xiv Introduction boycott had already attracted overwhelming black support when he be- came head of the MIA, King’s uplifting oratory on the first night of the boycott provided an unexpected stimulus to a mass movement already in progress. Using imagery that subtly linked the boycott to the struggle to end slavery, King’s address concluded with a portentous passage that be- came an accurate prediction of the nascent movement’s place in the long struggle for social justice: “Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a race of people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.’” King was neither a historian nor a civil rights lawyer, but his training and experiences as a Baptist minister gave him an inclusive, historical per- spective that allowed him to understand the civil rights militancy spurred by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education as confirma- tion of his prophetic worldview. Although Jackson recognizes that King would sometimes find it difficult to translate his intellectual radicalism into civil disobedience, his sympathy for the oppressed was deeply root- ed and enduring. One of King’s earliest seminary papers, written when he was nineteen—seven years before the start of the Montgomery boy- cott—demonstrates that he was already committed to a ministry based on knowing “the problems of the people that I am pastoring.” At this early stage of King’s ministry, moreover, civil rights reform was only an aspect of his social gospel agenda. When King defined his pastoral mission—“I must be concerned about unemployment, slumms [sic], and economic insecurity”—racial segregation and discrimination were conspicuously absent from the list, which was a prescient suggestion of his antipov- 4 Although he was undoubtedly concerned erty crusade two decades later. about civil rights, his basic identity as a social gospel minister was already firmly established before the Brown era of mass civil rights activism. Growing up as the son of the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., the younger King had absorbed the essentials of the social gospel at an early age. Daddy King was part of a well-established tradition of black minis- ters, particularly those in black-controlled churches, also providing po- litical as well as spiritual leadership. As the younger King became aware of the dangers his father faced while advocating black voting rights and