Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) June 21, 2023: The late African American Protestant theologian Rufus Burrow, Jr., the distinguished author of the book God and Human Dignity: The Personalism, Theology, and Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), makes a remarkable claim about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968; Ph.D. in theology, Boston University, 1955) and Black American culture in his 2012 article "The Beloved Community: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Josiah Royce" in Encounter, volume 73, number 1 (Fall 2012): pp. 37-64. Referring to "the pressure on King during the last two years of his life," Dr. Burrow points to "the black cultural, family, and church influences on King" (p. 40).
Dr. Burrow says, "And yet when one has a sense of the real strength and encouragement that King drew from family, including his extended church family, the relaxation that came from boyish horseplay with close friend (as occurred just hours before he was assassinated), etc., one might well conclude that, like any human being, a person under such pressure would most assuredly experience moments of depression and despondency. However, this alone does not necessarily mean that King was incapacitated" (pp. 40-41).
Dr. Burrow also says that King "understood himself to be both African and American [because he] was influenced by the cultural institutions of both [Africa and America]. . . . King expressed the need for his people to take more seriously the African aspects of their culture and to cease being ashamed of that part of their heritage, and of being black" (p. 41).
Dr. Burrow next turns to what W. E. B. DuBois said about the "double consciousness" and the "sense of twoness" of African Americans and "the Negro [as] the child of two cultures - Africa and America" (quoted on p. 41). However, Dr. Burrow does not show that DuBois various formulations influenced King's own formulation in Chapter II: "Black Power" in his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper & Row, pp. 23-69).
In King's Chapter II: "Black Power" in his 1967 book, he says, "In physical as well as cultural terms, every [American] Negro is a little bit colored and a little white. In our search for identity, we must recognize this dilemma.
"Every man [and woman] must ultimately confront the question 'Who am I?' and seek to answer it honestly. One of the first principles of personal adjustment is the principle of self-acceptance. The [American] Negro's greatest dilemma is that in order to be healthy he [or she] must accept his [or her] ambivalence. The [American] Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many [American] Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures. . . . [But] The old Hegelian synthesis still offers the best answer to many of life's dilemmas. The American Negro is neither totally African nor totally Western He [or she] is African-American, a true hybrid, a combination of two cultures" (pp. 54 and 55).
Now, at this juncture, I want to pivot. I want to draw on the work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist, cultural historian, and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Ong's Protestant father's ancestors left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 - five years before the founding of Harvard College in 1636.
Yes, both King and Ong were named after their fathers. Yes, each man received his Ph.D. in 1955. And, yes, both men were ordained to Christian ministry - and both studied theology as part of their preparation for their respective ministries. As Dr. Burrow discusses in his 2012 article, mentioned above, King studied what is known as Boston Personalism under Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf at Boston University (1951-1955). Even though Ong does not happen to advert specifically to Brightman or DeWolf, he characterized his work as phenomenological and personalist in cast.
Ong's mature work from the early 1950s to 1968 coincides roughly with King's years of social and political activism from late 1955 to 1968. As far as I know, Ong never engaged in social or political activism. However, it would have been impossible for him not to have heard of King's social and political activism, because King was one of the most widely publicized Americans during the years of his activism. No, I am not aware of any reference in Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations or reprintings as distinct publications) where he refers to King.
No, I am not aware of references to Ong in King's publications. But it is entirely possible that King never heard of Ong. After all, Ong was never named Man of the Year by Time magazine -- as King was in the January 3, 1964 issue of Time. Nor did Ong ever receive the kind of publicity that King received when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
For a briefly annotated bibliography of Ong's 400 or so distinct publications, see Thomas M Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the anthology Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (Hampton Press, 2011, pp. 185-245).
In any event, from the early 1950s onward, Ong enunciated one iteration after another of the insight he had when he was researching his Harvard doctoral dissertation on the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). Harvard University Press published Ong's dissertation, slightly revised, in two volumes in 1958:
(1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason [in the Age of Reason];
(2) Ramus and Talon Inventory, a briefly annotated bibliography of more than 750 volumes (most in Latin) by Ramus and his followers and his critics that Ong tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.
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