(RNS) — Child orator. Farmhand. Agnostic.
Only one of those titles would be commonly guessed to describe the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
But a new 420-page book by scholar Lerone Martin reveals those and other little-known pieces of King’s history. In “Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr.” — which will be released Tuesday (May 5) — he describes the family, friends and educators who helped shape King into the man who would one day draw some 250,000 people to the 1963 March on Washington.
Martin, 46, is the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. To write the book, he delved into resources such as King’s letters to his parents, hit tunes on the jukeboxes during his college days and a health examination to determine the future civil rights leader’s 5-foot-7 height.
The interview with Martin was edited for length and clarity.
Why did you decide to explore the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s early life?
There were two reasons — the first was professional. Starting the new job in January of 2022 as director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, I started encountering things that I had never read in my entire life of studying Martin Luther King Jr. One of the main things that I encountered was the letters he sent home from Connecticut when he was working on the farm. I never knew that he had these revelations (explained in the letters). On a personal side, I was driven to this because o …