Jr.×Lincoln

Two architects of freedom debate the student who learned their lessons too well.

00:00of10:35

legend · A

Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–1968

Every sentence arrives on time

corpus11.3k pages · sermons, speeches, letters

Vera speaking

From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. They take up On the pupil who surpassed them.

legend · B

Abraham Lincoln

1809–1865

Starts with a joke. Ends you.

corpus22.7k pages · letters, debates, speeches

full transcript

Vera
From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. They take up On the pupil who surpassed them.
Abraham Lincoln
You know, Reverend, I once told a crowd that I'd never been much afraid of failing as I was of succeeding at something that didn't matter. Now here we sit, two men who got ourselves killed for mattering, talking about somebody who might've done the whole thing better than either of us.
Martin Luther King Jr.
President Lincoln, I'm not certain we're here to measure who did it better. The question before us is whether the pupil who learns from the teacher's victories and defeats alike hasn't been given an unfair advantage. Every generation stands on the shoulders of those who came before.
Abraham Lincoln
Unfair advantage? That's the whole point of civilization, isn't it? My father couldn't read. I read law by candlelight. If some young lawyer came along and did better than me because he had a lamp and a full library, I'd call that progress, not theft.
Martin Luther King Jr.
But progress carries a weight we must acknowledge. When John Lewis walked across that bridge in Selma, he carried not just his own courage but the accumulated moral authority of every person who'd resisted before him. He carried Frederick Douglass. He carried Sojourner Truth. He carried you, Mr. President.
Abraham Lincoln
And he carried you, Doctor King. I've heard tell of that march. The question rattling around my mind is this: Did he surpass you, or did he complete you?
Martin Luther King Jr.
He pushed when I might have paused. After Birmingham, after the dogs and the fire hoses, I counseled patience in some quarters, consolidation of gains. John and the young people of SNCC said the time is always now. They were right more often than I cared to admit while I was living.
Abraham Lincoln
You're talking about the difference between strategy and impatience, seems to me. I spent the first year of my presidency trying to save the Union without touching slavery. Held back the proclamation when I had it written. Some called it wisdom. Frederick Douglass called it cowardice, and he wasn't entirely wrong.
Martin Luther King Jr.
But you did issue the proclamation. You moved when the moment demanded movement.
Abraham Lincoln
After Douglass and the radicals pushed me to it, yes. After enslaved people themselves forced the issue by fleeing to Union lines. The pupil doesn't always surpass the teacher, Doctor. Sometimes the pupil just refuses to repeat the teacher's mistakes.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Then we must ask ourselves: Is that surpassing, or is that fidelity? When the young people sat at those lunch counters, they enacted the very principles I preached. They made real what I had only described. The Word became flesh, if you'll permit me the theological language.
Abraham Lincoln
I'll permit it. I'm no theologian, but I understand the notion. Still, there's a difference between doing what the teacher said and doing what the teacher couldn't manage himself. Which are we talking about?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Both, perhaps. I spoke of nonviolence, but I never spent a night in jail until I was twenty-nine years old. John Lewis was bloodied on the Freedom Rides at twenty-one. The students of the sit-in movement were nineteen, twenty years old, putting their bodies on the line daily. They didn't just listen to the sermon. They lived it more fully than I did.
Abraham Lincoln
Now that's a hard admission. Takes a big man to say he was outmatched by his own students. I never had that problem myself, being largely self-taught and therefore limited only by my own shortcomings, which were considerable.
Martin Luther King Jr.
You're being modest, Mr. President.
Abraham Lincoln
No, I'm being accurate. I'm six foot four and I was raised in a cabin with a dirt floor. Modesty had nothing to do with anything I ever accomplished. But I'm curious about something, Doctor King. Did it trouble you? Watching young people do what you'd called for, but faster and harder than you'd intended?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Trouble me? At times, yes. I confess it troubled me. Not because they were wrong, but because their courage exposed my own calculations. I was always counting the cost, always measuring the political possible against the morally necessary. They simply saw injustice and moved against it. There's a purity in that which I sometimes lacked.
Abraham Lincoln
Purity's a dangerous word. Pure people get themselves killed, often before they've accomplished much. You and I, we calculated because calculation keeps you alive long enough to matter. Maybe the pupil surpasses the teacher precisely because the teacher stayed alive long enough to teach.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Except we didn't stay alive, did we? Both of us were killed for the very causes we asked others to moderate their approach toward.
Abraham Lincoln
Fair point. Though I made it through a war and you made it through Birmingham. The calculations bought us time, even if they didn't buy us old age.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The deeper question might be this: What does it mean to surpass? If John Lewis accomplished more freedom-work in his lifetime than I did in mine, is that surpassing, or is that simply a different assignment from the same God?
Abraham Lincoln
You're asking whether there's a competition at all. I like that. Puts me in mind of something. In '42, when I was a young representative, I heard John Quincy Adams speak in Congress. He was ancient then, been president decades before. Somebody asked him if he minded that younger men had outstripped him. He said, 'I planted. They water. God gives the increase.' That's Scripture, but it's also just sense.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, chapter three. Yes. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.
Abraham Lincoln
You know your Bible better than I do, but that's the sense of it. Maybe surpassing is the wrong word altogether. Maybe we're talking about seasons of the same harvest.
Martin Luther King Jr.
And yet the harvest metaphor assumes a crop that eventually gets gathered. I wonder if freedom is ever fully harvested, or if each generation simply tends the same field, pulling new weeds that look remarkably like the old ones.
Abraham Lincoln
Now you're getting at something. I issued a proclamation that said enslaved people in rebel states were free. Didn't say a word about the border states where I needed political support. That's not principle. That's weeding one part of the field and leaving the rest because you can't reach it yet. Did I surpass Jefferson, who owned slaves while writing that all men are created equal? Or did I just weed a little more of the same garden he planted?
Martin Luther King Jr.
You weeded more, but you also planted. The Thirteenth Amendment was your doing, your political mastery. Without that, the proclamation dies with the Confederacy's surrender. So you both continued Jefferson's work and pushed beyond what he could imagine doing himself. That's the pupil surpassing the teacher.
Abraham Lincoln
Or it's the pupil finishing what the teacher started and couldn't complete. There's a difference.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Is there? Completion is a form of surpassing. You went further than Jefferson could. John Lewis went further than I could. The movement didn't end with my death. It expanded. Young people took the methods of nonviolence and applied them to wars I didn't live to protest, to rights I hadn't thought to name.
Abraham Lincoln
You're talking about that war in Vietnam. I heard you'd come out against it before you died.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Yes, though it cost me. The Johnson administration turned against me. Colleagues in the movement said I should stay in my lane, stick to civil rights. But the young people, they understood immediately that justice is indivisible. They didn't surpass me by being smarter. They surpassed me by being more consistent with the principles I'd taught them.
Abraham Lincoln
That's the thing about teaching, I suppose. You give them the tools, and then they use the tools on problems you hadn't considered, or hadn't the courage to face. The pupil becomes the teacher's conscience.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Precisely. And if we're honest, that's what we should want. A teacher who wants his pupils to stay smaller than him is no teacher at all. He's a tyrant. The whole point of leadership is to create leaders who exceed you.
Abraham Lincoln
Create leaders or recognize them? I didn't create Grant. I just finally had sense enough to promote him after three years of lesser generals. Sometimes the pupil's already great, and the teacher's job is just to get out of the way.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Both, perhaps. We create the conditions, the space, the permission. But the greatness has to be there already, waiting for its moment. I gave young people the language of nonviolence, but they supplied the courage to live it out at far greater cost than I'd paid when I first taught it.
Abraham Lincoln
So here's what I'm hearing. The pupil surpasses the teacher not by rejecting the lesson, but by taking it more seriously than the teacher did. That about right?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Yes. And by seeing implications the teacher missed or avoided. When I was killed, I was in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers. That wasn't about votes or desegregation in the classic sense. That was about economic justice, about the dignity of labor. The young people had pushed me there. They'd asked, what good is sitting at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy lunch? I had to follow where they led.
Abraham Lincoln
The pupil teaching the teacher. That's a particular kind of surpassing, I think. You were humble enough to learn from them. Not every teacher is.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Not every teacher survives long enough to see where his pupils go. You were killed just days after the war ended, after the great work was nominally done. I was killed in the middle of a changed struggle, one I was still trying to understand. Perhaps the measure of a pupil surpassing isn't in what they accomplish, but in whether they force the teacher to grow.
Abraham Lincoln
And whether the teacher has the sense to let himself be forced. I think we're agreeing, Doctor, which makes for dull radio but decent philosophy. The pupil surpasses the teacher when the pupil takes the lesson all the way to its conclusion, even when the teacher couldn't or wouldn't go there himself.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Especially when the teacher couldn't. That's not a defeat for the teacher. That's the teacher's vindication. We taught the right things, you and I. The fact that our pupils did those right things more bravely, more completely, more consistently than we managed, that's not our failure. That's our victory.
Abraham Lincoln
Reminds me of what my old stepmother used to say. She couldn't read either, but she told me: If you give a boy good tools and good sense, don't be surprised when he builds a better house than yours. You just be grateful he builds houses at all instead of tearing them down. I think she was onto something.
Martin Luther King Jr.
She was. And if we're remembered at all, Mr. President, it won't be because we were the greatest who ever lived. It will be because we raised up pupils who were greater still, and had the wisdom not to stand in their way when they surged past us.
Abraham Lincoln
That's a sermon, Doctor. You can't help yourself, can you?
Martin Luther King Jr.
No, sir. I cannot. It's the only language I know for speaking truth.
Abraham Lincoln
Then I suppose we're fortunate it's a language worth speaking. The pupil surpasses the teacher. Long may they surpass us. And longer still may their own pupils surpass them. That's not a tragedy of obsolescence. That's the whole design of time.