President Chopp:	I'm going to keep my remarks brief because I'm so excited about our speaker today; Elliot Ratzman, who is our very own visiting Assistant Professor of Religion. Elliot's talk is entitled, "Mighty Streams: What King's intellectual and political influences have to teach us today". Elliot will argue that King's speeches, sermons and strategies for the Civil Rights Movement were shaped in large part by his education at Morehouse College and Boston University, but also Crozer Seminary in Upland, just four miles away from here. He will explain how King the activist was informed by King the scholar.
	Elliot himself has studied under great academicians and activists like Ellie Fitzell and Cornell West with whom he studied at Harvard Divinity School and at Princeton. Elliot earned his PhD in Religion, Ethics and Politics. He first earned his Bachelors in Philosophy and Religion and then his Masters in Philosophy from Ohio University. After leaving Princeton with his PhD, he was a visiting non-degree student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he taught Jewish Thought, History and Religion. 
	Elliot has taught at Vassar College, Lee High University, Temple University and at Swarthmore, twice. He has taught the course Religious Radicals, the Theological Political Martin Luther King twice, including this past fall at Swarthmore. Elliot's teaching and his research focus on the religious thought and practice of Judaism and Christianity in the modern rest, Jewish thought and practice, Christian and Jewish ethics, secularism, politics, religion and philosophy of religion.
	Mark, don't you think that sounds like an ideal academic profile? Elliot is finishing a memoir and travel narrative about his time living in Israel, where he worked with the Peace Camp and studied Jewish philosophy and history. His book will be called After Zion. He has been a contributing editor of Heeb magazine and is involved with a local group Operation Understanding, which brings together black and Jewish high school students for dialogue, education and service learning trips. 
	To commemorate this day in our community, please join in me in welcoming Elliot Ratzman.
Elliot Ratzman:	Thank you, President Chopp. I knew her scholarship years ago when my advisors suggested I read them. Her powerful work was recommended to me by many professor and it's an honor to be introduced by her. 
	I'd like to thank the committee, especially my contacts Tania Johnson, Nadia Williams, Joyce Tompkins, and all those who helped today. Thank you for coming, some of my students past and apparently present who I wrote in to come and hear me.
	The theme of this gathering is In Shackles, Shining a Light on Shadow America. Let me note a few of those shackles. We come together in the wealthiest country on earth, which still sustains substantial underclass, overworked, underpaid, still lacking healthcare and safe streets. We live in the freest society on earth, which harbors the world's largest prison population. The most idealistic, national project, which is mired in a selfish materialism. The most generous and giving citizens who are still reluctant to curb an environmentally devastating consumption appetite. The most open-minded and modern society, which still sustains a profound xenophobia against immigrants, muslims and critics of the American project among others. Yet, our virtues and our vices are our own creation, not something imposed upon us by natural or supernatural forces. 
	These are the ironies of the American character and practice. These are the ironies of the promise of America and King knew what the promise of America was, was not afraid to hold America to its promise and not afraid to run down the litany of its dark side, to inventory the shackles that keep Americans from being truly who they are ought to be. These are ironies because we are human and it is in our nature to screw up. The Christian tradition calls this being sinful, but we must bare responsibility for the imperfections of the world we live in. The self-centeredness of sinfulness blinds us to our ability to see what it is that we must do.
	Now, if these reflections sound familiar, they are cast in the theme of Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the great influences on King's thought. I want to talk about him today. Let me tell you what I want to do. First, I'd like to talk about Niebuhr and King's other intellectual influences, the life of King's mind. How often are we talking about King as intellectual, King as scholar, King as somebody who read books and used those ideas and books to inform his activism, to inform his language, and to think through the political problems of his day and also the personal problems he faced with tremendous pressure of being the leader or symbol of a movement.
	Then I'd like to talk about some of those influencers and their lives because their lives are interesting and instructive as well, so we want to broaden the scope to see how those thinker intellectuals also wrestled with their issues and their politics and how that can help us think through finally the problems that we face today.
	Now as you know, King went to Morehouse College. He entered at the age of 15. The end of World War II, they were letting in students at a younger age because many of the normal college aged men were being drafted. He majors in sociology. He thinks he's going to be a lawyer. Changes his mind after hearing the lectures from his family friend and mentor, Benjamin Mays, other philosophy professors, theology professors. He enters Crozer Theological Seminary. He's there, only four miles away, from 1948-51. There, he gets a Bachelors in Divinity and I should want you to remember that Crozer was one of the few seminaries in the North that consciously committed to bringing African-American candidates for higher degree. Crozer was integrated and this was one of the first times that King actually is in a classroom, an integrated classroom. 
	He then commutes to University of Pennsylvania. How many Swarthmore students did that? To take a Hegel seminar. Now, Hegel is one of the most difficult philosophers you will ever read. He is not commuting because it's a gut class. He's commuting because of his love and desire for 19th century philosophy. He reads Hegel at University of Pennsylvania, a philosophy seminar, and integrates that into his thinking, into his lecture. He talks about the Montgomery bus boycott in terms of Hegel. King, in some ways, is a miracle. The confluence of leader, charisma, humility and intellectually aggressive curious mind. May we have a thousand such Kings. 
	He then goes on to Boston University, doing a dissertation in theology, which he finishes in 1955. We'll talk about that in a second. He then takes his first pulpit down in Montgomery, Alabama. Now, let me say a few words about King's influence and let's take a quick look at a little snippet from the letter from Birmingham jail. He writes this in 1963 as a way, a conscious way of explaining to the world what the Civil Rights Movement is up to. I know it's hard to imagine, but their, by now comparatively mild protest, were seen as extreme, seen as radical by the people of the time. Just sitting in lunch counters starting in 1961 or so, students spontaneously sitting in, King joined them. With the Montgomery bus boycott, the attempt to break Jim Crow. What people on news were seeing was chaos and disruption and King writes while he's in jail this classic American letter. He writes it, the occasion is to other clergy in the area, who have sort of urged the Civil Rights Movement and King specifically to not break laws, not break the laws of the city on ordinances and to go slowly.
	There, you see in this crucial paragraph, he talks about whether a law is just or unjust. I'm not going to read it all, but I do want to call your attention to who he sort of name checking there. "Segregation," he says in the middle, "to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an I-it relationship for an I-thou relationship and ends up regulating persons to the status of things." Buber called to our attention that we treat people differently in different context. We may treat a love one authentically as another, as a you, as a thou, but we may be callous towards strangers, callous towards people serving us, callous to the cab driver taking us somewhere. They are merely an it. How many times have we ourselves turned people into an it? Jim Crow segregation turned an entire society, a group of people, into its and this was its' problem, its' evil. 
	"Paul Tillich," he writes, "said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an essential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness." In other words, Paul Tillich is writing about the need for unity, reunity, harmony. Segregation pulls people apart. To get over these forms of alienation, these codified forms of racist alienation, King urges the breakdown of these bad laws, these unjust laws. He goes on to say, finally the last few lines, "Lamentably, it is historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privilege voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture, but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals." Individuals may be perfectly willing to change their life or change their attitude, but groups as a whole, more reluctant.
	Now, King notes these thinkers, not merely because he thinks that somehow he will get some points for it, but because he's engaged these thinkers in grad school. They have shaped his language and he is speaking in someways the language of educated theologians and intellectuals and philosophers, but also because he loves these thinkers, wrestles with these thinkers and I want to go through some of them with you.
	Now, the first influence we want to note, and I think Nadia touched on the theme of the using, to think about whether we are raising or lowering the temperature of a society. Some of this language comes out of what's called the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel was a turn of the century movement, a mostly white Protestant ministers and theologians who were thinking about how Christianity could best serve the problems of the people in the cities. These Social Gospelers were behind all sorts of progressive reforms and thinking about how best to link Christianity to the problems of the urban, growing urban underclass. 
	The Social Gospel also spoke about the prophets in the Hebrew Bible as social reformers and social critics. One of the first times it's happened. Some of King's, his teachers and instructors come out of this legacy. Now one phenomena that emerged out of the second wave after the Social Gospel was a focus on Gandhi and the thought of Gandhi. Some of the Social Gospelers, especially African-American Gospelers, went to India to meet and study with Gandhi. There is King in one of his offices with a picture of Gandhi. Here is King years later traveling to the land of Gandhi. Gandhi's thought influences him at Morehouse. Benjamin Mays brings in speakers who have met Gandhi. He's reading books about Gandhi at Crozer and one very significant figure here is Howard Thurman. Now, I don't know, has anybody here read Howard Thurman? He is amazing. I see a few hands, I hope I see more next year. 
	Jesus and the Disinherited, this little 1949 book, King travels around with this when he's lecturing and organizing and getting arrested, using it for inspiration. Let me tell you a little bit about Howard Thurman. Howard Thurman is this mystic theologian, essay writer and chaplain. He starts the first interracial, intentionally interracial congregation in San Francisco. Then he goes on to become the Dean of the Chapel at Boston University when King is studying there. Now, he is a friend of the King family, so King actually knows him and he knows his father more. He goes to Thurman's lectures and shakes his head at the amazing wisdom that he gives. 
	Thurman writes this great book and let me just say a word about this book and you all should read it. He's confronted by a Hindu when he goes to travel to India to study with some of Gandhi's disciples. The Hindu asks him, he says, "You African-Americans have been enslaved by Christians, why are you still Christian? Why not leave the religion?" This book is Thurman's response. He says, "Yeah, there's Christianity and there's the religion of Jesus. African-Americans ought to be turning to the religion of Jesus. The religion of Jesus is the religion that follows that Jewish carpenter oppressed by the Romans. That member of the despised race." He sees Jesus' struggle as a racial conflict against Rome and says that, "This religion of Jesus contains the resources, the physiological resources, the spiritual resources for the oppressed, for the people with their back against the wall." Thurman is a Social Gospeler, no stranger to the idea of social reform and legal change, but he also says that religion should be one way of sort of bolstering the spirit psychologically of the oppressed. It's an amazing book. The inventories why African-Americans stay with the religion of Jesus over an against oppressive Christianity. 
	Karl Barth, this is a lovely picture. I just want to point out that King almost never let himself be photographed smiling publicly. He wanted to be serious, but here he's caught in a moment meeting one of his heroes, Karl Barth. Swift theologian. This is Princeton by the way, Princeton Theology center. They didn't know they were going to meet. They were just both there at the same time for different stuff. Here somebody's cracking a joke and King's laughing. Barth, now by the way, if you think all these thinkers, or like, "Ah, this is ancient history, who ever would have heard of these people?" Take it back to better days when Karl Barth's on the cover of Time magazine. Who was on the cover of Time last week? 
	King reads Barth and let me just tell you a few things about Barth, what he writes about Barth in grad school. Barth was a crazy radical pastor. He pastored to the working class in Europe and he was known as sort of the red pastor, a very radical guy, but very conservative theologically. Had some very conservative beliefs about the word of God and one's obedience to the word of God and Barth, very bravely helped pan something called The Barmen Declaration, which was the declaration of German speaking Christians against the Nazification of the church. The Nazis were trying to turn Christianity into a what you might call variance of premises religion. Barth hands and speaks out against the Nazis for which he is sort of kicked out of Germany. 
	Here's King and one of his heroes, who himself had a long career of activism. Barth is friends with then German philosopher Martin Buber, who we saw King citing. He reads him with George Kelsey at Boston. Now Martin Buber is a Jewish theologian, he's also one of the most important xenoist organizers around the turn of the century, organizing for a Jewish homeland and a renewal of Jewish religion and politics centered around the land of Israel. Buber was probably the most famous Jewish thinker of the 20th century. He moves to Palestine after the rise of Nazism and then for the rest of his life, continues to agitate for a binational state, where Jews and Arabs live together in harmony, where there's not merely a Jewish state and an Arab state, but one state all together.
	Paul Tillich, who King writes about, his dissertation on, and also has a short correspondence with. Paul Tillich, friends with Buber, friends with Barth, all these guys know each other. Tillich is probably the most famous Protestant theologian. He has been cited in supreme court cases defining religion and reconstitutes and recast a conception of God as the ground of being. Very abstract form of God. He recast religion as ultimate concern and was so famous in his day that he makes the cover of Time.
	Now Paul Tillich's a radical guy, he's a radical guy in the 20s, when he's in Germany and he's a radical guy in the rise of Nazism. Nazism is rising in Europe. Somebody asked Tillich, "Are there any true Christians left in the world today?" He says, "Yes, the Jews because they are the one's suffering and persecuted. Their suffering is holy. Christians today are the ones who are oppressing others." He's speaking of European context most immediately. Well for comments like this, he's sort of pressured out of Europe. 
	Tillich makes his way to America, first to Union, then to Harvard where King and him tried to get together, but he's out of town. Nevertheless, Tillich's thought permeates King's speeches and writings, very fascinating. The person responsible for bringing Tillich into town was Reinhold Niebuhr.
	Now Reinhold Niebuhr is enjoying a sort of comeback. I guess in my mind, if you make the cover of Time, you've made it. People are reading you in the supermarket and we are no longer in the day when we are reading theologians on the front page. Maybe someday soon. Reinhold Niebuhr is a towering intellectual. One of the most famous circuit theologians of his day. Let me give you Niebuhr in a nutshell. A few years ago, then candidate Obama is asked, "What do you know about Reinhold Niebuhr?" Bam, now my students by the way, this is a perfect summary of what I will expect every class session for you doing the readings. He writes, or Obama said in this interview, "Niebuhr is about there's serious evil in the world, hardship and pain. We should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate these things, but we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away from Niebuhr the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism." 
	The early Niebuhr, pastor in Detroit for the workers who are starting to organize unions, prolabor, he ends up very, very radical, pacifist, runs for office in the socialist party USA, makes his way to New York where he teaches at Union, and then World War II and the aftermath of World War I sort of sour him on the idea that humans are naturally good. He leaves his pacifism seeing that there's true evil in the world. You have to do something about it, you just can't expect humans to be good naturally, sometimes you have to be coercive. He says, "Even Gandhi is coercive." You have to use power and use it knowing that you may hurt someone. That's tragic, but inevitable because humans screw up." Besides being one of Obama's favorite thinkers, he's also Bill Clinton's favorite thinker. He's a profound guy and he's making a comeback. Now Niebuhr influences and challenges King's inclination towards passivism and has to rethink his commitment. Now years later, King and Niebuhr will end up on the same side on many issues, but also on the opposite sides. 
	Finally, I want to mention Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel first meets King at a conference on race in January 1963. The conference is called Race and Religion. Heschel is an ultra Orthodox prince who plucked like an ember, as he described, from burning fire of Europe, makes his way to America where he teaches in New York. He's best friends with Reinhold Niebuhr and Heschel is this mystic poet, ultra Orthodox Jew who champions a number of unpopular causes, meets King at this conference in which Heschel comes to the podium and says, "The first conference on religion and race, the first conference was between Moses and Pharaoh in Egypt and we are still hearing implications from it today." 
	It is Heschel's translation of Amos 5:24 that King uses, "Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream." You will not find that in any Bible. That translation is Heschel's. Heschel's work on the prophets as critics of social justice influenced and was read by all these seminarians who worked with the Civil Rights Movement. He marched with King in Selma and at King's funeral in Atlanta, Heschel gives one of the eulogies. Years later at Heschel's funeral, Coretta Scott King gives the eulogy.
	By the way, here's King. I know you wanted to see King on the cover of Time and here's him portrayed by the amazing radical artist from New Jersey, Ben Shahn. Now, King was influenced by mighty streams. Some of those streams were the culture and characters of African-American church tradition no doubt, where the powerful influence of ministers and pastors lectures, who are not philosophers and theologians, it's true, but also he was influenced by these intellectuals as philosophers. We know this. He spent hours reading them. There's no better proof than this, let me tell you this. 
	King is sent to state prison in Georgia in 1963, no 1960. 1960. On a trumped up traffic violation. He was thrown in shackles and Coretta and his entourage, think this might be it. They're going to throw him in prison and kill him. He's taken to this prison. By the way, this is 1960, it's October, it's right before Nixon versus Kennedy election. Which candidate will intervene? Nixon doesn't call, although he probably still writes. Kennedy calls Coretta Scott King, "Hope you're well," awkward conversation you can imagine, "We're hoping and trying to do something about this King situation from the justice department." Coretta thanks him. Word goes out throughout all the African-American community, Kennedy is siding with King and the election goes to Kennedy, but meanwhile, King's in jail. They think it's really dangerous. He writes a letter to Coretta Scott King and says, "I don't know how long I'm going to be here. Here are the following books I want you to bring. Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology, part one and part two." Now it's only in jail do you want to read Systematic Theology. Because he knew, "Oh, I'm going to be here a long time. I'm going to read these again," but that's what he asked for. He asked for that and a book on Gandhi, his own book, he was going to work on some speeches, Paul Tillich, that's what he wanted to take to jail. That's a commitment.
	This is just the thinnest slice of a very deep account of King's intellectual life. His influences and all these basically religious socialists who he's reading the influence, Social Gospel Rauschenbusch, Howard Thurman, the American Gandhians, Niebuhr and Tillich, Barth, all these thinkers were very radical, political activist [inaudible 00:29:53]. 
	Let me sort of come to some conclusions about how I think these thinkers can help us think about our own situation today as people of the mind and hopefully people who act. First, we have to think that, we have to realize that sometimes using the language of philosophy, political theory, theology is an important movement. King saw its importance in what he wrote and how he spoke, so being able to sort of code switch between different layers and levels of audiences, of intellectuals, of people on the street, of young people he was trying to organize, it was very important that King master that. He did that well. 
	Also, I think these thinkers whom King wrestled with point to a deeper issue in thinking about how social justice work needs to happen. Retreating to the life of the mind is one way of checking ourselves. It's a checking our blind spots, it's of calling ourselves out by meditating on thinkers who think different thoughts than us. It reminds us, too, of our own deepest commitments. I asked one of my classes, you know it's the first day of school, I asked my class today, "Tell me something that's morally true. Give me a moral truth." I don't know, shyness, nobody wanted to say. Somebody said, "Well Ten Commandments." Anyone here for the Ten Commandments? I said, "When's the last time you remembered and kept the Sabbath? You're breaking a Ten Commandment every week." We have these commitments, yet we do not act on them. This is the intent. Now these thinkers that I showed you were not saints. They all had their demons. Niebuhr failed to support King at certain times. Tillich, his radical politics waned while his libido kept on shooting over and over, a lifelong healthy libido. Buber, for all of his efforts at dialogue and reconciliation ended up living in an Arab family's house after the 1948 war. I'm not even going to start talking about Gandhi. He's a different story.
	King as well as all of his faults, wrestled with this two pronged, let's say, problem of how do we make social change and how do we hold ourselves individually up to our highest standards of virtue. We cannot do the work we think we want to do without thinking about our virtues. I over the years have known lots of activists who were terrible human beings. I know lovely human beings who have nothing to do with social justice activity. Now, most people want to do something, but they don't know what to do. What I like to suggest and counsel, and maybe we can talk more about this question and answer, is to link ourselves up with the projects already on the move in a helpful way. How can I be useful for those efforts and movements already happening? How can we do ten percent more? I think Martin Luther King Day, rather than being a too solemn or too sad day, should be thought about as the day we recommit ourselves to doing more of the beliefs we already hold, that we should be addressing the evils of the world, that we should be thinking about how we are with others and where we can be most useful. 
	As King and the Social Gospelers have taught us, there is no better forum for many people than the traditions and communities that we come from, that these are the staging areas for creating social change. Let me end on that, but let me say that King the intellectual has much to teach us. The limitations of King as an organizer has much to teach us, King's courage has much to teach us and I hope we will rededicate ourselves from now for the next Martin Luther King Day, from learning and acting and reflecting on what we've done. Thank you.