just enough to teach a college class. We happen to have a list, in his own handwriting, of the readings he assigned. The course ran at breakneck speed through major figures in the history of western political thought, starting with Plato’s Republic and followed by selections from Aristotle’s Ethics and The Politics. Then came Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli and Hobbes, before moving on to Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and “the Utilitarians” Bentham and Mill. His students did not exaggerate when they remembered “an immense amount of reading” for the class.

Today, we would recognise the course King offered as a “great books” course in western political thought. Before even considering the ideas contained in the books on King’s list, his syllabus would be criticised now for being made up exclusively of “dead white men”. Yet we should heed what King taught budding activists in 1961, for it reveals his rootedness in a particular — and radical — political tradition. It sheds rare light on how he understood the movement for civil rights and holds lessons for the struggles for justice and equality in our own time.


King arrived in Montgomery in September of 1954 for his first full-time job as a pastor. He was 25. Four months earlier, the US Supreme Court had struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that permitted racially segregated schools in the south. Since then, tensions between Montgomery’s black community and its white authorities had been growing, with Mayor W A Gayle refusing to relax the city’s bus segregation rules despite earnest appeals. The national mood was also turning.

In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was lynched while visiting relatives in Mississippi for allegedly offending a white woman in a grocery store. The picture of his mutilated body, which had been dumped in a river, circulated widely even as his murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Back in Montgomery, a 42-year-old black seamstress returning home after a long day of work was asked to give up her seat to a white passenger, as required by law. Calmly and politely, she refused. The bus driver threatened her, but she held fast. “I had taken no previous resolution until it happened,” Rosa Parks recalled, “and then I simply decided that I would not get up.” The driver called the police and, shortly after, two officers entered the bus and arrested Parks. The fuse in Montgomery had been lit.

The next day, Friday December 2 1955, black leaders gathered in the basement of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where an initially reluctant King agreed to support the call for a bus boycott that Monday. On Sunday, with hymns, prayers and inspired preaching, Montgomery’s black churches steeled themselves for the day to come. By mid-morning Monday, it was clear that the boycott had garnered massive support, with participation from almost the entire black population, which made up 75 per cent of bus ridership.

That afternoon, community leaders called for an extension of the boycott, formed a new organisation — the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) — and elected the young, polished and highly educated newcomer who had just become Doctor Martin Luther King Jr as its president. Addressing a mass meeting that evening, King inaugurated his leadership of the civil rights movement, vowing “to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city”, and adding that, “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.”

MIA’s demands were modest. Rather than ending bus segregation outright, it proposed a scheme whereby blacks would seat themselves from the rear of the bus forward and whites from the front of the bus backward until every seat was filled. Ralph Abernathy, who later became vice-president of MIA, recalled that they expected the dispute “would all be over in three or four days”. But Montgomery’s white establishment dug in. And so did the black community. From the beginning, King understood that the movement’s success would depend on its ability to maintain the moral high ground, and he began to preach in earnest the doctrine that would come to define his political life: non-violent resistance.

The bus boycott went on for another 381 days. A committee organised a system of car pools and taxis to provide alternatives for transportation. A legal team challenged bus segregation in the courts. The black community closed ranks. When King suggested to an elderly member of his congregation that she resume taking the bus for the sake of her health, “Mother” Pollard famously replied, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”

On day 184, the legal strategy MIA was pursuing in parallel with the boycott won a decisive victory when the Federal District Court declared Alabama’s bus segregation law unconstitutional. Alabama appealed to the US Supreme Court, and the boycott continued. On day 344, the Supreme Court upheld the district court’s decision, but it took more than a month for the actual desegregation order to reach Montgomery. The boycott therefore continued until December 20 1956, when King called it off. The next day, he became one of the first passengers to ride an integrated bus in Montgomery.

The success of the Montgomery bus boycott transformed King’s voice into the voice of a national movement for civil rights. In the course of the struggle, he had been arrested and jailed, his house had been bombed and his life had been repeatedly threatened. In February 1957, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which described him as “a scholarly, 28-year-old Negro Baptist minister . . . who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation’s remarkable leaders of men”. In June 1958, he and other black leaders met with President Dwight D Eisenhower to discuss civil rights. In September, at a book signing in New York, he was stabbed in the chest and narrowly escaped death. By the close of the decade, he had shaped and defined the struggle and public discourse for civil rights more than any other American of his time.


King’s decision to step down from his pulpit in Montgomery and move to Atlanta in February 1960 was motivated, in part, by exhaustion. “I have been under extreme tension for four years,” he told an interviewer, adding that, “If the situation is not changed, I will be a physical and psychological wreck.” But the change didn’t slow down much of anything. On the day King arrived in Atlanta, four black college students over in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat at the whites-only counter at a Woolworth store and refused to move when ordered to. The next day, two-dozen students showed up to repeat the offence.

By the end of the month, more than 30 sit-ins had been organised in seven southern states. In April, Ella Baker, who ran the day-to-day operations of the SCLC, convened a conference of student leaders to create the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which launched a youth-led wave of challenges to segregation and voter suppression throughout the south.

In October 1960, student leaders in Atlanta, including SNCC founder and communications director Julian Bond, persuaded King to join them in a sit-in targeting Rich’s department store. King was promptly arrested and sentenced to four months of hard labour. The draconian sentence entered the presidential campaign when candidate John F Kennedy called Coretta Scott King to express concern for her husband and directed his brother and campaign manager Robert Kennedy to exert pressure on local authorities for King’s release. King was indeed released and publicly thanked the Kennedys. A few weeks later, Kennedy was elected president by a slim margin that surely included many appreciative black voters.

In light of all of this, it’s easy to sympathise with King’s sense that he needed a bit of a break. By the fall of 1961, longing for a day when he would no longer “be a leader . . . in the public eye and in the news”, and feeling “almost an eagerness to give the rest of my life to the pursuit of the cultural, intellectual and aesthetic ideas I’ve been pulled away from”, King tried his hand at teaching. For this, he took a post at his alma mater Morehouse College and came up with a course he called “Social Philosophy I”. Although students report that King rarely missed class and graded the final papers himself, he sought the help of his fellow pastor and longtime associate Samuel Williams, who was on the faculty at Morehouse.

King’s course had eight students, including Bond, who had been arrested alongside King in the Rich’s sit-in, and Amos Brown, who had first met King in 1956 as a 14-year-old attending a convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in San Francisco. Many of the students signed up for the class for no other reason than that it was Martin Luther King Jr teaching it.

King the college professor made an impression. One student recalled that King “used the Socratic method and drew out of [the students] what the readings were”. Another remembered “a good debate about Machiavelli and talking about do the ends justify the means”. What Brown, who would lead a major congregation in San Francisco, remembered most was a class on Rousseau’s Social Contract.

Graham Prindle, a white student who had quit his job in New York to enrol at Morehouse when he learnt that King was teaching a course, described the experience by invoking “the difference between taking a bath and soaking in the hot spring. The one you do because you have to do it, the other you do because you want to. It is such a pleasure that you keep going back for it. That’s what this class was like: a hot spring of ideas.”

Julian Bond recalled that, “The class was not a strict study of the philosophers . . . we read them — there was an awful lot of reading — but mostly the class would use them as a kind of jumping off point to then talk about the civil rights movement.” Barbara Adams, a student at Spelman College who cross-registered at Morehouse in order to take King’s course, described it as “more like a conversation rather than a lecture”.

A few things are worth noting about King’s remarkable syllabus. The course moves chronologically from antiquity to the mid-19th century, ending with utilitarianism — an ethical system that reduces moral value to the principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number”. The chronological order suggests an evolution in thought that brings us closer and closer to the struggle in which both students and professor were locked.

The fact that the course is called “Social Philosophy I” suggests a second semester, in which readings would come to the present time. What thinkers might King have included in the second semester — Karl Marx? Friedrich Nietzsche? Frederick Douglass? Reinhold Niebuhr? Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Jane Addams? W E B Du Bois? Mahatma Gandhi?

Some of the questions on his final exam give us a sense of the use to which King was putting his thinkers: “Appraise the Student Movement in its practice of law-breaking in light of Aquinas’s Doctrine of Law”; “State and evaluate Aristotle’s theory of slavery”; and “List and evaluate the radical ideas presented in Plato’s Republic”.

Note also the careful selections, showing King’s close familiarity with the source readings. Plato’s Republic almost in its entirety and selections from Aristotle’s twin treatises on Ethics and Politics including Book I of the Politics, where Aristotle justifies the practice of slavery on the grounds that some people are “slaves by nature” while others are born to rule. Halfway through the course we find Hobbes’ teeth-grinding account of the state of nature as one of war of “every man, against every man”, representing a fundamental rejection of Aquinas’s sublime notion of a natural law against which human laws must be measured and from which they derive their only legitimacy.

We enter modernity with Machiavelli’s vision of the exercise of political power as necessarily involving moral compromise, an understanding later challenged by John Locke’s postulation of inviolable individual rights grounded in God’s order of creation.

With “Social Philosophy I”, King sought to ground the thought and activism of the civil rights movement squarely in the liberal tradition embodied in “the classics”. Reading these texts and debating their fundamental ideas was the intellectual training ground for the task of confronting America’s racial injustice.

Some contemporary thinkers, repeating the racial essentialism King fought against, might claim that the “whiteness” of King’s authors disqualifies them as sources for the political education of today’s diverse students. Beginning in the late 1970s, colleges began to move away from humanities requirements focused on the western classics. The trend picked up steam in 1987, when students at Stanford University protested against a requirement in Western Civilisation that they, along with some faculty members, criticised as being racist, Eurocentric and colonialist. The university responded by replacing the requirement with a new course that de-emphasised the western tradition and introduced a more diverse set of authors to the syllabus.

Many schools followed suit. Today, the challenge to humanities requirements that emphasise western classics takes the form of calls for schools to “decolonise the curriculum,” which some proponents define as “an effort to decentre western and white perspectives across the curriculum in favour of inclusion of non-western and non-white perspectives, experiences and modes of knowledge”.

While we have learnt much since King’s day that complicates and alters our relation to the traditional western canon, to steer students away from its study is a tragic mistake, even if we put aside the fact that the racial category of “white” doesn’t apply to many of King’s figures, most notably to St Augustine, a north African man of Berber ethnicity.

To study the texts and debates that gave shape to our political present is, indeed, to study a history of exclusion, subjugation and exploitation. But it is also to study a history of liberation and of the progressive extension of privileges that were once reserved for the powerful few. To study the past is to understand the ways in which women and non-elites of all sorts were dehumanised and marginalised, but it is also to understand the ways in which the value and fundamental equality of all individuals came to occupy the central place it holds in our political culture. To study the past is not only to encounter a world of monstrous injustices, but also to encounter the values in the name of which we can reject and rectify those injustices.

As an American man of colour who has benefited from the legacy of the civil rights movement and whose political consciousness has been formed by the canon King taught at Morehouse College, I am stung by the irony — and indeed the tragedy — of steering contemporary students away from that textual tradition. Rather than empowering them or uplifting them, this robs them of the most powerful intellectual tools we have to advance our ideals of social justice. We should certainly read new and diverse authors and study non-western traditions, but we must do so along with — rather than instead of — the traditional canon, as King did with the writings of the Hindu ascetic Mahatma Gandhi.

A little more than a year after finishing his course, King found himself in a Birmingham jail after being arrested for organising a mass demonstration. “Alone in a narrow jail cell,” he began to write, on any scrap of paper he could get hold of, a major document in the history of American political thought known as “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. The letter draws directly from the material he taught at Morehouse, invoking Socrates repeatedly and quoting, from memory, Aquinas, Augustine and other canonical writers. King had internalised the liberatory history of ideas and debates he taught. For him, the Morehouse syllabus traced “the moral arc of the universe”, which he believed “bends towards justice”.

Faced with ideological polarisation that threatens the foundations of liberal democracy, it behoves us to recover the political tradition embodied in King’s syllabus. It represents the connective tissue of our politics, the discursive bridges by which we may work out solutions to our thorniest problems. We must challenge the simplistic mentality that casts this tradition as irredeemably patriarchal, white, and elitist, and which, by doing so, makes students more provincial and less effective actors for social change.

It is precisely because the tradition reflects an unfolding struggle for justice that it provides us with potent sources of argument, strategy and vision for addressing the inequalities and abuses that persist in our society.

Roosevelt Montás is senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Centre for American Studies and director of its Freedom and Citizenship Programme. He is author of ‘Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation’ (Princeton University Press, 2021)

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