He lived at home through his years at Morehouse (College), and then he went out to a small seminary in Pennsylvania, Crozer Theological Seminary, in a very isolated small town. She knew people like Paul Robeson, for example, who was a major figure in the Progressive Party, and Martin had none of that kind of experience. That was the third party in the 1940s that was set up and it was kind of socialistic it was against the Cold War. She had been politically active since 1948 with the Progressive Party. Coretta was much more of a political activist than he was at that time. The love letters he wrote to her when they were dating back in 1952, and discussing things like socialism. Q: What have you learned about King through receiving those papers that you did not expect?Ī: I think learning more about his relationship with Coretta has been exciting. At that point in my career, I wasn’t about to leave a tenured job and especially with my kids in school to go to Atlanta to work on a project that might go on for a while. There was another aspect to this, and that is that she wanted someone willing to move to Atlanta. I first said there might be some other people, and I remember suggesting David Garrow, who wrote a book about King. People would still be poor, they would still need jobs, and they still wouldn't have political power. He was trying to overcome a particular system of segregation, but I felt even once that was done, it really wouldn’t change things very much outside the South or even inside the South. I felt that the work that I started doing in Los Angeles when I was at UCLA, organizing in South Central Los Angeles, was at least as important as what King was doing in the South, taking on part of the problem, but there was still another part of the problem that was more national. I admire King a great deal, but I wasn’t a follower. Young people in SNCC thought that they were ahead of King they were the vanguard that King was trying to catch up with, rather than the other way around. That was rather a broader topic of the freedom struggle, and I focused on young people, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Martin Luther King’s papers? Did you set any goals after accepting this challenge?Ī: My first thought (was), do I really want to do this now? Because King was not the center of my research. Q: Do you remember your first thoughts back in 1985 when Coretta Scott King asked you to take on and edit Dr. He discusses what the civil rights leader would make of today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Clayborne Carson has spent the past three decades studying Dr.
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