Striving for a Complete Life: The Spiritual Essence of African–Americans’ Food Justice Activism

Abstract

This essay employs Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”, as an acute lens through which to assess and impart new meanings to African–American activists’ strivings to reach an ideal state of humanness and communal holism as they fulfilled their personal, political, and spiritual missions in the food realm during the 1960s Civil Rights era and the contemporary food justice movement. Narrative analyses of these Black activists’ personal testimonies convey that their discrete journeys to completeness—what Dr King called the ideal state of humanity in its fullness—were not only facilitated by a divine calling but were also conditioned by the enactment of their Christian faith, particularly in reconciling the affective tolls engendered by their participation in lunch-counter sit-ins and by their quests to help alleviate food insecurity among impoverish populations in the American South. Indeed, when these individuals consciously endeavored to master the three dimensions of a complete life—recognize their agency, honor the interconnectedness of humanity, and seek God’s guidance in doing both—were they able to embody their best selves and demand the realization of a truly democratic nation.

Full text

Citation: Johnson, Lynn R. 2023.
Striving for a Complete Life: The
Spiritual Essence of
African–Americans’ Food Justice
Activism. Religions 14: 1361.
https://doi.org/10.3390/
rel14111361
Academic Editor: Carol E.
Henderson
Received: 18 August 2023
Revised: 21 September 2023
Accepted: 25 October 2023
Published: 27 October 2023
Copyright: © 2023 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
religions
Article
Striving for a Complete Life: The Spiritual Essence of
African–Americans’ Food Justice Activism
Lynn R. Johnson
Department of Africana Studies, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA 17013, USA; johnsoly@dickinson.edu
Abstract:
This essay employs Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon, “The Three Dimensions of a
Complete Life”, as an acute lens through which to assess and impart new meanings to African–
American activists’ strivings to reach an ideal state of humanness and communal holism as they
fulfilled their personal, political, and spiritual missions in the food realm during the 1960s Civil
Rights era and the contemporary food justice movement. Narrative analyses of these Black activists’
personal testimonies convey that their discrete journeys to completeness—what Dr King called the
ideal state of humanity in its fullness—were not only facilitated by a divine calling but were also
conditioned by the enactment of their Christian faith, particularly in reconciling the affective tolls
engendered by their participation in lunch-counter sit-ins and by their quests to help alleviate food
insecurity among impoverish populations in the American South. Indeed, when these individuals
consciously endeavored to master the three dimensions of a complete life—recognize their agency,
honor the interconnectedness of humanity, and seek God’s guidance in doing both—were they able
to embody their best selves and demand the realization of a truly democratic nation.
Keywords:
African–American sermon; African–American activism; civil rights movement; First
Fruits Farm; lunch-counter sit-ins; food justice; food access; Nashville Nonviolent Student Movement
1. Introduction
In January 1954, Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his renowned sermon,
“The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”, for the first time to African–American parish-
ioners at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
1
As various scholars
note (Lischer 1997;Miller 1998;Jackson 2008;Dorrien 2018;Harvey 2021), King’s religious
oration was inspired by Phillip Brooks’s homily, “The Symmetry of Life”, in which the
nineteenth-century abolitionist theologian interpreted the new and glorious Jerusalem that
Saint John envisioned descending from heaven in the book of Revelation as “the picture
of glorified humanity
. . .
as it shall be when it is brought to its completeness by being thor-
oughly filled by God” (Brooks 1881, p. 110). The perfection of this city and humanity was
in part attributed to its symmetry, the equal measures of its length, breadth, and height
(Brooks 1881).
2
Like Brooks, King projected this vision of balance and completeness onto
modern lives. He (King 1954, p. 153) explained to his audience in Montgomery that the
length of life is not determined by its duration but by “the inward concern for achieving
our personal ends and ambitions”. The breadth of life, he insisted, extends beyond the
self to centralize the well-being of others (King 1954, p. 153). To realize the height of life,
the “movement beyond humanity and the reaching up to God” is requisite (King 1954,
p. 153). For both clergymen, then, a complete, symmetrical existence akin to that of the new
Jerusalem would emerge from the integration of this metaphysical trinity.
King individuated his sermon from that of Brooks’s when he adapted this radiant
vision of an integrous, three-dimensional life to his own imaginings of a complete and
“ideal humanity” at a time when the increased turbulence of racial segregation reverberated
throughout the American republic (King 1960d, p. 572).
3
“Three Dimensions of a Complete
Life”
4
can therefore be read as his call for a spiritually informed activism that harnessed
Religions 2023,14, 1361. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111361 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions

Religions 2023,14, 1361 2 of 14
the energy, talents, and ambitions of countless individuals to reconstruct, with divine
guidance, a distinct and equitable world for the common good. Viewed in this way, the
import of King’s address extends beyond its 1950s and 1960s frameworks. For this essay,
it serves as a unique lens through which to examine the existential registers of past and
present civil rights activists that King’s sermon bids to recognize their agency, honor
their interconnections with others, and overcome their anxieties through appeals to God
as they satisfy the humanistic missions of the socio-political movements in which they
participated. In deploying this lens in my analysis of the lives of Dr King, Nashville
Nonviolent Student Movement member Patricia Jenkins-Armstrong, and professional
athlete turned farmer Jason Brown, I primarily contend that their strivings for completeness
undergird the spiritual essence of their food justice activism. Indeed, their discrete journeys
to completeness inside and outside of the food domain were not only facilitated by a divine
calling but also conditioned by their Christian faith and their love for broader humankind.
As conveyed in various histories of social justice movements (Hoekstra 2015;Edge
2017;Opie 2017;Garth and Reese 2020), food activism embodies personal and public
campaigns that link food geographies, access, provisioning, and consumption with human
rights. Indeed, African–Americans have consistently led the charge in many of these cru-
sades. For instance, whereas Georgia Gilmore and members of the Club from Nowhere
5
sold baked goods to fund the Montgomery bus boycott from 1955 to 1956, the Black Panther
Party in Oakland, California, distributed free breakfast and groceries to underserved Black
communities throughout the 1960s as part of their survival programs. The lunch-counter sit-
in movement that college students organized in cities such as Greensboro, North Carolina,
Atlanta, Georgia, and Nashville, Tennessee, demonstrates African–Americans’ determina-
tion to rally against segregation laws that prohibited interracial dining.
6
Moreover, farming
initiatives were and remain significant to African–American food activists’ praxes. Cases
in point include Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1969 founding of the Freedom Farm Cooperative
in Mississippi (Brooks and Houck 2010;White 2019), the Nation of Islam’s farms, food
processing, and grocery store operations that provide African–American consumers access
to healthy food (McCutcheon 2013) , and Leah Penniman’s establishment of Soul Fire Farm
in 2010 to advocate for food sovereignty in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)
communities (Penniman 2018).
This study adds King’s, Jenkins-Armstrong’s, and Brown’s accounts of the theological
foundation of their activism in the food domain to this archive of African–American food
justice history. In so doing, it reveals, through close readings of their accounts, that kitchen
spaces may unexpectedly transform into sites of divine revelation, lunch-counter sit-ins
can engender a Black spirituality that preserves individuals’ respectability, and a “unique
ministry” to feed the hungry may materialize at God’s command (Brown and Asay 2021,
p. 95). In all, these food justice advocates validate the balance, integrity, and strength
accorded one’s life when its length, breadth, and height are bestowed equal value and
placed in human service.
2. Kitchenscapes: The Locus of King’s Divine Revelations Regarding Completeness
King (1954, p. 153) asserted that “life as it should be is the life that is rich and strong
all round, complete on every side”. The richness and strength of a complete life for King
was contingent upon the “due development” of its length, breadth, and height (King 1954,
p. 153). In this regard, the anticipated spiritual growth he envisioned entailed the merger
of the length of life, which emphasizes a moral “self-interest” and self-love, with the “other-
regarding dimension”, the breadth of life, where one recognizes human interconnection
(King 1960d, p. 398; 1967, p. 572). During his 1967 “Three Dimensions” address at New
Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago, King portrayed the confluence of one’s length and
breadth through his description of the ritualistic care of the body that occurs each morning.
In so doing, he began by establishing the fallacy of egocentrism, stating to his audience,
“You may think you got all you got by yourself. But you know, before you got out here
to church this morning, you were dependent on more than half of the world” (King 1967,

Religions 2023,14, 1361 3 of 14
p. 132). After delineating the French, Turkish, and Pacific Islander nationalities who furnish
the soap, sponge, and towels used for bathing, King rhetorically steered his audience
to their kitchens for breakfast to provide additional proof of human interdependency.
He stated:
You reach on over to get a little coffee, and that’s poured in your cup by a South
American. Or maybe you decide that you want a little tea this morning, only
to discover that that’s poured in your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you want a
little cocoa, that’s poured in your cup by a West African. Then you want a little
bread, and you reach over to get it, and that’s given to you by the hands of an
English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. Before you get through eating
breakfast in the morning, you’re dependent on more than half the world. (King
1967, p. 132)
This breakfast revelation illuminates for his audience the quotidian expressions of what
Martin Buber (1958, p. 26) described as the “I–thou” projection, the direct relationship
between the self and others that is based on mutuality and equality.
7
King borrowed Buber’s
I–thou philosophy for his sermon to promote an unqualified interest in the well-being of
others. Yet, expressing and preserving the I–thou relationship often comes with risks, and
thus appealing to God for endurance, which is the pillar of the height of life, is critical.
This third dimension of a complete life adds a layer of divine dependency, where God
as an eternal presence provides solace by alleviating the fears engendered during the second
dimension of life and augments the talents and ambitions that one recognized in the first.
King exemplified this most clearly in his January 1956 “Kitchen Table Revelation”.
8
Once
overwhelmed by the death threats he received due to his leadership in the Montgomery
Movement, King disclosed:
I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried
to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In
this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take
my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table
and prayed aloud
. . .
At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine
as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the
quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: “Stand up for righteousness, stand up
for truth; and God will be at your side forever”. Almost at once my fears began
to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. (King 1958,
pp. 134–35)
King’s appeal to God in this moment verifies the power of Christian faith to mitigate the
personal suffering that may result from expressing one’s love and concern for humanity.
King would again invoke his faith not only while incarcerated in Fulton County Jail in
October 1960 for participating in a sit-in to desegregate the restaurant of Atlanta’s largest
department store but also while confined days later in Georgia State Prison at Reidsville
for violating the terms of his probation.
3. To “Awaken the Dozing Conscience of Our Community”: The Impetus for King’s
Sitting in and Self-Suffering
King’s incarceration in Fulton County Jail and at Reidsville was the punitive conse-
quence of his participation in the 19 October 1960 sit-in at the Magnolia Room, a segregated
restaurant in Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta. King claimed in his autobiogra-
phy that he participated in the lunch-counter sit-in “as a follower, not a leader. [He] did not
initiate the thing” but accepted the Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights’ invitation
to join the protest (Carson 1998, p. 145). Seven months prior to the sit-in, Lonnie King
and other college students from historically Black colleges in Atlanta founded COAHR
to lead nonviolent efforts to desegregate the city. Dr King agreed to participate in their
protest because he “felt a moral obligation to be in it with them (Carson 1998, p. 145). Once
arrested for trespassing and sent to Fulton County Jail with the students, King assumed a

Religions 2023,14, 1361 4 of 14
leadership role by drafting a position statement to James E. Webb, the judge charged with
overseeing their arraignments. In this missive, he (King 1960a, p. 522) explained to Webb
that the sit-in protest evolved from “a deep-seated concern for the moral health of [their]
community” and that he and the students “[did] not seek to remove this unjust system
for [themselves] but for [their] white brothers as well”. With this goal in mind, they were
willing to forego bail as long as necessary to bring awareness to the injustices of racial
discrimination at Rich’s and at other establishments throughout the city. He wrote, “Maybe
it will take this type of self-suffering on the part of numerous Negroes to finally expose
the moral defense of our white brothers who happen to be misguided and thusly awaken
the dozing conscience of our community” (Carson 1998, p. 145). King’s statement and
resolve to endure suffering for the redemption of all highlight the personal and communal
empowerment gained by investing in the I–thou relationship. For, the social awakening
that King and the students endeavored to effect could, from their perspectives, cultivate
mutual and equitable associations in the Atlanta community.
King confirmed in a press interview two days following his arrest that the sit-in and
the incarceration of the protesters did indeed impact the moral conscience of national and
global citizens. He (King 1960b, p. 527) affirmed, “My personal staying power is buttressed
by the courage and dedication of my fellow jail-mates and the concern that has been shown
around the nation and the world for this moral stand we have taken”. The owners of Rich’s
dropped the charges against King and the students once they realized that the protesters
were steadfast in their collective decision to remain incarcerated and that their business
would suffer a great financial toll given the community responses. Although De Kalb
County officials released the student protesters, the sheriff remanded King into custody
because Judge J. Oscar Mitchell “construed [King’s] ‘trespassing’ at Rich’s department
store to be a violation of his probation” (D. L. Lewis 2013, p. 126). As a result, Mitchell
imposed an unappealable sentence of “four months on a hard labor gang because [King]
had a previous arrest for driving with an out-of-state license” (Hampton and Fayer 1990,
p. 68).
Hours after the sentencing, Georgia officials transported King to the state prison at
Reidsville, which was over two hundred miles from Atlanta and thus from his family. In
his account of his transference, King described the angst of being unaware at the time of
his destination. He divulged, “That kind of mental anguish [was] worse than dying, riding
mile after mile, hungry and thirsty, bound and helpless, waiting and not knowing what
you’re waiting for. And all over a traffic violation” (Carson 1998, p. 147). To withstand these
circumstances, King appealed to God and found comfort in his belief in divine purpose. In
a letter dated October 26, which he wrote to Coretta from Reidsville prison, he advised his
wife to “be strong in faith” and relayed, “I am asking God hourly to give me the power
of endurance. I have the faith to believe that this excessive suffering that is now coming
to our family will in some little way serve to make Atlanta a better city, Georgia a better
state, and America a better country” (King 1960e, pp. 531–32). As a result of Senator Robert
Kennedy’s intervention in the matter, Georgia officials released King from prison six days
after his arrival. Across the country, civil rights activists bore witness to King’s suffering
and found it imperative to continue nonviolent direct-action campaigns to actualize the
dream of a better nation.
4. On Attempts to Complete a New Democracy: The Nashville Lunch-Counter Sit-In
Over the years, Dr King adapted the homiletic content of “Three Dimensions of a Com-
plete Life” to address the import of civil rights activism in the establishment of an American
democracy that would, like the new Jerusalem, be “new in structure, new in outlook, and
new in character” (King 1954, p. 152). The achievement of this modern republic relied on
resolving the race problems that segregation laws protracted. When delivering his sermon
to a congregation at the Unitarian Church in Germantown, Pennsylvania, King (1960d, p.
575) averred that the seeds of these racial conflicts germinated in an existential field, as
many whites selfishly endeavored to maintain their economic and political privileges by

Religions 2023,14, 1361 5 of 14
investing in a system of racial division that “substituted the I–it relationship for the I–thou
relationship”. The I–it relationship denies equality with and objectifies others, nature, and
spiritual beings since it presumes “natural separation” (Buber 1958, p. 36). King (1960d,
pp. 574–75) expressed his unease about this untenable relationship. He professed to his
audience, “I am absolutely convinced that the problems we face today in the southland
grow out of the fact that too many of our white brothers are merely concerned about the
length of life rather than the breadth, concerned about their so-called way of life”. He
subsequently challenged the myopathy of this self-centered disposition and contemplated
a remedy for the white anxiety this short-sightedness induced. He (King 1960d, p. 575)
surmised, “If only they would add breadth to length, the other-regarding dimension, the
jangling discords of the South would be transformed into a beautiful symphony of brother-
hood”. Although King specifically indicted white Southerners in this statement, he held
all citizens accountable for altering the state of national affairs. He (King 1960d, p. 575)
imparted to the Germantown audience that “[all] men of goodwill have a moral obligation
to work assiduously to remove this cancerous disease from the body of the nation”. If
these men did not perform the excision, the country’s demise would be inevitable. Eleven
months preceding his visit to Germantown, King presumed the historical recording of
this national death in his “Three Dimensions” sermon at Friendship Baptist Church in
Pasadena, California. He (King 1960c, p. 400) stated, “Historians will have to say that
America died because too many of her people were concerned about the length of life
and not concerned about the breadth of life”. Essentially, King suggested that the life and
integrity of a democratic nation was reliant on the complete integration of the lives that
form its constituency.
The mission of the civil rights movement was to inject new life into the nation and
to preserve the constitutional rights of all its citizens, primarily through nonviolent direct
action. African–American minister James Lawson, like King, believed that assimilating
Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence in his Christian-based teachings and his
mental conditioning of civil rights activists would ensure the humanistic fulfillment of
the movement’s agenda. In December 1959, he, along with Reverend Kelly Miller Smith,
Andrew White, and others, would implement this philosophy in what Lawson called a
“Gandhian experiment” in Nashville, Tennessee (Nelson 2017). They determined to recruit
and train college students from historically Black institutions, specifically Fisk University,
American Baptist Theological Seminary, and Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial Univer-
sity, to desegregate department store lunch counters in the city’s business district. Lawson
recalled in a documentary interview, “It was especially Black women in Nashville coming
to our workshops week after week who said let’s begin downtown. That’s where there is
great indignity, white/colored signs over everything, and mistreatment from white people
in the downtown area” (Nelson 2017). He emphasized to these young activists that the
objective was not to “blow up Nashville downtown” in response to such indignities, but
to make every commercial area of these businesses accessible to all without exceptions
(Hampton and Fayer 1990, p. 54). Hence, these activists received carefully devised training
“to help them to begin to discipline themselves, to work together as a unit using nonviolence
instead of violence” (Nelson 2017). This is because Lawson believed that the disciplined
and pacifist Black body held greater agency in the face of white-supremacist aggressions.
Indeed, Lawson was deliberate in outlining the critical methodology of nonviolence
for his workshop attendees so that they could reach this disciplined state. The methodology
included assessing the problems of segregation, intelligently negotiating with business
owners and government officials who upheld segregation in eating establishments and
elsewhere and devising an effective plan of action to desegregate these spaces despite
violent physical and verbal backlash (Lawson 2022). Furthermore, Lawson insisted that
the end task would be to evaluate the socio-political and emotional outcomes of their
activities that could provide for national and personal healing (Lawson 2022, p. 42). To
effect this methodology, he and Smith conceptualized specific campaign strategies, which
included “sit-ins, poster walks, economic boycotts, marches, and parades if necessary” to

Religions 2023,14, 1361 6 of 14
upend the discriminatory practices of the downtown businesses (Nelson 2017). However,
for the sake of efficiency and practicality, they chose sit-ins as the primary technique of
resistance. The activists also concluded that these protests would precede any negotiations
with the business owners and local government officials because the talks could delay
action (Cornfield et al. 2021, p. 479).
In addition to articulating the pragmatism and psychology of this nonviolent strategy,
Lawson directly appealed to the activists’ religious sensibilities. As he recalled:
In Nashville, I interpreted Jesus as a nonviolent practitioner and the Bible as a
critic of violence, which is there but often hasn’t been picked up by conventional
people and by the churches. And these are all youngsters; these are all people,
clergy, students, housewives who were baptized people of the church. So, it
seemed to me that the very important thing [was] to use their Christian thought
and commitments in a fashion that enabled them to see what they were doing
out of that context. (Nelson 2017)
By situating the Nashville lunch-counter sit-in campaign within the framework of Chris-
tian thought, Lawson supported King’s position in his “Three Dimensions” sermon at
Friendship Baptist that individuals’ contributions to the “upbuilding of humanity
. . .
[have]
cosmic significance” (King 1960c, p. 398). This spiritually informed food activism attracted
Patricia Jenkins-Armstrong to the campaign, which would become known as the Nashville
Nonviolent Student Movement. Although Jenkins-Armstrong and other activists tested
the business practices of downtown department stores in December 1959, by requesting
food and leaving once denied service, they officially began to sit-in at these establishments’
lunch counters in February 1960, five months preceding the sit-in at Rich’s department
store in Atlanta. It was through her dogged determination to help close the door on segre-
gation in Nashville with other activists and to accentuate the humanity of all people in the
process that Jenkins-Armstrong would eventually realize a complete life before her death
in January 2023.
5. Traversing the Jericho Road to Completeness: The Dangerous Altruism of Patricia
Jenkins-Armstrong
At the time Jenkins-Armstrong attended Lawson’s weekly training workshops on
Tuesday evenings in the basement of Clark Memorial United Methodist Church in Nashville,
she was 17 and enrolled in Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University, which is
known today as Tennessee State. Recalling the import of these sessions in a 2015 interview
with Dave Hoekstra, she stated, “Our training was significant. In some way, Jim Lawson
was able to transcend to us about being nonviolent. The principles of Gandhi and Jesus
Christ were what the training was all about. I don’t know how we were able to do that
at our young age. A lot of us had a real commitment that we were going to make a
change” (Hoekstra 2015, p. 113). Jenkins-Armstrong’s statements align with both King’s
and Brooks’ descriptions of the developing self-consciousness present in the first dimension
of completeness (length of life) and the “other-centeredness”, the central concern of the
second dimension (breadth of life), that this new awareness can birth. For at a “young age”,
she discovered, as Brooks described in his “Symmetry of Life” sermon, her own “special
powers and dispositions” (Brooks 1881, p. 112). In recognizing her compassion for others
and her commitment to social justice, she voluntarily underwent the intensive training
needed to fulfill her ambition that extended outward. It is at this stage of recognition and
mobilization that King would assert Jenkins-Armstrong’s living begins. In his address
at New Covenant Baptist Church, he (King 1967, p. 127) submitted that “a man has not
begun to live until he can rise above his own individual concerns to the broader concern of
all humanity”.
The divine guidance transmitted through the tenets of Christian theology that were
part of Jenkins-Armstrong’s training under Lawson fortified her agency to transcend her
personal ambitions to shift the racial climate in Nashville with her contemporaries. Lawson
stressed that it was because of the student activists’ orchestrated efforts that Nashville

Religions 2023,14, 1361 7 of 14
“became the first city that began the pulldown of [the white/Black] signs of tyranny
. . .
and then opened up restaurants, the train station, and the bus station” (Nelson 2017).
Although Jenkins-Armstrong marvels “how [they] were able to do that” (Hoekstra 2015,
p. 113), it may be argued that she had already solved the mystery of this rumination: it
was through the “reaching upward toward God”, honoring the height of life, that she and
others were able to endure the “Jericho Road” to equality and social relevancy, particularly
as African–American citizens.
In multiple iterations of his “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” sermon, King
described the Jericho Road as a site of unpredictable violence; it was “a dangerous road”,
as made evident in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan and by his own travel experience
along this route from Jerusalem to Jericho in 1959 (1960c, pp. 399–400; King 1960d, p. 574;
1967, p. 128). He explained that “[during] the days of Jesus that road came to a point of
being known as the ‘Bloody Path’” (King 1967, p. 129). King would transfigure the biblical
Jericho Road into an apt metaphor for the tumultuous journey to equality in America.
In so doing, he conveyed that the precarious terrain of the pathways to equality incites
fear, which exacerbates one’s weariness about assisting in the elevation of others clearly
injured along its waysides. But like the Good Samaritan who provided aid to the man
wounded and robbed while traveling the Jericho Road in the biblical story, the people
of his time, in King’s opinion, must ask these questions among themselves: “What will
happen to humanity if I don’t help? What will happen to the civil rights movement if I
don’t participate?” (King 1967, p. 130).
In formulating plans for a sit-in campaign, Jenkins-Armstrong and members of the
Nashville Nonviolent Student Movement answered these questions as they endured the
bodily and spiritual risks in their endeavors to bring about new social conditions that
went beyond interracial dining in the South. King explained the significant choice of
lunch-counter sit-ins:
Almost every Negro had experienced tragic inconveniences of lunch-counter
segregation. He could not understand why he was welcomed with open arms at
most counters in the store but was denied service at a certain counter because it
happened to be selling food and drink. In a real sense the “sit-in” represented
more than a demand for service; it represented a demand for respect. (Carson
1998, p. 139)
Civil rights activist Ella Baker (1960) shared King’s sentiment and asserted that the lunch-
counter sit-ins were “concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger or even
a giant-sized Coke”.
9
Jennifer Jensen Wallach (2019, p. 125) explains that “being denied
the right to consume [these foods] on equal terms amounted to an assault on the Black
protesters’ claims of national belonging”. Of course, white citizens who defended segre-
gation in Nashville did not offer the service and respect that the student activists sought.
Instead, they violently denigrated them as these students sat peacefully at the food coun-
ters of McLellan’s, Walgreens, S.H. Kress, Woolworth’s, and Harvey’s department stores.
Jenkins-Armstrong recounted:
We would order food, but they wouldn’t give it to us
. . .
They would close down
the counters. If someone pulled us off the counter, we had to go limp. We had
spotters. The spotters would run to the First Baptist Church and say that one
group had been arrested. The second group would take their place. People would
call us names. They would pour ice on our heads. We could not react”. (Hoekstra
2015, p. 105)
In addition, angry whites spat on Jenkins-Armstrong, and she suffered a concussion “in
front of W. T. Grant’s store on 5th Avenue. A man knocked [her] out” (Hoekstra 2015,
p. 113). The calm resolve that she maintained in the face of such violence and demoralization
exemplifies what Lawson considered an expression of Black spirituality, one that “[senses]
that I’m not going to allow your hatred to cause me to get in the ditch with you. I’m not
going to allow you to pull me so low that I hate you in return” (Nelson 2017).

Religions 2023,14, 1361 8 of 14
Despite the training in Christian nonviolence that gave her “the mental equipment
for a dangerous altruism” in this Jericho Road moment (King 1960d, p. 574), Jenkins-
Armstrong testified to the imprint of this Black spirituality in her consciousness when she
detailed the lingering psychological impact that her participation in the sit-in campaign,
and the later Freedom Rides, had on her life. In the alimental realm, she recounted that
once arrested and “crowded into jail downtown
. . .
[the police] would give [them] oatmeal
and grits”, and she refused to eat those foods ever since (Hoekstra 2015, p. 113). Sit-in
activists received basic and often inedible provisions while incarcerated; thus, food was a
mechanism for disciplining the body. Jenkins-Armstrong’s refusal to consume grits and
oatmeal in a contemporary context, therefore, registers her continued resistance to the
control and traumatization of the Black mind-body. Even more significantly, she credited
her religiosity and involvement in the church for mitigating the resentment that she held
towards whites who sustained such dehumanizing racialized practices. She confessed, “At
first, I was angry at Caucasian people
. . .
There was a time I would never consider talking
about this because it brought up too many emotions
. . .
[but] by going to church and steady
reading the Bible, I was able to overcome my anger. I don’t have anger anymore
. . .
You
can’t have soul if you hate” (Hoekstra 2015, p. 117). Christian practice enabled Jenkins-
Armstrong to claim the “soul force”, a “sense of rightness and righteousness”, that her
nonviolence training accentuated (J. Lewis 1998, p. 78). This soul force not only sustained
her through the bloody path of racial antipathy, but also placed her and, by extension, the
country on a new route to “symmetrical completeness” (Brooks 1881, p. 126).
Jenkins-Armstrong’s acknowledgment of no longer harboring anger towards whites
underscores her spiritual rootedness and fulfills the final requisite of James Lawson’s
methodology of nonviolence—the follow-up stage where one “engages in healing and
reconciliation” (Lawson 2022, p. 42). In his book, Revolutionary Nonviolence: Organizing
for Freedom, he (p. 48) advised, “You must do the healing that needs to be done. If it’s
nonviolent action, it will cause a lot of people to change their lives—not all, but some. And
you need to corral those feelings and help those feelings get expressed”. By participating
in both civil rights work and engaging in spiritual work for the sake of completeness,
Patricia Jenkins-Armstrong changed the course of her life and those of many others, even
individuals who resisted the calls for national unity. For, once the mayor of Nashville, Ben
West, conceded that he felt that segregation was wrong, six of the downtown merchants
also conceded by finally opening their food counters to African–Americans on 10 May 1960.
In his autobiography, King asserted, “Spontaneously born, but guided by the theory
of nonviolent resistance, the lunch-counter sit-ins accomplished integration in hundreds of
communities at the swiftest rate of change in the civil rights movement up to that time”
(Carson 1998, p. 137). For King, the successes of nonviolent direct action would continue by
virtue of what he advised in the closing remarks of his “Three Dimensions of a Complete
Life” sermons: it would be by activists’ assertions of faith and their maintenance of a
rational love of self, of others, and of God that they could eventually realize a complete
and true democracy.
6. The Bread(th) of Life: Envisioning a New Politics of Food Access
The lunch-counter sit-ins that occurred in Nashville, Atlanta, and other southern cities
during the 1960s illuminate both the racial injustices and economic inequalities inherent in
legalized segregation. Indeed, within the culinary geographies of these nonviolent protests,
the hovering shadow of food insecurity projected the race-based and financial disparities
among some of the participants on each side of the social divide. In her examination of
the 1963 Jackson, Mississippi sit-in, Wallach (2019, p. 125), for instance, conveys that “[for]
activists like Anne Moody who had known extreme hunger, the abundant food on display
in these restaurants also served as a potent symbol of racial difference”.
10
In making this
claim, she infers that “the white hecklers were so confident in their ability to access food
whenever they wanted it that instead of preserving it, they weaponized it, using it to
assault rather than feed bodies” (Wallach 2019, p. 125). King (1958, p. 90) recognized

Religions 2023,14, 1361 9 of 14
that the “inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice”, as revealed through
these moments of terror and food justice activism. Once he learned from his mother about
“segregated eateries and lunch counters when he was only six” and when in his adult life
he was relegated to segregated dining cars while traveling in the U.S. did King “first [think]
seriously about access to food and the privilege to eat as being not only practical necessities,
but also basic human rights” (Baldwin 2016, p. 130).
In his elaborations on mastering the breadth of life dimension in his sermons, King
avowed that the alleviation of global hunger begins with a recognition of the intercon-
nectedness of humanity; this recognition would evoke individuals’ and governing bodies’
empathy and resolves to provide nutritional relief. Once recounting the “depressing mo-
ments” of bearing witness to impoverished, food-insecure people living on the streets of
Calcutta and Bombay, India, in 1959, King rhetorically asked congregants in Germantown
and Pasadena, “How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes
millions of people going to bed hungry at night?” (1960c, p. 401; King 1960d, p. 576).
11
Moreover, he critiqued governments’ business models of food access that prioritized sur-
plus food storage rather than relieving the nutritional deficiencies of destitute populations
within their jurisdictions. He (King 1960d, p. 577) related, “I thought of the fact that we
spend millions of dollars a day to store surplus food, and I started thinking to myself,
I know where they can store this food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of the
hundreds of thousands of millions of people all over the world who are hungry”.
12
The
national and international governments’ insistence on denying the presence of starving
people while fortifying their stores of food is resonant with the resolve of the wealthy
farmer in the biblical parable of the rich fool that King explicated in his “The Man Who
Was a Fool” sermon.
In this sermon, King interpreted the allegory of the rich fool found in the gospel
of Luke
13
through the lenses of modern life and activism, as he once again identified
egocentrism as the folly of those who “didn’t make contributions to civil rights” and, like
the wealthy farmer, “looked at suffering humanity and wasn’t concerned about it” (1961,
p. 413). Instead of sharing the abundance of his harvests, the farmer in the Bible decided to
construct huge barns and declared, in King’s words, “I’m going to store my goods and my
fruit there, and then I’m going to say to my soul, ‘Soul, thou hast much goods, laid up for
many years. Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry’” (King 1961, p. 413). However, at the
“height of his prosperity, the farmer dies” (p. 413). In his interpretation of this parable, King
emphasized that the farmer’s primary interest in his increased materiality and personal
comfort depleted his spirituality and obscured the fact that “wealth is always the result
of the commonwealth” (p. 415). He stated that the farmer “talked as if he could plow
the fields alone. He talked as if he could build the barns alone. He failed to realize the
interdependent structure of reality” (p. 415). King surmised that the farmer was blind
to the existential crisis that always results from the collapse of the two realms of human
existence—the “within” (the spiritual self and ends) and the “without” (the “material stuff
necessary for our existence” (p. 414)). God therefore rendered the rich man a fool because
he did not sustain the “line of distinction between ‘his’ and ‘him’” (p. 414). In other words,
the farmer’s life was incomplete upon his death since he never endeavored to transition
from the stage of immoral self-regard. Content with his self-centered ambition, he chose
to direct his attention, faith, and love towards himself and his accumulations instead of
towards others and God.
7. No Rich Fool on the Farm: The Emptiness of Jason Brown’s Completeness
King’s (1961, p. 414) message regarding human interdependency in relation to food
access and honoring the “line of demarcation between [one’s] life (read: within) and [one’s]
livelihood (read: without)” manifests in the autobiographical narrative of Jason Brown.
In 2012, Brown made the life-altering transition from being a lineman on the fields of the
National Football League to being a farmer in the agricultural fields of rural North Carolina.
In his memoir, Centered: Trading Your Plans for a Life that Matters (Brown and Asay 2021),

Religions 2023,14, 1361 10 of 14
he described the moment when he acknowledged a divine calling that did not involve
prolonging his tenure as a professional athlete. He (Brown and Asay 2021, p. 94) explained
to his wife Tay, “God is telling me that I need to sell our home in St. Louis and move
back to North Carolina
. . .
He is telling me to purchase some land there
. . .
He wants me
to be a farmer”. In conveying this revelation, Brown situated God’s calling on him to be
a cultivator of the land in order “to feed His sheep” (p. 77) in opposition to the “call of
the American Dream” to which society more readily proclaims, “You must answer” (p. 63).
Unlike his professional football career, which was for him a sound “business decision” that
would provide financial security and social mobility, farming would clearly pose great
challenges because he lacked fundamental knowledge in agricultural production (p. 77).
Although he “had been so good at [football]” that he became a star player, on the North
Carolina farm, he was a novice (p. 77). Following the divine call certainly was a testament
to his faith as he “accepted his tools and limitations” (King 1967, p. 124) as an emergent
farmer and began his journey to completeness.
Although practical in his mind, Brown’s economic-based decision to pursue athletics,
akin to the determination of the allegoric rich fool to hoard his surplus crops, consigned
him to the selfish dimension of completeness, the length of life. He later recognized that
his “identity and self-esteem were wrapped up in football” (p. 79), and he reflected, “I was
the center of my own existence. I had my mansion. I had my eight-figure NFL contract. I
had what the world says to value. And, ironically, I’d taken my eye off the ball” (p. 74).
Brown’s concentration on displaying his individual talent to garner praise from spectators
reduced his public persona to simply a rich entertainer. The call from God to become a
farmer who provisioned the hungry catalyzed a moment of self-rediscovery for him, one
that demanded his exit as “the center of that tiny, self-contained world of sport” (p. 74) and
his entrance into a world of “other-centeredness” as King ascribed the breadth of life stage.
In his “Three Dimensions” sermon, King (1960c, p. 398) insisted that “[once] we
discover what we were made for, what we are called to do in life, we must set out to
do it with all our strength and all the power we can muster up”. As Brown diligently
embarked on the journey to fulfill his divine appointment, he found that his complete life
conversion required him to experience a spiritual state of “emptiness”. In her analysis of
Charles Johnson’s short story, “Dr King’s Refrigerator” (Johnson 2005), Chandler (2013,
p. 339) describes emptiness in Buddhist philosophy as transformative since it involves the
personal “release of material desire” and egotism, which subsequently facilitates a broader
“focus on the interconnectedness we share with all earthly beings”. By way of example, she
reads Johnson’s fictional depiction of King’s revelation regarding human interconnection
that would be foundational to his “Three Dimensions” sermon as inspired by the clearing
of his cabinets and fridge of various sourced foods while looking for a midnight snack to
satiate his hunger. She (Chandler 2013, p. 339) argues, “As Martin empties their contents,
he learns how to see the food for what it really is; not something that is meant to fulfill his
selfish, physical desires, or something merely contained within cultural, ethnic, or social
boundaries. Instead, he learns how to see the food as a reflection of his spiritual connection
to all of humankind”. Brown came into a similar consciousness as the fictionalized King
once he followed God’s command to “POUR IT ALL DOWN THE DRAIN”—the career
that made him the highest paid player in the league, the mansion, and the other expensive
acquisitions—to establish First Fruits Farm (Brown and Asay 2021, p. 81).
Brown’s conversion narrative, which highlights his emptiness in the founding of First
Fruits Farm with Tay, also reads as an intertextual revision of the rich fool biblical parable
that King interpreted in 1961. Unlike the wealthy farmer who decided to store his copious
harvests in his large barns and live out his days in comfort, Brown relinquished his lucrative
career and expressed his care about food accessibility as a human right when he chose to
donate the first fruit of his seasonal harvests. He explained that the biblical verses about the
first fruit inspired “the basis of [their] new covenant with God. Whatever land God would
give [them, they would] use to grow food. And [they] would give away the first fruits of
the land—the first and the best—to people in need” (pp. 98, 99). When a representative

Religions 2023,14, 1361 11 of 14
from the Society of St. Andrew contacted him about gleaning his fields to provide food
to local churches and food banks to provision for the hungry, he honored this covenant.
He (p. 138) assured her, “You’re not going to just pick up the leftovers. You’re going to
have the best. In fact, you are going to have it all”. Brown’s commitment to his divinely
appointed service to others tamped down any inclination that could arise for him to craft
an economic plan for his farm (as he did with his football career decision) that was more
profit-driven than spiritually driven.
As a farmer, Brown expressed his belief in the spirituality of human interconnection
through food, not only when he provisioned local organizations with the first fruit of
his initial harvest in 2014 but also when, through the charity of others, he received the
bumper crops that made this harvest possible. Once failed investments and embezzlement
ravaged his revenue stream of the millions of dollars he earned while in the NFL, Brown
acknowledged that he could afford neither a modern tractor nor seeds to begin farming. A
neighboring farmer, Len, whom Brown had previously asked about planting sweet potatoes
and who had no knowledge of Brown’s financial predicament, helped to find a resolution
to Brown’s crisis of confidence about whether he could conduct his agricultural ministry
without the funds. In an act of care, Len contacted Dave and Allen Rose, experienced sweet
potato growers with a thriving business, and once they learned about the intentions of
First Fruits Farm, the Rose brothers donated “USD 5000 worth of transplants”, which Len
tasked his workers to plant, unbeknownst to Brown, in five-acres of First Fruits’ fields.
This “miracle”, as Brown termed it, because it came without costs to him, resulted from his
decision to follow God’s command to “walk in faith” (p. 132).
Walking in faith would also be important in sustaining the Brown family’s basic needs,
given their financial precarity. Brown (p. 124) stated, “Even in our relative poverty, even
when it seemed as though we couldn’t afford it, we’ve given our harvest away”. These
continual offerings, as expressions of their love for suffering humanity, led to other blessings
for his family and the farm. After news outlets publicized his post-football career and First
Fruits, Brown received letters from people nationwide who offered praise and support.
And it was through the generosity of one such individual that he finally secured a modern,
air-conditioned tractor to replace the age-old wheezing and growling Allis-Chalmers that
he prayed to God daily would continue to operate (p. 3).
The emptying of Jason Brown, both the voluntary and involuntary release of his
material comforts and ego in reverence to God, shaped his experience of the integrous,
three-dimensional life that King characterized as completeness. In assessing his life’s
journey, Brown (p. 160) concluded, “Success is nice, but I wasn’t called to be successful—at
least not how the world defines it. I wasn’t called to be comfortable. I was called to
be faithful”. His defiance of the American Dream’s prosperity narrative by becoming a
Christian servant signals his newly directed attention not only on the I–thou relationship but
also on “Thee”—God (p. 160). For, as he placed his service over selfishness in provisioning
the hungry, Brown simultaneously recognized God as his companion and provisioner
through time and circumstance.
8. Conclusions
At the end of his “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” sermons, King identified faith
and love as the essential hallmarks of a complete life. At Friendship Baptist in Pasadena,
he (King 1960c, p. 405) assured his audience that “if you catch [faith], you will be able
to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope”. To the congregants at the
churches in Montgomery, Germantown, and Chicago, he emphasized obedience to the
divine commandment to love oneself, others, and God. For in so doing, they would
realize “in [their] individual lives, in [their] national lives” the promise of a new and “ideal
humanity” that St. John envisioned (King 1960d, p. 579). Indeed, Dr King’s, Patricia
Jenkins-Armstrong’s, and Jason Brown’s food activism embodied this spiritual imperative
that sustained their beliefs in justice for all as well as an unrelenting drive to achieve
the wholeness characteristic of the new Jerusalem. In defying segregation policies that

Religions 2023,14, 1361 12 of 14
prohibited interracial dining and alleviating communal food insecurity through agricultural
production, these activists would experience both the power of faith and a love that was
more than “interaction between individuals” but a “potent instrument for social change
and transformation” (King 1958, p. 97).
Undoubtedly, African–Americans’ food justice activism continues not only to inspire
socio-political and personal progress but also to illuminate the connections among African–
Americans’ spirituality, health, and livability. Contemporarily, one recognizes this trajectory,
for example, in the efforts of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, a grass-
roots organization that uses urban agriculture to fight food insecurity. This organization’s
community gardens provide both healthy food and safe, healing spaces “where [African–
American women of the community] are able to exercise, reflect, meditate, and farm as a
stress reliever” (White 2019, p. 220). The concern for the wholistic health of members of the
Black community is also resonant in the teachings of African–American naturopaths such as
Queen Afua and Dr Llaila O. Afrika. Like Dr Alvenia Fulton, who opened “a combination
health food store, restaurant, and herbal pharmacy” on the Southside of Chicago in the
1950s (Opie 2008, p. 166), Queen Afua (1993) and Dr Afrika (1983), advance a liberatory
dietary politics which insists that a natural food diet would ensure African–Americans’
physical and spiritual well-being. Dr Afrika (1983, p. 14) even argues that health is “a
human right” and that shifting the African–American diet from European-based to an
African wholistic one is an “overlooked revolution”. Ultimately, African–Americans’ food
justice activism articulates a soul force that has commissioned and sustained the fight for
freedom, equality, and survival of the corporate whole, as Dr King advocated in his “Three
Dimensions of a Complete Life” sermons.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
Notes
1
Dr King delivered various iterations of this sermon on multiple occasions, and as part of other sermons he wrote throughout the
1960s. This essay focuses on those delivered in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954; Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1960; Pasadena,
California in 1960; and Chicago, Illinois in 1967.
2
St. John’s vision of the “New Jerusalem” appears in verses nine through twenty-seven in the twenty-first chapter of Revelation.
When describing the “holy city”, John states that it “has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as
crystal” (NRSV 1989, p. 1008).
3
Lischer argues that King adopted the “biblical text, tone, and a concept for a sermon along with a generic outline consisting of
three ‘places’” which he “amplified with proofs unlike those used by Brooks” (Lischer 1997, p. 98).
4
Throughout the remainder of my discussion, I employ the truncated title “Three Dimensions” sermon to reference King’s work.
5
Frederick Douglass Opie explains that Georgia Gilmore and other women who sold baked goods to support the Montgomery
bus boycott called their group the “Club from Nowhere” so that “they could earn money for the movement without raising the
suspicions of white officials and members of the Klan” (Opie 2017, p. 61). The result of naming the club as such was that whites
who purchased the baked goods did not realize that the money would go to the movement.
6
For a comprehensive history of the lunch-counter sit-in movement, see Melody Herr’s Sitting for Equal Service: Lunch-Counter
Sit-ins, United States 1960s (Herr 2011).
7
Buber (1958) asserts, “The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between
I and Thou”. In other words, the I–thou recognizes the existence of the whole person in what he calls the three spheres of
relationship: the relationship to others, nature, and spiritual beings. Any preconceived ideas or expectations about these
relationships may jeopardize an I–thou relationship from forming. King also applies Buber’s philosophy to his analysis of the
parable of the Good Samaritan in his “Three Dimensions” sermon. He states that the Samaritan was a great man because he
“could project the “I” into the “thou””.
8Scholars have also called King’s spiritual revelation his “Kitchen Vision” (Baldwin and Anderson 2018, p. 5).

Religions 2023,14, 1361 13 of 14
9
Jennifer Jensen Wallach elaborates on the significance of Baker ’s use of Coke and hamburgers in her speech. She states that “Coke
and hamburgers were, and still are, powerful symbols of American culture and affluence” (Wallach 2019, p. 125).
10
In her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody detailed her experience of poverty and hunger as a child. She
recalled that her mother lacked money to purchase food because of her father’s gambling habit and that they most often subsisted
on beans and bread. (Moody 1968, p. 29) .
11
In the July 1959 edition of Ebony magazine, King speaks of food insecurity in India and the United States in an article entitled
“My Trip to the Land of Gandhi” (King 1959, vol. 5, p. 231).
12
In his sermon, “The Man Who Was a Fool”, King (1961, vol. 6, pp. 416–17) makes this same case, as he discusses the condition of
food-insecure people that he witnessed while traveling in South America during the summer of 1960.
13 The biblical allegory of the rich fool is found in the twelfth chapter of Luke, verses 13–21.
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