Patrick Parr

The Seminarian:Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age by Patrick Parr caught my eye on the new books shelf of my local public library. I had to check it out and take it home. This book could be called a biography of a few years in Dr. King's life. Martin Luther King Jr. entered Crozer Theological Seminary at the very young age of 19 in 1948. King had skipped over one year of high school already was he was accepted at Morehouse College right after his Junior year of high school at 15. With the shortage of men due to the Second World War Morehouse was accepting young men who had only finished the third year of high school to fill their class. Martin graduated from college at 19 and went off Crozer where most of his classmates were 4 or more years his senior, many having had their educations interrupted by World War II service. In spite of his young age he became a leader of his fellow students and was elected student body president. It was at Crozer that King was first exposed to the Social Gospel ideas of Walter Raushenbusch and the realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. I too studied both of those writers.
Parr provides a lot of supplemental material in this book including Crozer's class rosters and course discriptions. King grew into adulthood while at Crozer and polished his speaking and leadership abilities there.

Crozer Seminary was in Chester, Pennsylvania. I visited the site of the campus in 2002. It was then a social service facility . The school had merged with Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in 1970 and closed the Chester campus. Colgate Rochester after that became Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. I can't quite claim that Dr. King and I share an alma mater but I did take one graduate class in the 1990s at Colgate Rochester Crozer and I was pleased to see that there was a seminar room called the Crozer Room which had some MLK memorabilia in a display case. I am glad I found this book.… (more)