DR. KING WAS A PHILOSOPHER

DR. KING WAS A PHILOSOPHER Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr is remembered much more as an iconic civil rights leader, Baptist preacher, husband and father, than as the philosopher, which he was. Dr. King's doctorate in 1955 was in systematized theology from Boston University. In his scholarly work, he compares the works of two fellow philosophers, Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. He then contrasts them with his own philosophy that of a personal view of God. This view is the view of black religion for whom God is real, ever present, personal, powerful . Persons with academic doctorates become known by the fields in which they are obtained: historians, mathematicians, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists, physicists , botanists, philosophers. Yet in his namesake's DADDY KING AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Martin Luther King, Sr with Clayton Riley (1980), no mention is made of his son being a philosopher. The word is not in the index . That lack could not have been an oversight; it had to have been purposely excluded, for the reasons best articulated by others. I simply don't understand. But I say that Martin Luther King, Jr was a philosopher. This is based not merely on my reading of his corpus, books, but on his practical philosophical orientation to God, as the source, personification of life. Dr. King's is redolent of ancient Ethiopian and Egyptian priests, scribes , philosophers', views of life, divine conception and whose works undergird Greek philosophy. Savior Jesus Christ was not known as a "philosopher," either, but by other titles/names . But who when reading the sublime philosophy of the "Sermon on the Mount," can doubt that it was life philosophy. Christ's philosophy was applied and practiced for 400 years by Africans in North America , being the traditional form of religion that was most widely practiced in black churches of any Christian denomination as well as in the secret slave bush arbors, as most eloquently explained by Dr. Howard Thurman, in JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED. Howard Thurman himself was a profound scriptural exegete, cosmic philosopher, and professor, associate/teacher of Dr. King, Jr and Daddy King Sr. Don't believe me read them yourself!