James A Beshair recalls his friendship with one of the great icons of the 20th century When we met at Crozer Theological Seminary in September 1950 I had just turned 23, and had no idea that this congenial African American of the same age was destined to become an icon of the international civil rights movement. For anyone lucky enough to be his friend and classmate he was the most unforgettable man, someone who went on to devote his life to Christian Personalism. For Paul Tillich, who gave the Crozer lectures in 1951, the ontological status of becoming a person resides in a belief in the sacredness of human personality. There is a love that is higher than Freudian love. "God as agape" is articulated in Plato's Phaedo and developed by the example of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. Personalism is summed up in the First Epistle of St John: "Let us love one another; for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love." All forms of love, except agape, are contingent on characteristics which change and are partial such as sexual attraction, passion, quid pro quo, and varieties of sympathy. Agape is independent of all these. It goes beyond these states to affirm justice as a social virtue that binds the individual with the other in a community of brotherhood. The community has to honour social justice. Love that does not suffer and forgive is not true love. Love seeks the personal fulfilment of the other. Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere: so can we sum up the existential position of Martin Luther King Jr. Injustice is a violation of the Christian ethic of love as "agape". In his book Why We Cannot Wait MLK Jr explains that justice is action in the here and now. The silent majority chose to close their eyes to the racial injustices of the past. Silence is an attempt to cover up the present with hopes for a better future. Commitment to do justice to the other is a cause to follow. Martin Luther King quotes his namesake in: "Here I stand; I can do no other, so help me God." In his sermons MLK Jr addressed contradictory accounts of two quotations in the Bible. MLK Jr preferred the St Mark version in 9:30: "He that is not against us is for us" over the St Mathew version in 12:30: "He that is not with me is against me." Mark's statement is issued in the plural whereas Matthew's is in the singular form. The "silent majority", MLK Jr reasoned, adopts the singular version which is discriminatory by being ethically silent about social injustice since it singles out whoever is not with me as alien. Through his correspondence and visits I learned about these fine differences between commitment to social justice and seeking personal goals in life. Martin Luther King Jr was considered an idealist by some and as a rebel rouser by the media but he succeeded in changing the image of his mission in life. He was twice on the cover of Time and was able to lead a civil rights movement that changed the course of history. Without Martin Luther King Jr it would not have been possible for Barack Obama to become the 44th president of the United States. King was a Baptist minister who believed in a personal god, a god of love who acts in history through Christian leadership to bring about a community of reasoned love. He assimilated the tenets of personalism from two professors at Crozer, George W Davis and Kenneth Smith, and from Boston University's Edgar S Brightman. King wrote his dissertation, "A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and HN Weiman" under his Boston University professor L Harold DeWolf. Crozer students lived in a dormitory, a renovated Civil War hospital building, on a large wooded campus on the hill overlooking Chester, Pa. Martin Luther King Jr had a room adjacent to mine. He was a notable orator who attracted many students, both white and black. I was among those who chose to sit next to him at dinner. He impressed me as someone with an intellect that was searching for truth in a genuine way. He was not a showman and he was able to convincingly articulate his thoughts about a personal rather than a metaphysical god. His devotion to God shows in his book Strength to Love (1963). "God has been profoundly real to me in recent years. In the midst of lonely days and dreary nights I have heard an inner voice saying, 'Lo, I will be with you...' I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship." At dinner table at Crozer he once surprised me with the question: "How do you see me?" I was not prepared for the question and responded with some diffidence: "You look like me." "Shoot man," he said, "I am a negro." I did not know what to say to his confession of racial consciousness. I explained to him that in Egypt we do not think of a person as black or white, only as Christian or Muslim. There is consciousness of religion but not of race. I know that I belong to a minority of Christian Copts, and my Muslim friends identified themselves as Coptic Muslims. An Egyptian historian, Nimet Ahmed Fouad, maintains that Copt means Egyptian in Greek. Coptos is derived from Gyptos. The consciousness of being Egyptian is a primary binding force between Christians and Muslims in Egypt. Martin's skin colour was darker than mine but I did not think of myself as either white or black. A Fulbright scholarship to study at Crozer and Penn opened my eyes to King's mission. When I arrived on the Crozer campus I was received by Martin Luther King Jr who was the president of the student body, and by William Tasker, a former World War II veteran. The encounter with King inspired me to dig deeper into Christian personalism as it impacts on the brotherhood of man. Martin led the way for all mankind. We attended lectures by Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich at Crozer, and Bertrand Russell at Swarthmore. Liberal thinking had a major role in shaping the movement for racial equality in the United States. In his book Stride Towards Freedom MLK Jr was searching for a "Christian community" committed to justice through "brotherly love". Martin and I attended two courses taught by George W Davis, Comparative Religions, and another by Kenneth Smith on Social Ethics. These courses inspired Martin Luther King, Jr to lead the civil rights movement. In Search for the Beloved Community (1974) Kenneth Smith gives a full account of Martin Luther King's journey through the social gospel of Rauschenbush and Edgar S Brightman. Martin Luther King Jr would have been 81 years of age now, and I believe that he would have been surprised at the strides towards freedom and equal rights in the US. The spirit of King's non-violent movement for racial equality stands firmly within the US tradition of democracy as inspired by Christian humanism. The 1950 Thanksgiving holiday at Crozer re-awakened my identification with the white silent majority. The dormitory was closed and all the students went home. I was one of three foreign students who were invited to American homes for the holiday. En Chin Lin from China and Makutu Sakurabayashi from Japan went with classmates to Virginia. I received two invitations: one from William Tasker of Moundsville, West Virginia, and another from Martin Luther King to go to Atlanta, Georgia. I chose to go with Bill because he was white. I was aware of what Martin had told me about his childhood in Atlanta. Martin had related to me at dinner how he and his father were treated by a white policeman. I did not feel that I was ready for a visit to Atlanta. I declined the offer and he was gracious enough to invite me again on a later occasion. On 10 December, 1956 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favour of integration. Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Prize in December 1964. From then on the hearts and minds of the American people changed. Martin Luther King Jr visited me in Cairo with his wife Coretta. He spent two days at the Continental Hotel, overlooking the old Cairo Opera House, and I took him out sightseeing, including a visit to the American University campus and to Dar Al-Hilal with Emile Samaan. I introduced him to Professor Allan Horton, dean of the Graduate School, who invited him to address the students at Wednesday assembly. I saw him a few years later, after I moved to Pittsburgh, and he addressed the student body at the university there. He recognised me in the audience and had his bodyguards allow me to come to the podium with him. We spent a few minutes chatting, and that was the last time I saw him. In 1965 Wadei Philistin, professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo and a distinguished Egyptian writer in his own right, translated Stride Towards Freedom under the Arabic title Ala Darb Al-Horeya. It is the only King book with which Arab readers are familiar today. After MLK's return to the US he wrote a letter saying "my sympathies are with Egypt rather than with the Western colonial and imperial powers". When I read his letters today, and I have four of them, I feel inspired and blessed by the memory of a truly Christian man. He dedicated his life to a noble cause, seeking civil rights by peaceful means. I consider him the most unforgettable man in my life. When King was assassinated in Memphis I wrote a memoir about him. The same day that my eulogy appeared in the Duquesne Duke my car's windshield was smashed in the faculty garage. It was either an inside job by an angry racist or the work of a neighbourhood vandal. My article would not have been published without the support of the late Reverend Edward Murray, former vice-president of Duquesne University. The article was not proofread, but I sent a copy to Mrs King, and I received a nice "Thank You". In 1967 King addressed the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC, and he spoke out with courage about racial equality and the need for more social psychology research. American psychologists, he said, seem to be more interested in rats than they are in racial issues. He echoed his liberal theme of Christian humanism by calling for peaceful co-existence between classes and races. He asserted the bonds of love and brotherhood across racial and religious lines. He believed that religion could not afford to ignore social inequality, and was capable of changing it. A year later I attended the historic meeting when Martin Luther King Jr stood before 200,000 people gathered around the Washington Monument on 29 August, 1963. I felt that the Civil Rights Movement had finally received legitimacy. Martin Luther King Jr entered the archives of world history when he summed up his mission in the following lines: "I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true measure of its creed: We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal." His mission touched our hearts and minds, and made us more caring and more responsible for the needs of our fellowmen. I was fortunate to have known Martin Luther King, Jr, and his example has enriched and ennobled my life. Beshai, JA (1988) Qualitative Analysis of MLK, Jr Stride Towards Freedom . Paper presented at the American Psychological Association Convention, Atlanta, GA, August, 1988.
