Martin Luther King Jr. at Crozer Theological Seminary
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
Martin Luther King Junior came to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania in nineteen forty-eight, a nineteen-year-old from Atlanta with a bachelor's degree already behind him. The three years he spent here were among the most formative of his intellectual life. At Crozer he immersed himself in theology and philosophy, studying Hegel, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the social gospel tradition.
Most crucially, he encountered the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and began developing his own philosophy of nonviolent resistance, the framework that would shape the civil rights movement. He graduated in nineteen fifty-one with a Bachelor of Divinity degree, finishing at the top of his class, then went on to earn his doctorate at Boston University. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen sixty-four.
The ideas rooted here in Chester helped change the course of American history.
