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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
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Fears arose when the second born entered the world completely motionless, eyes closed, no crying, not even a breath. Everyone in the family's upstairs bedroom, Alberta's midwives and Dr. Charles Johnson took their cue from the newborn, holding their breath. The anxious father, Michael King, had married his bride on Thanksgiving Day in 1926 and moved into that very bedroom in his in laws home. Home paced in the hallway was the child dead. The doctor dangled the motionless newborn by his tiny ankles. He tapped the brown wrinkled skin on the baby's naked bottom, looking for signs of life. The pat elicited only a loud silence. The baby did not move. The only sound was the gasps of the adults in the room. The doctor tried once again making a vice like grip on the baby's ankles. He coiled his hand back even farther, hoping a harder smack would impart life into the lifeless, dangling body. Whack. The baby boy slowly opened his eyes, expanding his tiny chest and spit out a weak cry. His trickle of tears broke the dam of pent up emotion in the room. The first sound from the child's vocal cords elicited joy and tears. It was a harbinger of life to come. A slumped, but smiling Alberta held the child who would tease her for years about his challenging birth. I hear that I was a burden to you in the period before I was born, he would say. Was I worth it? That child, Martin Luther King Jr. Is the subject of the book Young the Making of Martin Luther King Jr. By the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial professor in Religious Studies and Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and education Institute at Stanford University. Professor Laron A. Martin Laron, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:07]
A
Thank you for having me, Sullivan. It's, it's a blessing and a privilege to be here and it's, it's, it's fascinating to hear those words spoken in somebody else's voice and I actually haven't heard them aloud before, so that was really moving for me. Thank you for, for doing that.
- [02:26]
B
Well, it was, it was a privilege to be able to read them, you know, this book. So, you know, people ask me a lot of times for book recommendations and if I don't know the person well, I will always say, well, what do you like? Because you know, every book is not for every person, nor, nor should it be, I think. So I always want to know, what do you like? And that will help me figure out like what might be a recommendation. But I gotta tell you, like, Young King is the book I recommend without asking people what they like. Since. Since I finished reading it has been the. The. The. The. Just the blanket recommendation, you need to read this. And as people are listening to this, it will be available to them when it's. It's not quite out at the time we're recording, but at the time that. That people are listening to this, they will be able to get their hands on a copy. So I'm really excited for people to. To read this one.
- [03:20]
A
Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited, too. And I will tell your. Your listeners what my sisters told me, and that is that, you know, they. They love me. They're. I'm the little brother. But they told me they will wait for the audio version. Well, with Blair Underwood, who's doing the audio. So they told me. They told me they're going to buy the audio because they want to hear Blair's voice.
- [03:42]
B
You know, I. I don't all the time. If I've read a book, I don't necessarily go back and reread, but if Blair Underwood's doing the audio, I may go back and I may go back and read that. I might go back and listen.
- [03:57]
A
You sound like my sisters now. Yes. Yes, that's exactly what they said. They're definitely doing the audio.
- [04:02]
B
Okay, well, that'll be great also for people who prefer. You know, people prefer audio to. To the hard copy it. You know, they'll be. This will be a good one. No matter what format. People. People. People take it in. In. You write in the book's introduction that narratives of King's life rush through his adolescence to get to the momentous adult years in the civil rights movement. And that gives us a King who arrives in our consciousness and public memory as a determined superhero with no backstory. Talk about that.
- [04:40]
A
Yeah, you know, I. Reading books on King, learning about Kings, even as a child, you know, everything kind of rushed through. The idea that he was once a kid, the idea that he once didn't listen to his father, struggled with what he wanted to be when he grew up, danced, played basketball. Like all these normal things, I never learned. It's just. You end up reading King, who's this amazing human being with this amazing courage who's willing to push for justice and advocate for justice until his death. But you never get the fact that he was once just a boy. And I have three sons. And one of the things that I've learned from them in all the Marvel movies they make us watch, is that all of these superheroes have a backstory. Right. That it helps to understand their commitment to their Mission, their power, why they are the way they are, their moral compass. And you learn all that with the backstory. And I think it's the same thing with Martin King. And I think in presenting King's backstory for people, it helps to humanize him, and it helps to make him more touchable, understandable, relatable. And I hope that ultimately inspires people that this is an individual who was just a little boy once, just a child, and did normal things and struggled with things, but yet somehow, because of his commitment, was able to rise above and work hard to better his community and ultimately the country and the world.
- [06:16]
B
Now, you. You wrote on your Instagram that your sons were one of the inspirations for this book. And you wrote that it was, you know, you reflected on their adolescence, your own adolescence. And, of course, you were studying the King Arch. You know, this is not. I think there's a trend right now in Biography, in Biography, where there's sort of this hybrid memoir biography kind of thing happening out there. And this is. I feel like this is not that. This is very much a King biography. That said, I wondered if you were in this, but,
- [07:03]
A
yeah, definitely. Definitely, I'm in the book in the sense of. It made me ask questions of the archive that I probably wouldn't have asked before. Like, questions like, well, what. What did King like to do on a. On a random Saturday? You know, he loved to play basketball. You know, I'd love to play basketball when I was younger. What. What was it like, his relationship with his mother and father? How did he view his father? How did his father view him? I honestly, recently, my father. He doesn't. My father doesn't fly as a result of having fought in Vietnam. And my father visited me in California for the first time when I was writing this and sitting down and talking with my dad and the questions he was asking me. It was like the first time I'd ever realized my. That my father and I were talking not as father and son, but as, like, human beings. And I remember he asked me a question. He said, you know, you're a professor at Stanford. You know, your mom and I, neither of us ever, you know, you know, went to college. When did you decide that this was going to be your life? And that question made me ask similar questions about the archive. Like, what did King's parents think of him growing up when he was, you know, going to dances and when he was not doing well in school? Like, what did they think? And so it made me dig and ask questions of his parents in terms of what they wrote, what they. What they said about him in interviews. So my experience and my experience of my children shaped the questions I asked of the.
- [08:41]
B
Of the sources you ask in. In the introduction, essentially, you ask something of the reader as well, of this book. You, you know, you ask us to strip away what we know about Dr. King as this superhero and allow him to simply be an adolescent. Talk about that. Ask of the reader.
- [09:08]
A
Yeah, it's. It's an ask to just read about. Read about a kid, like, strip from him all these moral concerns of right and wrong and. And that he. He knows that he is ultimately going to become this iconic figure. Like, let all that go for a moment and just read this book about a child. And when he approaches a woman for a date and she turns him down, like, just live with that as a normal teenage thing. And I think it's important for King to do that because I feel like King is often viewed as always being Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And so these moments that he has as a child are too often, I think, read as if he's already an adult, that he doesn't have the right to make teenage mistakes. And I wanted the reader to rest in that tension. I wanted them to deal with the tension that we have when we see young people making mistakes. Like, it's a cringe moment, and you're like, God, don't do it. But, you know, you also know that they have to do it in order to learn. It's a similar feeling I have watching my kids. While I don't know that everything's going to be all right, right, they're not a historical subject, but I hope it will be. And there's some mistakes you've got to let young people make so that they can really learn. And that's what I wanted the reader to do, is just let all the stuff go. Let go of as much as you can of the fact that, you know he's going to be this amazing speaker, this amazing preacher and activist and thinker, but for a moment, just wrestle with the fact that he's getting C's in high school and he's not doing well, but wrestle with the fact also that he is in a crowded public high school where there is a school shooting. Wrestle with all of that. How does that form a young person and then leads them to end up being who they are as an adult. So I wanted to keep the reader in that tension that we don't know how this story's going to end, because he didn't know. And I want the reader to walk with him during this journey that is filled with uncertainty.
- [11:23]
B
Do you think you could have written this book earlier in your career? I'm thinking about some of what you're saying and that, yeah, that it seems to be a vantage point of someone who's middle aged. Oh, I say, like, I'm middle and you and I are. You and I are the same age. Roughly the same age. So I feel like I can ask that.
- [11:40]
A
You can't ask that. You can't ask that. I love that question. And no, because I would not have had the same questions. I would not have had the same fears about, you know, what does this mean when a child goes through this? What's going to happen? I wouldn't have had the same comfort. I wouldn't have had the same questions. And so, no, I don't think I could have written this earlier. And that's why, to your point, you know, the book in some ways is dedicated to my three sons because of that, because of their role in my life and watching them, but also their existence and forcing me to confront questions I think that I wouldn't have had if I was not a dad.
- [12:24]
B
So the book structure lays out several sections, but all of the sections start with the word finding. Talk about that as a. Talk about this idea of finding as a framework for this book.
- [12:37]
A
I felt that reading the material and looking through the archive is that King was always searching for something. I felt like his life was a perpetual search. And in fact, one of his final sermons that he will preach is called Shattered Dreams and it's or unfulfilled dreams. And he basically says life is a story of starting something and looking for something, but, you know, never being able to finish it or never being able to find it. And I think that all of us are on a journey. And I think I saw in King his journey was always looking for something. It was looking for what he, what he was going to do with his life when he got older. It was looking for the right education, the right profession, and then of course looking for the right wife to help him and along in this journey. So I felt like finding was the right structure because he's always searching for something. And I think a lot of us go through life, you know, we're, we're, we're searching for something and sometimes we find it and then we move on to the next stage of life and we're on a new search. And I felt like I saw that in King's life and looking through the
- [13:43]
B
archive, there are several places in the book where you're looking at something that happened in King's life and talking about it. And you note that you are taking a different. You have drawn a different conclusion, perhaps, than previous biographers. One of those places is at the time when his grandmother, who we call Mama, takes ill and then. And then later dies. Talk. Talk about your point of view around that versus other biographers. Yeah.
- [14:24]
A
So in this moment in the book. Thank you for raising it. King is distraught by this death. It's the first time that anyone really close to him has ever died. And the family tells a story and it's even mentioned in Time magazine when he's the man of the year that he's so distraught that he goes on the second floor of the. Of his home, he opens the window, climbs on the roof and jumps off. And other biographers have looked at this moment as sort of passing like, oh, you know, he was just looking for attention or he. It's just trivial because they just didn't think it was that serious. And I think knowing what it's like to lose someone close to you. I remember what it was like when I lost my grandmother. And I was around the same age as king. I was 10 or 11. I remember how distraught I was. And also recognizing that King's father says that King blamed himself in part for her death because King was supposed to be at church. He had snuck off and gone to a parade downtown and got word that she had died. And his father says in both written and unwritten sources that King blamed himself. He thought that God was punishing him for being disobedient to his parents. So I just tried to think about what it's like to be a youngster and having all that heaviness on you. And then referencing psychology, which tells us about young people and how they encounter trauma, how they encounter especially trauma as relates to loss or grief. And then you add to that the trauma of the racism King had experienced by that time. I just felt that it was very, very, very possible that we should take that moment seriously. That's very possible that King actually was attempting self harm. That if we look at through the lens of first loss, blaming himself, and also the racist trauma he had experienced up to that point in his life, it becomes very plausible that he's trying to harm himself. And I just thought that that moment should be taken seriously because I think other biographers have sort of mentioned it in passing. But I think it's very important, especially today in our society where we know the numbers of Young adults, especially young adults of color and engaging in self harm has actually gone up. And I think that we have to take those moments seriously, that it's not something that's trivial when a young person tries to hurt themselves. And I think that I wanted to delve into that in a serious manner.
- [17:00]
B
Mama's death actually causes ML to have a profound crisis of faith. Talk about that crisis of faith.
- [17:09]
A
King says that that moment he just is really angry and he starts questioning everything he'd ever been taught, especially around religion and faith. His father says that he spends an entire day trying to comfort King, trying to tell him that God was not that angry. God doesn't do this. But King has been taught his entire life that the wages of sin is death. And so he just has a crisis of faith and he says he just is angry and begins to question everything, everything he's ever been taught. The resurrection of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the existence of God. And King says basically by the time he's 13 years old, 14 years old, he's raising questions like this in Sunday school, which is a scandal, right, because he's a. He's the child, he's the son of the pastor of the church. He's questioning fundamentals of the faith. And he says he basically just becomes an atheist, excuse me, an agnostic, that he's just not quite sure there's actually a God. And that's a significant thing for a young person who's raised in church, whose father is a pastor, whose grandfather was a pastor. And he just says that he just goes through a period of questioning that he's just not sure that there is a God and that God is real. And all of that is kicked off by the death of his, his grandmother
- [18:31]
B
and is part of a larger time that he calls a general rebellion. Which I love thinking, maybe because I didn't have a general rebellion. And now maybe I'm having. I'm getting to the age where it's time for my general rebellion. I loved the idea of his general rebellion, which lasted several years, right? That period that he talked about. And it wasn't just religion.
- [18:58]
A
It wasn't just religion. He actually becomes a fighter. All his, all his. You know, up until being a teenager, he was not a fighter. And his father actually used to get upset about it. His father even says in an interview, King would come home from school having been beat up or in a fight and had not retaliated. And King's father is just very disappointed. He's like, you know, King, men have always had A hot temper, and he doesn't have it. What's wrong with this kid? And he even says, I got to the point where I told him, if you come home one more time, and having been beat up at school, like, you're not to face me, like, I'm going to spank you. He really wants his son to be a fighter, and King refuses. But during this general rebellion, this teenage rebellion, all his friends say he became really aggressive. He got into fights. He would test people and taunt them into wrestling with him. He became very aggressive on the basketball court. His teammates said that he would just dribble the ball and just run people over on the court. So he goes through this period of anger. And I think that if we think about young adults, I think that's very natural. Young adults experiencing loss or something that is extremely traumatic in their life at times respond with anger. And that's a. That's a part of the grief grieving process. And I think if we think about it from a normal child's development, you could see how you could expect this, in a way, from Martin Luther King Jr. At the time. And that period of general rebellion involved that. It involves going to dances. His father's Baptist. That's supposed to be dancing. King is going to dances. And everyone reports that. He was an amazing dancer, by the way, which made it even worse, right? So he was not only rebellion, but he was like, I'm gonna be good at it. Right? He's an amazing at doing the jitterbug, the Lindy Hop, and all the popular dances of the era. His brother says, he was so good, I couldn't keep up with him. He tries to start becoming a little Casanova in high school, dating women, going out on dates, and. And he just goes through this period of trying to really find himself because he's really angry. And it's an anger that one could only feel when one feels one has been lied to their entire life. And I think we see that in King at that moment.
- [21:25]
B
So there's this period then through high school, and he makes the decision. He wants to pursue law, wants to go to Morehouse, needs to make some money. This section of the summer before he matriculates at Morehouse, I mean, again, the entire book, there's not. I can't say enough about how good the entire book is. This segment, though, of the summer before he goes to Morehouse was easily one of my favorite sections. It was one of those where I sat down just to read a little bit, and hours went. Went by, talk about this, some talk about this summer before Morehouse.
- [22:12]
A
King says when he writes to apply to Divinity School, that it's this summer that begins the process of his feeling called to go to the ministry. And Morehouse has a program for students at the time to send them to Connecticut to pick shade tobacco to make money for tuition at Morehouse. So King goes to Morehouse with about, probably about a hundred other students from what we can tell. And he's living on a farm in Simsbury, Connecticut, picking tobacco. And it's the first time he's ever been outside of the segregated South. So keep in mind this is a 15 year old boy. He's never been outside of the segregated South. He's never been anywhere where there's not Jim Crow signs that say, you know, colored only or white only. He's never been in a place where he can explore public accommodations freely. And he does that in Connecticut. And he writes letters home to his mother and father. And he says things like, I never thought a person of my race would be able to go to any restaurant I ever wanted to go to, and I went into the finest restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut. And he is just floored by this experience of living life on a plane that is not explicit racial segregation. So he's floored by that and he has his mind open by that. And he starts to say, his friends say, he starts to say that this is God's country. Like this is, this is what life is meant to be like. Now, of course, Connecticut's not perfect. They have racism in Connecticut, but it's not the explicit racism he's used to. And then he is such a terrible tobacco worker, he gets voted the laziest on the entire farm, which maybe is an early indication that he was not going to be engaged in manual labor. And he starts working in the kitchen because he's terrible at picking tobacco, he's serving other people, serving their food. And he also somehow, we don't know how, but he gets chosen to lead the religious devotions. So here's a young man who comes to the, to the, to the farm, doubting the existence of God, but has this amazing experience of living freely apart from racism and ends up leading the devotions. And from what we know, that is the first time King ever preaches. And everyone who's there, we don't know the exact words, they've been lost to the dust of time. But everyone who's there says his sermons were all about helping people, all about helping to make sure that African Americans could live life apart from Jim Crow about how the faith is about helping people, serving others. And we know that's the first time that he ever preached. And he leaves that farm and comes back and all his friends are clear, like, dude, it's clear you need to be a minister. And he's fighting it. No, it's not for me. It's not a respectable position. I'm going to be a lawyer. That's what's really going to help people. And his friends say they get so tired of talking about it because that's all he wants to talk about. He's trying to get his friends to agree with him that he should not be a minister. And his friends say they love them too much to lie to him. And they're like, no, man, I think this is what's for you. It's so bad that his friends say that some of them stop hanging out with him because all he wants to do is talk about the experience in the summer and how that was fleeting and what's. What he really should do is be
- [25:52]
B
a lawyer before he returns to Morehouse. I feel like we need to talk about one other chapter in this section because there was someone else floating around, floating around town that summer.
- [26:11]
A
Malcolm Little, also known as Malcolm X, was floating around in that area of Connecticut on those farms at the same time as Martin Luther King Jr. Was there. We don't have any evidence that they actually met, but they were both in the same place. And there are several students who report they bought suits from Malcolm that summer because Malcolm is in the area working for clothing business from Boston. And his job is to travel around these rural towns and farm towns where there's lots of African Americans working as farm hands to convince them to buy suits. Several young men say they bought suits from him. The Morehouse newspaper says that King and all these other young men who were there that summer came home with brand new suits. So there's no evidence we have that Martin and Malcolm met that summer, but they were in the same place at the same time. And I think it's useful in that moment to reflect on, as I do in the book, where these two young men find themselves. So you have a 15 year old Martin Luther King Jr. Who's experiencing the north and saying, you know what? Not all white people are bad. There's hope for America. There's a way that I could bring God's country to the south. I could be a lawyer and I can help tear down these laws. Malcolm, on the other hand, that summer at the time is 19 and you know as many people know him at that time as Detroit Red. He's slick, he's smooth. One of the young men on the farm say that Malcolm was using words like daddy, O, and he was using other cool slang. And they say that they just wanted to be like him because he seems so cool. Malcolm, though, of course, has lived in the north his entire life. And Malcolm is increasingly at the point where he thinks America has no hope. And Malcolm, like Martin, has told his teachers that he wants to be a lawyer. And of course, those who've read the autobiography know Malcolm's teacher ridicules him and tells him that's no job for an N word to aspire to, to which to aspire. So there are, like two ships passing in the night, not just physically, but also where they are in their lives. King is gaining hope in America. Malcolm's hope in America is declining. And yet they find themselves on a farm in Connecticut, possibly catching a glimpse of one another and maybe even, for all we know, maybe even talking and not knowing that they would, of course, their lives that run parallel or run in two different directions for the rest of their lives.
- [28:53]
B
You just mentioned the Morehouse School newspaper, the Maroon Tiger, which is cited a lot in this book. And I had this. I had this vision of you researching just like, I don't know, dozens, hundreds. I don't know, talk. Talk about sitting, like, all this time with the Maroon Tiger as a source versus. Versus some other, you know, some other source material.
- [29:22]
A
You know, it was fun. And I have shout out to Morehouse and the auc. All these issues are digitized. And so it allowed me to read them from the comfort of my own home on my computer. Every issue is not digitized, but a good number of them are. And it was amazing. It allowed me a glimpse of what it was like to be a African American college student at the Atlanta University center in the 1940s. Everything from Homecoming to Miss Maroon and White to the comics to the editorials, what students are concerned about how they're dressing. There's editorials about, you know, how a Morehouse man should dress or how Spelman woman should dress, and the styles, the clothing, the music. It just gave me a glimpse into what it was like. And I try to take the reader there from the clothes the women are wearing, whether they're, you know, high heels or kitten heels or blouses with boat necks and, you know, everything to that nature, the suits the men were wearing. And it allowed me to sort of take the reader and myself into that moment to be a college student in the 1940s at the AUC.
- [30:34]
B
So Martin gets to Morehouse, begins Morehouse, you just mentioned before, you mentioned his age. 15 years old, something I had to keep reminding myself throughout because he started school early. And so he was. He was so young, so young, so young, so young.
- [30:54]
A
And I think we forget that right when he's making mistakes, he's not necessarily doing well in school, that we forget he's 15. And he's 15 in part because, one, he's at a public high school, Booker T. Washington, that at the time had over 4,000 students. They had modular units and trailers and portables. It was way too crowded, not enough teachers. So. And there's violence. There's a school shooting while he's there, fights, stabbings. So King is really interested in getting out of there. And then that's the push. The pull is that Morehouse is looking for students because so many African American men have gone off to fight in World War II. And so Morehouse is in danger of closing because they don't have enough students. So they open up the opportunity for young people to apply to go to Morehouse early if they pass a standardized exam. King asks his parents if he can take the exam. His father's proud that King is that ambitious, so they let him take it, and he passes and is admitted to Morehouse at 15 years old. But all his professors, to your point, point this out and their recollections that, you know, he was so young and curious, ambitious, but really young. And he was small. He was only about. By that time, he had gotten to be about 5, 5 or 5, 6. And he was only 15 years old when he started.
- [32:22]
B
We talked before about you having taken a different point of view on some things that happened in his life. Another one of those times is you talk about a traffic stop in 1947. Talk about that.
- [32:39]
A
We know that King is stopped while he's in. Back in Connecticut working on the tobacco farm. He has some encounter with the police. And we don't know exactly what happened, rumors on campus or that there was alcohol involved. But previous biographers have either not mentioned this or they've kind of dusted it off and said, like, you know, you know, this is the real reason why King decides to go into the ministry, right? Because he's terrified to tell his parents that he's. He's been caught drinking and stopped by the police. But it's mentioned in a trivial sense. And I take the perspective that especially in 1940s America, there is never a trivial encounter between African American men or women, but in this case, African American men and the police, especially in 1940s America, that's never a trivial experience. And I recite through the book as a roll call to put readers in the mindset of where African Americans were at the time. There is a constant roll call on the African American press about African Americans who have been murdered or beaten by police for really no reason at all. And police are never found guilty for these. And I wanted the reader to understand that this is not a trivial moment, that anytime, especially in 1940s America where African Americans encounter the police, it is not a trivial moment, but it's a moment that is jam packed with the potential for beating, incarceration or death with no way of advocating for oneself. And so I just thought it was important to really focus on that moment and dedicate a chapter to it because I think previous biographies have overlooked it or trivialized it. And I think that's a moment that can never be trivialized in the life of people of color.
- [34:31]
B
The latter third or so of the book spends a lot of time talking about his dating life, which again, for someone who's in their late teenage years, especially at that time, of course one is going to be dating. I'm curious, though, about how you thought about approaching that and talking. Talking about it.
- [34:54]
A
Thank you. I wanted to approach it delicately. I didn't want to approach it in a way that say, like, look at this guy. He's, you know, Casanova, he's this, he's that. Because in reality, what I was finding is that, you know, we, you know, he got turned down a lot. You know, like, It's. He was 5 foot 7. He was trying to find a wife as quick as possible because he wanted to go into the ministry. And for many women, that was a really unappealing endeavor, right. That they didn't really see that as attractive. And so I wanted to point out that this is someone we think about king and dating. And he's this icon, he's this famous American. But he wasn't at this time, he's just a guy telling people, I'm going into the ministry. I am going to pastor the first church that God calls me to. And he jokingly says, even if that's in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, and I need a wife who's going to take care of me the way my mother did. That's not a very appealing pickup line. And so I wanted to point out to people, like a normal 20 year old, he has his ups and downs with dating and he's actually turned down by a number of, by a number of women. And but his quest again of finding is that he is looking for a wife. He's looking for a companion, someone who's going to journey with him along in the ministry and be there for him and be a sounding board and someone he can learn from and lean on. And he's, he's, he's serious about that. Very serious.
- [36:39]
B
One of the things I really appreciated about these series of chapters, and we'll talk a little bit more about them in detail, is, you know, I, I, I grew up in predominantly white schools, almost entirely white schools. And one of the things that stands out for me about King that I learned from learning in school in those days is that although he was married, he stepped out quite a bit on his wife. And I think the reason why that was drilled into my brain. Right. Is to somehow diminish him. And even though I know so much better now than I knew as a young person, it, I really appreciated again, the way that dating and women, you know, are, his relationship with them is treated in this book as well as a counter, you know, as a, you know, not to feed into that.
- [37:41]
A
Yeah, I think narrative. Exactly. And I, and Sullivan, I appreciate that because I, I feel like, I feel like because of Martin Luther King Jr's iconic status and race, I do feel like people heavily scrutinize his private life in a way that they don't do for other iconic figures. You know, we, you know, there's never a discussion to say everything that Thomas Jefferson wrote and those, and those amazing words, right. About all men being created equal, that somehow those words are now invalidated by the fact that we know that Thomas Jefferson had an ongoing sexual relationship with his stepsister in law, Sally Hemings, and had children. Never do we do this as it relates to George Washington and pursuing his slave enslaved woman throughout his entire presidency on a judge. We never dismiss those figures for their shortcomings. But yet some reason, when we have purported shortcomings of Martin King, because we have this information largely based on the FBI violating his civil rights, that somehow that he is now tarnished and no longer look to as a figure from which we can learn and be inspired by. And so I appreciate you saying that because I'm always cognizant of that, about the role that I think that race might play in how we look at his purported shortcomings compared to those of others.
- [39:13]
B
So talk about Juanita.
- [39:17]
A
Yeah. Juanita Sellers. Juanita Sellers was the woman that Martin Luther King Jr. S father desperately wanted him to marry. She was the daughter of a well known mortician and funeral director. The Sellers family, they were well known throughout Georgia. They had several funeral homes. And she, like King, was part of the black middle class in Atlanta. And they just had this. And King says this, Coretta says this. Martin and Juanita had this informal agreement, almost like they were betrothed, that they were going to get married. They dated when she was at spelman. She was Ms. Maroon and White at Spelman. And so she was the quintessential Spelman woman. He was in Morehouse. They dated. She was so popular that as you cited the. My use of the maroon tiger. The maroon tiger even notes about how amazing she is and says anyone who would date Juanita Sellers and step out on her is crazy because she's just everything, right? It's like the yearbook, you know, and she's Miss Everything. And that's who King is supposed to marry. And Juanita tells the story that, you know, King and she tells her friends and that she and King have a conversation. He says to her, I'm going to go off to do my PhD at Boston and excuse me, I'm going to finish divinity school and then go off to Boston to do my PhD but when I'm done with divinity school, we should. We're going to get married. And she is not with that plan. She thinks that wants to be more independent. She wants to be a professional woman and thinks that and sees that that's not what King is really looking for. So she tells an interviewer in the 80s by saying, we were supposed to get married, but I was too liberated for him. That's what she says. Martin and Coretta will say that King is dating Coretta. Coretta knows about Juanita and knows that there's this agreement between King's family and Juanita's family. But King says that he's not in love with Juanita and King goes to his father. According to interview. Coretta gave an unpublished interview. And King laces out to his father. Juanita wants to be a professional woman. She's not going to want to take care of me, stay at home. She's not willing to up and move. She has her own career. She's an educator. She's teaching at Savannah State. But Coretta has promised me that she's willing to follow me and to go where I go and to let my career be out on the forefront and she's going to support me in my ministry. And his father gives him the blessing. And so King proposes to Coretta. Their. Their engagement is announced in the newspaper in April, and they are married in June. And it's a. It's a story that I think many people can relate to. I think, you know, reading it, people are all, you know, maybe thinking those who are married or those who are partnered will be thinking about that one person. You know, I could have gone that way. How life would have been differently had I gone that way and, you know, partnered with that person. And I think it's a relatable story, and it's a story that King himself went through when Coretta was very aware of it. They talked about these things in a very honest way, and I try to detail that, and that these are people who are trying to figure out the rest of their lives, and they're just trying to do the best they can with the information they have. Mm.
- [43:02]
B
I. I'm curious what got left out of the book from your research. Maybe that would be interesting to listeners.
- [43:14]
A
Yeah, there's a lot, I think, that I did that I left out. What? His time in divinity school and CRO at Crozier Theological Seminary. That is the one place we know that he dates a white woman there named Betty. I. I mentioned that. I don't go into too much detail on that. That was covered fairly extensively in other books, most recently Patrick Parr's book called the Seminarian and Jonathan I book, which, you know, both of them focus on King's adult years mostly. So I didn't go into that much. I didn't go into a great deal about his classes while he was in divinity school because I thought it was important in this book to point out that Morehouse is the place that sets the foundation for him. And I feel like previous biographies haven't always focused on the role that Morehouse plays. They've kind of focused on divinity school and the PhD program, and those are formative for him. But Morehouse is the foundation for. So I wanted to spend my time there, and I left out probably a good deal of information about his time when he was at the three years he was in divinity school.
- [44:28]
B
One thing you did not leave out is at the end of this book, there's a partial reading list. You reconstructed his reading list from this time. I'm so curious. I want to hear everything about this, include the decision to put in the book. You know, how many of these books, if any, did you read yourself? Talk about the reading list.
- [44:51]
A
It's very kind of you and very astute of you to notice that I have to Shout out to my, my editor, Elizabeth Mitchell. She's the one that suggested this after we finished the book. She says, you know, I think, I think you've done such a good job of chronicling his education formation. Why don't you give your reader a taste of some of the books that it seems were really influential in his life. And I thought it was a great idea. So I sat here with my team here at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and education Institute and just talked about, you know, what are some of the books that we know for a fact that King read and were influential for him. And so it was a great exercise for me to think about and also for books to me that for me that I had not read that were on that list. You know, books from the early 20th century, books about public speaking. I hadn't read those books. But also the books that he says were formative to him on civil disobedience, reading of Gandhi. We definitely mentioned Howard Thurman, a book that Jesus, Jesus and the Disinherited, a book that King carried with him a great deal. So it was really fun thought experiment for us to look at the books that we know he encountered that he spoke about or wrote about when he was in graduate school that we know he read. And it was really, really fun for me to think that through and to give the reader a taste of a bit of what King was reading to help form him. And thank you for mentioning that. I really appreciate it.
- [46:27]
B
Well, this book is Young King the Making of Martin Luther King Jr. By Laron A. Martin. You can find Laron on Facebook and Instagram. Arone Martin, you can also find the King Institute on Facebook and Instagram. We'll have links to those in the show notes. You've been listening to Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Sommer, a new books network podcast. I am your host, Sullivan Sommer. If you like what you heard like, follow and drop us a rating on your favorite podcast app. We're on Instagram ditions to the Archive and we're free over on substack 2 where Laron and I are headed right now to continue our conversation.
- [47:07]
A
Thank you.
- [47:07]
B
Thank you for listening to Additions to the Archive.