me a scholarship to study for the summer in New York City! For a young woman from Alabama, who had never been out of the South, this was an exciting time. We had excellent training and free time to explore the city. The Chrysler Building had just been completed and was famous as the tallest skyscraper in the world. (The Empire State Building would not be finished for another year.) To see that beautiful Art Deco Chrysler skyscraper lit up at night was a sight I never forgot.
While Mabel described the excitement of New York, Martin wondered if he should spend the rest of his life as a teacher in the peaceful North Carolina village or, once again, pursue his dream of becoming a minister. As he was struggling, Mars Hill College invited a professor to give a series of lectures. The guest taught at Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania. Years later Martin could feel the impact of those talks: “If that is a sample of what Crozer has to offer, that is what I have been looking for.”
After the lectures Martin asked the visitor many questions about the graduate school. Would he have to repeat courses he had taken at Louisville? How long would it take him to get a degree and become a pastor? Could he work on campus? And, most frightening of all, how would a Southerner be accepted among young ministers-in-training from the North?
5
Crozer Theological Seminary did accept Martin as a student. The dean offered him a scholarship and a chance to work on campus. He would need both, as his small salary had not stretched to include much in the way of savings. The Depression was causing money troubles for most people, rich and poor. Martin wrote to Mabel that he was both excited about returning to graduate school and frightened at the same time:
The Burnsville bank closed today. One of the men who lent me money to go to Louisville is a stockholder. I had been hoping I could count on him for some pennies this fall. And I must see that Mama and Pop and the boys (his two younger brothers in college) are taken care of.
The train trip to Pennsylvania was Martin’s first venture out of the South. The seminary was in Chester, near Philadelphia. As much as he wanted to follow his dream, Martin was aware how far away he was from his friend Mabel. After college she had worked for a year as teenage program director (then called “Girl Reserve Secretary”) in the Mobile, Alabama, YWCA. Because the Depression had hit everywhere, as the youngest staff member she had been laid off. Mabel had gotten a new job in Miami, Florida, in a larger YWCA with even more teenage and young adult programs under her care. Martin congratulated her, knowing that she was even farther away from Pennsylvania and worrying about how long it would be until he could see her again.
Crozer, he wrote to her that fall of 1931,
is the most stimulating place I have been since the Blue Ridge conference center where we met. The teachers are a human lot. They will work you to death, but they do all they can to bring you back to life afterward. Last Friday a group of us went to nearby Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center to hear Kagawa (a well-known Japanese pastor and writer who lived among the poor in Tokyo). He is just a regular human being, in spite of the tendency to idealize him into some kind of superman. Of course he talked about love.
Martin’s letters began to share with his friend how he felt about two big issues: war and race. Both, he believed, were addressed in Jesus’ teachings to love one’s enemies and to treat everyone with respect. He was concerned that the leadership of certain Christian student groups did not address race matters. “I want to work on that.”
He did not have to look farther than his own school to “work on it.” Martin, and several of his classmates, looked around at an all-white student body and began asking questions. If this school teaches ministers how to lead people and preach from the Bible, why are there no (Negro) students? Many of the faculty and some of their fellow students answered, “They have their own schools.” But this was not reason enough to keep doors closed to anyone who wanted to study there. The same young man who had grown up poor in mill towns of South Carolina led a student delegation to talk to the president and the trustees about opening Crozer to students of all races.
The trustees had to agree; it was difficult to call themselves Christian and deny welcome to any of God’s children. The first African American student, a young man from Virginia, would become a minister, college president and a nationally known speaker who lived until 1997, Dr. Samuel Proctor. Years later, a young man who had skipped both 9th and 12th grades and had graduated from Atlanta’s Morehouse College at the age of nineteen, studied at Crozer Seminary. Later he enrolled in Boston University and earned a doctor of philosophy degree; the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
How to live peacefully in a world gearing up for war was also on Martin’s mind. Fifty years later he could vividly recall an incident from those seminary days:
A Japanese, Naguchi, and Chinese Tsong were fellow students at Crozer in 1931. Japan had invaded China. The two students asked to speak at a seminary gathering. Each told of the suffering his family had already experienced. Both stood, took each other’s hand and pledged that their loyalty to God was higher than loyalty to a government that might send them to kill each other. They pledged to work for peace between their two countries and begged their American friends to join their efforts for peace. How well they would be able to keep their pledge, none of their friends could know. But their act laid on all who watched and heard a clear burden to affirm and support them.
Martin wrote to his mother about this experience and told her of his classes and of life outside Chester. Since Julia never had the chance to attend high school, she could not understand the names of some of his classes, much less the content. But she was proud of him going before the board of trustees and told him Jasper would have been proud of him as well. Julia was surprised that her eldest son could pass difficult courses, hold a job, and still have time to be the vice-president of the Crozer Student Association and give leadership to the local and regional chapters of the Student Volunteer Movement made up of young adult groups from various churches.
Early in December of 1931 Martin wrote to Mabel asking “for a picture if it is not too expensive, of course, to remind me every day of the girl who is coming to mean more to me than anyone else in the world. I wish that I could afford to come to see you at Christmas. Next summer is a long, long time.”
Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what Mabel wrote back? While none of her letters survive, many years later she told a friend:
When Martin and I met at the Blue Ridge conference center I realized that here was a man with visions and dreams that would take him far. He was light about it, but I could see it. As we got more serious in our friendship and our relationship he said, “Now, if you go along with me someday, no telling where we might land!”
We do know that she did send a picture, and that she saved Martin’s letters. Often if he went to a conference he would include a copy of the program, as well as a long letter about what he had heard and what he was thinking. In the days before zip codes he could address the letters: “Miss Mabel Orr, YWCA, Miami, Florida.” He would end with “Sincerely, John,” the name he was sometimes called. But Martin would forget that all the extra pages needed more postage. These letters were stamped: “Postage Due. 3 Cents.” Mabel paid, and packed the letters each time she moved, to the end of her life.
Martin wrote to her about dreams for his life’s work. Could he find a job as a minister in the South, or teach in a Southern seminary? He doubted it; his views on equal treatment of Negroes (the correct term in those days) would not be popular. He had not even been able to persuade friends at Mars Hill to have an interracial conference when the college honored the memory of “old Joe,” the slave who had been put up as collateral when the new school had run out of money. And the Depression was making it difficult for young men to be hired by small churches whose members had no jobs.
What did Mabel think of pacifism? Martin knew that
