“They Are Willing to Walk” 111    remembered the tenor of his prayer: “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” In a later recounting, King remembered: “At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I never had experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.” This prayer would serve as a defining moment of his personal 52 faith and his leadership of the Montgomery movement. King emphasized this kitchen table experience in later stories about the boycott and recounted it in sermons around the country for years. Many King scholars have followed King’s lead, emphasizing this prayer as a critical turning point. Keith Miller emphasizes the “social gospel twist” of the story: “Unlike the narrators of traditional conversions, he faltered not from personal weakness or temptation, but from the strain of leading a social crusade. His description testifies to a social gospel, for God of- fered him strength—not to resist personal temptation—but to continue leading the bus boycott. By translating the social gospel into a conversion narrative, he expertly blends this-worldly and otherworldly redemption.” James Cone claims this was the moment when King first made the God of the African American experience his own. Mervyn Warren asserts that the vision at the kitchen table transformed King from “a mere pastor to a minister with innumerable inner resources.” Lewis Baldwin also credits what he calls King’s “vision in the kitchen” with solidifying a spiritual conception of his social leadership. Baldwin goes on to qualify his per- spective, however, suggesting this was not a unique experience, but rather was one reflective of many such encounters King had over the course of 53 his civil rights leadership. King did not mention this epiphany publicly for nearly a year, when he was quoted as telling his church that he had a vision in which God told him to “stand up and die for the truth, stand up and die for the righteous- ness.” Given the distance between the incident and any public account, it is quite possible King used this event as a rhetorical device to capsulate