Lerone Martin, a prominent scholar of Black religious history, leads the Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. His new book, Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr, grew from “professional and personal” roots.
Professionally, Martin “started coming across things that I had never seen before” about the civil rights leader’s childhood in Atlanta, his years at Morehouse College, and his time at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania. One key episode happened in 1944, when King was 15. Travelling north from Georgia, he spent a summer working in the tobacco fields of Simsbury, Connecticut. It’s known as a transformative stay, vital in King’s eventual decisions to follow his father as a preacher and to fight for civil rights. Nonetheless, Martin found an underexploited resource.
