'The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.' by Jonathan Rieder

Is Upon Me

The Righteous Performance of

Martin Luther King Jr.

Jonathan Rieder

Belknap/Harvard University Press: 394 pp., $29.95

PREACHERS can say the darndest things, as perhaps you've heard. "God damn America," to take one recent controversial example, is pretty mild compared with other recorded pulpit snippets. Consider this denunciation of U.S. military behavior abroad: "[W]e are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world." Or, similarly, calling the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and condemning it for creating "concentration camps."

It sounds like the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. decrying the Iraqi civilian death toll and the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, right? Sorry, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made those remarks in February 1968 and April 1967, attacking U.S. conduct in Vietnam.

Indeed, here's a historian's question for YouTube warriors on all sides of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. "Is Obama Wright?," as one video has been titled? A powerful return volley could be "Is Obama King?" -- which thousands of voters may be asking themselves. In fact, if all the relevant film footage of King's sermons were readily available for viewing, the most accurate and instructive title would be "Is King Wright?" Or, better yet, "Is Wright King?"

These questions and comparisons came to mind as I read Jonathan Rieder's rich, thoughtful new book, "The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me." Published to coincide with the 40th anniversary of King's assassination in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, the book "is not biography, history, or theology," Rieder emphasizes. Instead, the Barnard College sociologist focuses on "King's language and the way he deployed it," as distinct from King's public activism or the substance of his beliefs. The result is an extended meditation on the deeper meanings of the civil rights leader's words and how he used them, featuring a mosaic of carefully chosen and closely analyzed quotations.

"The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me" is an extremely learned book, one that Rieder has been working on for almost two decades (and he thanks this writer for answering a number of queries over the years). But he is surprisingly reluctant to draw explicit or broad conclusions. Successive sections consider the language King used in private discussion (some of which was recorded thanks to the FBI's extensive bugging and wiretapping of King) with African American friends as well as his preaching to black congregations, his overtly political addresses at civil rights rallies and what Rieder calls King's "crossover" orations and writings aimed at predominantly white audiences.