74 BECOMING KING persistence of prejudice in the hearts of some whites and the struggles of other minorities throughout the world: “We must be concerned because we are a part of humanity. Whatever affects one affects all.” Despite the intransigence of racism, King claimed that God acted through the 1954 Brown decision, leading him to conclude “that segregation is just as dead as a doornail and the only thing I am uncertain about is how costly the segregationist will make the funeral.” King espoused this same optimism when addressing his own congregation. In a sermon titled “Discerning the Signs of History,” King claimed that “evil carries the seed of its own destruction. God spoke through nine men in 1954, on May 17. They ex- amined the legal body of segregation and pronounced it constitutionally dead and ever since then things have been changing. We can go to places 42 all over the South that we could not go last year.” Later in the summer, King delivered “The Death of Evil upon the Seashore” to his Dexter congregation. Basing his comments on Phillips Brooks’s nineteenth-century sermon “The Egyptians Dead upon the Sea- shore,” King admitted: “We have seen evil. We have seen it walk the streets of Montgomery.” He surmised that human history “is the history of a struggle between good and evil. In the midst of the upward climb of goodness there is the down pull of evil.” Citing the Exodus story of the parting of the Red Sea and the subsequent death of the Egyptian army, King declared: “It was a joyous daybreak that had come to end the long night of their captivity. But even more, it was the death of evil; it was the death of inhuman oppression and crushing exploitation. The death of the Egyptians upon the seashore is a glaring symbol of the ultimate doom of evil in its struggle against good.” King applied his interpretation of the Exodus story to the challenges facing his congregation: Many years ago we were thrown into the Egypt of segregation, and our great challenge has been to free ourselves from the crip- pling restrictions and paralyzing effects of this vicious system. For years it looked like we would never get out of this Egypt. The Red Sea always stood before us with discouraging dimensions. But one day through a worldshaking decree by the Supreme Court of America and an awakened moral conscience of many white people, backed up by the Providence of God, the Red Sea