May 4, 2020 • 35 mins
Martin Luther King Junior was an activist, minister and the most visible leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He advanced civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. His strategy was both revolutionary and effective.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Martin Luther
King Jr. Was an activist minister and the most visible
(00:21):
leader in the civil rights movement from nineteen fifty five
until his death in nineteen sixty eight. He advanced civil
rights through non violence and civil disobedience, inspired by his
Christian beliefs and the non violent activism of Mahatma Gandhi.
(00:43):
Welcome to Personology. I'm Dr Gail Saltz, and my guest
today is claymorn Carson, director of the Martin Luther King
Junior Research and Education Institute, and he's the Martin Luther
King Junior Centennial Professor in the History Department at Stanford University.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Was born in nine in
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Atlanta to Alberta and Martin Luther King. King Sr. Had
taken over the ministry of Ebenezer Baptist Church from Alberta's father,
and the church became the very center of their lives.
The young Martin Luther had many influences in his upbringing,
but none more central than his father. Be bor the
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name of his father, His father saw him as the
firstborn son who was going to become a preacher himself.
You know, I think that that was kind of decided
at an early age, and Martin was was okay with that.
Were there things in his relationship with his father that
would foreshadow the direction that he would ultimately take. His
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father is a noble example. His father was someone who
had come from poverty to work himself into a role
of being one of the leading ministers in Atlanta. He
had struggled to get through more House College because he
had not had very much preparation in his childhood for
going to college, but he had managed to do that,
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and he had managed to marry the daughter of one
of the leading ministers of Atlanta. For his son, he
was the role model for what a minister could be.
Someone who was very concerned about the everyday lives of
people in his congregation, someone who was outspoken on social issues.
His father was a civil rights campaigner himself who actually
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led protests in Atlanta, and his grandfather had been a
civil rights leader the local chapter of the n double
a CP in Atlanta. This really was his history, and
it was expected that as someone who was essentially given
more than his father, he could perhaps do more even
than his father. I think so I think he felt
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he had a very privileged childhood. Unlike his father and grandfather,
who had grown up in poverty. He had grown up
as the son of a affluent minister in Atlanta, and
he had a sense that he had a gift of
leadership that he could give back to the black community
and help just as his father. He saw his father
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as as someone who was always trying to work for
the benefit of the black community. And what was his
relationship like with his mother, How would you describe that.
I think he saw his his mother as someone was
working behind the scenes. Obviously his father was publicly prominent,
but he described his mother as someone who was always
taking care of everything, and he kind of developed that
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as a role model for what a wife should be,
someone who stays home, takes care of the kids, but
also has a lot of talents that can be valuable
in the church, that more in the background. Being working
with the choir is something that has done. You don't
get a lot of public praise for that, but you
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do it because it helps the church as the whole.
So I think he grew up kind of understanding the
gender roles. You know that his mother was behind the scenes,
taking care of all the necessities, while his father was
the person who was the public presence of the family.
Can you talk about personality traits that may have been
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evident from an early age. Was he a loquacious kid?
Was he a competitive kid? He was a good speaker,
He won oratory contest as a young boy. He was
someone who was concerned about social issues, outspoken. One of
the things he did is he wrote a letter to
the editor of the leading newspaper in Atlanta as a
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fifteen year old, protistic about the conditions that black people faced,
and it got published, and that was the first publication
by Martin nut the King. So he was he was
doing number of things that indicated that he had the
potential for leadership. He did go through a crisis in
the sense of his religious faith. He did. He was
done a fundamentalist like his father. He questioned the Bible.
(05:13):
He questioned many of the stories in the Bible. And
it was only when he took the course by George
Kelsey as professor at Morehouse. That was the only course
he got an a in. But it was also the
course where he learned to reconcile some of his doubts.
What Kelsey would call the deeper truths of the of
the Bible. Some of the stories might be not literally true,
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but they conveyed oral truths, and that those were more
important than whether Jonah was really swallowed by the whale,
and that many of the stories that are in the Bible.
So was that a departure from his father's ideology, then yes,
I think he saw his father as more of a fundamentalist,
that the Bible was just the truth, it was the
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word of God, it was not to be questioned. But
I think Martin was someone who questioned things and that
actually prepared him for his ministry. Martin graduated more house
In at the age of nineteen was a b a.
In sociology. He then went on to Crozer Theological Seminary
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to continue his education. Closure with Theological Seminary was one
of the more advanced of What I mean by that
is it was more than simply training people to be ministers.
It was training then to answer these theological questions. They
had to understand that the Bible was a historical document
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that was not all written at the same time, and
it was important to distinguish the different books of the Bible.
Some of them were contradicted one another. So all of
these things were part of the deeper study of the
Bible that he did during his time at Crozier, and
it was there also that he he really developed it
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into actual gifts. He was not a gifted student as
an undergraduate, but once he got to Crozier, he realized
that his mind really was drawn to theological questions and
he wanted to know what was the role of the
modern minister. How can ministry actually help the people in
terms of their everyday problems. One of the papers that
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he writes when he's at Closure, he says that as
a minister he will deal with problems like unemployment, slums,
and economic insecurity. I think he's still maybe nineteen or
twenty years old when he writes that, so he's he's
already laid out his life plan, that he's not simply
going to be preaching to his congregation. He's going to
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be preaching a gospel. He called it the social gospel
that will help them deal with their everyday problems. Was
that a departure from how one went about being a minister?
That that was not the norm? I think it was
unusual in the sense that within the Baptist Church, most
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ministers felt that their job was simply to deal with salvation,
to emphasize the need for belief. His dolosion was that, yes,
you need to do that, but you need to do
bore than that. You need to address the social issues
that your congregation is dealing with. Wasn't enough to simply
save their souls. You needed to make the world in
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which they lived something where they would be able to
provide for their families and deal with the problems that
he thought were important, you know, especially these economic issues
of poverty. He turned Christianity into means of making the
society better. That's something that doesn't happen in those churches,
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at least at that time. Most ministers were content to
simply tell the biblical stories and draw the moral lessons
from them, and not see the need to involved themselves
in issues like civil rights. Let's take a quick break here,
we'll be right back. After King graduated from Crozer Theological
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Seminary in ninette, he again decided to continue his education,
this time working on his doctorate at Boston University. And
he was a very social affable. It seems that he,
even in those early years, got along well with people had,
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I guess I would say a real charisma. People were
already drawn to him. People who knew him when he
was going to Dustin University sometimes referred to him as
the prince. You know. He he was a person who, well,
many students struggle economically while they're going through school. He
had a new car when he came to Boston. He
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had a an apartment paid for by his father. He
was popular among both men and women. He was socially
engaging person, someone who was well respected by those around him.
So he had that charisma that you see later in
his life. And he was drawn to Coretta Scott, two
years older than him, a singer, musically talented, somebody who
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perhaps was less interested in being behind him and only
a support and not having any accolades of her own.
When he first called her in Boston in nine two,
she wasn't that interested in going out with him. She
was training to have a career in music, and the
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last things she wanted to do was become a minister's wife,
kind of raising the kids and staying in the background.
That she wanted to have her own career. She was reluctant,
but after they went out a few times she began
to be drawn to him. She saw his talent and
his charm and was I think convinced that maybe she
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could achieve some of her life goals by being his wife.
That took a while. Their courtship was difficult. If you
look back at the letters that he wrote to her,
you can see that they went through some difficult times,
especially when he asked her to come to Atlanta and
meet his parents. She wasn't quite ready to do that.
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She knew how strong an influence Daddy King was on
his son, so they fought over that, and you can
see that there was a chance that the relations should
kind of broken up over that. She knew what she
was giving up, and she had studied very hard. And
one of the things that happened even after they became
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engaged to each other that she insisted that she complete
her education at the New England Conservatory of Music, and
even after their marriage, as she was the one who
organized what she called freedom concerts that would raise money
for the movement, and during that time she was also
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a strong pacifist. She was affiliated with an organization called
the Women's International Strike for Peace, so she had her
own political involvement. She had been a member of the
Progressive Party during the ninet Was she influenced by him
in that way? I mean, was that something that she
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came to him with that they happened to agree on.
I think it was more the opposite is that she
was the one who was the bar politically engaged when
they met. Martin had never been involved in the protest,
and she was the first of all just older. She
do black political leaders like Paul Robeson. She had signed
a concert with him, so she knew these the older
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generation and admired this older generation and black activists. There's
a wonderful sure I have of her at the Progressive
Party convention in so at a time when when Martin
is still a teenager, she's already at a national political convention.
And later on in the sixties she's the one and
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speaks out against the Laar in Vietnam before Martin does so.
Is she the major influence for him in terms of
the aspect of his career that had to do with
pacivism and using non violent methods to make change. I
think what I would see is that they both influenced
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each other. That we shouldn't see her as simply following
him and not the other way around either. I think
both had strong ideas. His came out of his religious faith,
hers came out of her political activism. She went to
a very liberal arts school in Antioch. Many of the
students were I guess what you would call leftists politically engaged,
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and he had never had an opportunity to do that
because his education was more in the South at more House,
and he was exposed to ideas. I remember once she
told me, said I met Martin. He had a lot
of wonderful, really interesting ideas, but he had never really
done very much. So I think that if he had
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just not had the opportunity to develop politically because of
his own background, and because when they met he was
fairly old enough to vote. After school, Martin and Coretta
moved back to Coretta's home state of Alabama, deciding Montgomery
was the best place to start their family. They both
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wanted to return to the South. She had grown up
in rural Alabama, he of course, in Atlanta, Georgia, and
they had both agreed that they would try to move
back to the South and bring their progressive ideas into
that region and try to be part of the movement
for change. So he becomes a minister of Dexter a
New Baptist Church right and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church had
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been a place where many of the politically active black
residents of God bring that was that was their church,
and the previous minister, Burdon Johns, had been a politically
active minister. So that's one of the reasons why he
chose that church, as he helped these were people who
would be receptive to his kind of theology. He didn't know,
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of course, that that there was going to be a
bus boycott movement there. That was more an accident of
history that he was in the same place as Rosa
Parks at that point he had to make a decision
about whether he was going to take a role as
a civil rights leader in terms of the best boycott.
In December of Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to
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follow a bus driver's order to move to a seat
in the back of the bus to accommodate a white passenger.
The local chapter of the n Double A c P
had to waiting for a test case like this challenge
the issue of bus segregation. Then Double A CP met
at Dr King's church, and King was eventually elected to
lead the boycott, It's hard to know what would have
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happened if he didn't happen to be in the same place.
I think that that's one of the aspects of department
of the King's life that I think most people don't understand,
is that the some degree he was in the right
place at the right time, that we wouldn't be talking
about Martin Luther King if he had gone to Mobile, Alabama,
lather in Montgomery, Alabama for his first church. Sometimes when
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we're talking about someone great in history who created something,
discovered something, who there were other people percolating around at
the same time who might have been the one. But
for were there other people who might have been the
Martin Luther King if it wasn't him, Yes, definitely, the
fun degree ROSA. Parks had been a man and then
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a prominent person in the community actually had become the leader,
you know. But I think that he himself had some
doubts about whether he should put himself forward when he
was unexpectedly selected to lead the boycott movement. He had
just declined an offer to become an officer, maybe the
president of the local in double a c P chapter.
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So he probably felt that, you know, this is his
first church, maybe I should spend a few years kind
of getting used to being a minister. And also he
do the dangers of becoming a civil rights leader. What
in his past do you think would have prepared him
or enabled him to take on that risk. He himself
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said I'm not going to live past forty, and indeed
he did not, but he clearly did understand the dangers,
and many men might have said I can't do this
or just steered away. I think that his father gave
him a role model of someone who outspoken even when
it involved risk. His father leads on March back in
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the nineteen thirties. He was probably taking as much of
a risk as as Martin is going to take later on.
So I think he saw his father as a role
model in this. And I think he also just had
a deep religious faith. Whenever he had doubts, which he
did have many times during the Montgomery a little bit
of should I have done this, you know, especially when
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it leads to the bombing of his home, when his
wife and newborn baby are in the home. These are
things that calls doubt for anyone, absolutely, and the threats
that he received constantly. He talks about the crisis that
he faced one evening when he receives a particularly threatening
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called threatening nut like himself, but his his wife and daughter.
He recalls that as time when he thought, do I
have the strength to face up to this and to
carry on despite these threats? Basically his deep faith that
God is with him in the struggle that allows him
to carry on? And did Coretta feel the same way?
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Did she also feel supported by her faith in terms
of supporting him doing these things? Yes, yes, I think so.
There's a moment a couple of months into the boycott
and both his father and Kretta's father, this is after
they've been threatened house bombing, and both of their fathers
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come and try to persuade them to leave, especially Coretta,
to leave and take the baby and not be in
Montgomery anymore. And they both say, now we're going to stay.
We're going to come through this. But there is that
effort on the part of Daddy King and her father
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to say, you need to think of your daughter, you
need to take care of yourselves. How much was ambition
for him a driver in terms of need to not
turn back and push forward. I think he wanted to
be a great minister. I don't think that his ambition
from the beginning was to become a great civil rights leader.
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I think that that is something that he grew into.
And again, some of that is happens then, some of
it is things that he could not have predicted. First
of all, he could not have predicted that the Dontgomery
bus boycott was going to succeed. That's what thrust him
into the national livelight. If you go back after the
success of the Montgomery bus boycott, which could not have
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been predicted because it really came about not so much
because the local white leaders gave into the boycott itself,
but the Supreme Court intervened and overturned the best segregation statute.
That came at a time when Martin thought maybe the
movement wasn't going to succeed because the city leaders were
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issuing an injunction against the boycott. So I think that
only gradually does Martin realized that, yes, I am a leader.
I didn't choose this. But he has a number of
talents that make him a very effective leader, in particularly
the fact that he's articulate and can articulate the goals
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of a little bit. I think that's what his great
skill was. Did he have religious thoughts that he was
in some way chosen to be the leader. I think
that he always felt that that was more accidental. It
seems that even as he had doubt, there was something
about him and his temperament, his character that he was
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willing to take risks, especially obviously in this instance with
what was on the line. I think after a while
he finds that he doesn't have a choice. To be
a leader, a black leader during the nineteen sixties, especially
in the South, you take a risk. There are leaders
like Vendor Rappers who our staff dated during that time.
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So he understands that death could be around the corner.
He's assaulted even before the Birmingham campaign. He has a
stabbing incident in New York where a woman comes up
and stabs him in the chest, and that might have
been the end of him. He has another moment in
Birmingham or he's there giving a talk and a Nazi
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who is sitting in the audience comes up and assaults him.
That person could have had a gun and he would
have been dead. So he has a number of incidents
that remind him of his own mortality. I remember talking
with Andrew Young, and he ventured that Marten had a
scar on his chest from the stabbing in and every
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morning when he dressed, he would see that scar around
his chest, and that was a constant reminder of his
mortality and how close he had come to being killed.
Let's take a quick break here, we'll be right back.
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In nineteen sixty three, six large civil rights organizations came
together to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
In the end, between two hundred and three hundred thousand
people of various races and backgrounds attended the march. The
most well known moment by far is Dr King's famous
I have a dream speech. My poor little children one
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day live in a nation where they will not be
judged by the colored mass skin, but by the content
of that character. I have a plan. He is making strides.
He meets with the President, he rallies larger and larger
numbers of people to him. So at the same time
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these obviously dane wors things are happening, these frightening things
are happening, he sees himself making some progress. I think
his greatest fear was not of death, because I think
he had to come to terms with that. I mean,
it was certainly a fear, But I think as great
as fear was failure when he becomes a leader. Every
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time he puts his leadership on the line, you know,
like he does in Albany, Georgia, or Birmingham, each of
those occasions the boom that can fail. Towards the end
of the Montgomery bus boycount, he goes to court thinking
that in the courtroom he's going to find out that
the city leaders in Montgomery are going to issue an
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injunction manning the bus boycott, so he thinks it might
be over. But instead he gets the message that the
Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the boycott. After
leaving the jail in Birmingham, many of his staff say
that the movement is likely to fail because he had
donned the jail written a letter from Birmingham jail. But
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when he comes out of jail, the situation in Birmingham
and not changed very much. There was no indication that
the city leaders of Birmingham were going to get into
the demands of the po So there were many instances
where he felt and rightfully so on the edge of
success or failure. But things went well, yeah, sometimes for
reasons that couldn't have predicted, like the children's marches that
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happened after he came out of jail. It was really
the teenagers who went to jail who turned the tide
in Birmingham, and no one could have predict that. And
throughout all this Coretta supports him. She's raising his children. Obviously,
he has to travel a lot, he's moving around. He
is certainly an admirable father, but she's the present mother.
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There's been long discussion over fidelity and Martin Luther King Jr.
And clearly he stayed married for his life. It's described
as sometimes tumultuous, but certainly a loving marriage. But he's
not always faithful. How do we understand that in the
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context of this man. The way I understand it is
that a lot of great people are not perfect people.
If we have the qualification that you cannot show greatness
in one area of life while you are less than
admirable in another area of life, that we would eliminate
a lot of people who become wonderful presidents and leaders
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in varieties of areas of life. Simply because someone is
a minister doesn't necessarily mean that they always live up
to their own expectations. And I think that that really
gets to the heart of Martin and Corretta. I think
that throughout their marriage they loved each other, drawn to
each other because of their common interests in changing the
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world for the better, their common interests in their children.
But there were a lot of streams, And particularly when
you're of a husband who is traveling throughout the country
after the success with the Montgomery and Busboy Acount Martin,
he goes to be invited everywhere. There are months in
the early nineteen sixties for he might be away from
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home more than he's at home, and he's goes to
places where there's admiring crowds waiting for him, that tempatients
are always there. When I look at his own reflections
on this, he unders parents that there are examples at
the Bible, and he cites them as King David and
and one of the things that I think is true
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is that he does feel as he's reaching the end
of his life and he has these visionary goals of
eliminating poverty, eliminating war, as well as eliminating racial discrimination.
That maybe he won't be able to succeed because he
is a flawed leader. And he gives that wonderful sermon
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Unfulfilled Dreams, where he talks about that and just says,
you know, look, all I can say is I tried
to be a good man and hopes that God will understand.
You don't need to draw up this morning saying that
mardin Luther King is a said don't know I want
you to know this morning, but I'm sure. But a
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lot of leaders who people surround and you know, admire,
develop a hubris over time, you know, the experience of
being the leader, and aren't able to even to themselves
acknowledge their flaws. It sounds as though you're saying he
was aware and he had remorse for the things that
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he might have done that were essentially, in his own mind,
not moral, and perhaps that made him a better leader
in many ways. I've never encountered a saint, at least
that I know of, and I think that as I
studied people in the past, what interests me is that
they are complex individuals. What makes them interesting is that complexity.
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If you have someone who is always living the perfect life,
they might be a wonderful person, but not very interesting
to a historian who looks at people who are in
very many ways complex individuals, who do things that are good,
things that are not so good, and and you just
take all of that together and you don't try to
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make them into, say, like people. Well, there's no question
that our world has been changed forever by Martin Luther
King and by so many other people who are also
complex individuals. And we focus on him because he's the
most famous, but he's not really, in some respects that
much different from many other people who who also played
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important roles during this period of change. In nineteen sixty eight,
doctor King was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting the black sanitation
workers while they were on strike for higher wages and
better treatment. At a rally for the workers, King gave
his I have been to the Mountaintop speech. In it,
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King references bomb threats made recently against him and says, quote,
and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get
there with you, but I want you to know tonight
that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.
So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. And
to night, where about fid Mona Sell. The very next day,
(30:45):
Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated while standing on
his motel's second story balcony. Do you have thoughts as
a historian had he not been assassinated the ways in
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which he might have changed things? Further? Were there things
on the horizon that it looked like he might impact
had he lived a longer life. Oh, of course, yeah,
I think that he had just started his life. When
you compare him to someone like Gandhi at the age
of thirty nine, Gandhi had done nothing early in India.
He had achieved some change in South Africa, but all
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the things that we think of in terms of Gandhi's accomplishments,
they were still in the future when he was building.
From Martin Luther King to be assassinated at what is
really an early age, what I would see is that, yeah,
he had a lot he would like to have accomplished.
One of the ironies is that because his visionary goals
(31:50):
were so visionary, there would be no Martin Luther King
holiday if Martin Luther King had lived, because he would
have been seen as someone trying to chief things that
were unachievable in eliminating poverty, as we said, eliminating war.
Do you think he could have really on his own
stop the war in Vietnam and stopped all the wars
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since then? He was trying to do something very radical.
Just think of of the poor People's campaign. I described
it to by students in terms that they would understand
and said, I badget and occupy movement. Some of them
remember the occupied openses ten years ago. Imagine that a
leader today said I'm going to go and occupy the
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National Mall of the United States until Congress passes anti
property legislation. You know, just think of how radical that
would be, how audacious that would be. So I think
that Martin ledder King, if he had lived, he would
have been seen as this radical leader. And you don't
make radical leaders into national holidays. So I think that
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what happened was that because he was assassinated before that
saw the end of what he was doing in terms
of of People's campaign, that it was then impossible to say,
let's honor this person because he was associated with this
great civil rights movement, right and that is the place
that he made impact, and that is the place where
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we saw incredible change following his time, the Civil Rights
Act of nineteen sixty four, the Civil Rights Act of
vanteen sixty five, or romentous changes in the history of
the United States, perhaps as important as the amendments to
the Constitution. So we make Martin Luther King in national
holiday because he is the person most associated with that
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civil rights revolution. You know, you can't choose a better
person for that. For him, that was simply part of
his vision, part of what he wanted to accomplish with
his life. But our national psyche, I guess what you're
saying is the combination of his success in this in
this particular arena and his sudden death, which essentially martyred him,
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made us see him in a certain light. Yeah, I
noticed that on Martin Luther King Holiday there's a tendency
to replay the I Have a Dream speech, but not
his speech attacking the war in Viet Tom because that's
still controversial on what he says in that speech. We
have destroyed that to most cherished institution, the family and
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the village. It is our national psychology that has essentially
in some ways immortalized him further. Well, that wraps things
up for this episode. A huge thanks to Dr Claiborne Carson.
For more on mlk's life and work, check out his
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edited volumes of the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Also,
if you're interested in more information about the people we
discussed in this series, you can check out my book
The Power of Different and make sure to follow me
on Twitter at Dr Gale Salts or at person Oology
m D to follow along with all the latest news
about the show. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio.
(35:13):
The executive producers are Dr Gayl Saltz and Tyler Clang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The Associate producer is
Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Martin Luther
King Jr. Was an activist minister and the most visible
(00:21):
leader in the civil rights movement from nineteen fifty five
until his death in nineteen sixty eight. He advanced civil
rights through non violence and civil disobedience, inspired by his
Christian beliefs and the non violent activism of Mahatma Gandhi.
(00:43):
Welcome to Personology. I'm Dr Gail Saltz, and my guest
today is claymorn Carson, director of the Martin Luther King
Junior Research and Education Institute, and he's the Martin Luther
King Junior Centennial Professor in the History Department at Stanford University.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Was born in nine in
(01:06):
Atlanta to Alberta and Martin Luther King. King Sr. Had
taken over the ministry of Ebenezer Baptist Church from Alberta's father,
and the church became the very center of their lives.
The young Martin Luther had many influences in his upbringing,
but none more central than his father. Be bor the
(01:32):
name of his father, His father saw him as the
firstborn son who was going to become a preacher himself.
You know, I think that that was kind of decided
at an early age, and Martin was was okay with that.
Were there things in his relationship with his father that
would foreshadow the direction that he would ultimately take. His
(01:54):
father is a noble example. His father was someone who
had come from poverty to work himself into a role
of being one of the leading ministers in Atlanta. He
had struggled to get through more House College because he
had not had very much preparation in his childhood for
going to college, but he had managed to do that,
(02:15):
and he had managed to marry the daughter of one
of the leading ministers of Atlanta. For his son, he
was the role model for what a minister could be.
Someone who was very concerned about the everyday lives of
people in his congregation, someone who was outspoken on social issues.
His father was a civil rights campaigner himself who actually
(02:38):
led protests in Atlanta, and his grandfather had been a
civil rights leader the local chapter of the n double
a CP in Atlanta. This really was his history, and
it was expected that as someone who was essentially given
more than his father, he could perhaps do more even
than his father. I think so I think he felt
(03:00):
he had a very privileged childhood. Unlike his father and grandfather,
who had grown up in poverty. He had grown up
as the son of a affluent minister in Atlanta, and
he had a sense that he had a gift of
leadership that he could give back to the black community
and help just as his father. He saw his father
(03:21):
as as someone who was always trying to work for
the benefit of the black community. And what was his
relationship like with his mother, How would you describe that.
I think he saw his his mother as someone was
working behind the scenes. Obviously his father was publicly prominent,
but he described his mother as someone who was always
taking care of everything, and he kind of developed that
(03:44):
as a role model for what a wife should be,
someone who stays home, takes care of the kids, but
also has a lot of talents that can be valuable
in the church, that more in the background. Being working
with the choir is something that has done. You don't
get a lot of public praise for that, but you
(04:06):
do it because it helps the church as the whole.
So I think he grew up kind of understanding the
gender roles. You know that his mother was behind the scenes,
taking care of all the necessities, while his father was
the person who was the public presence of the family.
Can you talk about personality traits that may have been
(04:27):
evident from an early age. Was he a loquacious kid?
Was he a competitive kid? He was a good speaker,
He won oratory contest as a young boy. He was
someone who was concerned about social issues, outspoken. One of
the things he did is he wrote a letter to
the editor of the leading newspaper in Atlanta as a
(04:48):
fifteen year old, protistic about the conditions that black people faced,
and it got published, and that was the first publication
by Martin nut the King. So he was he was
doing number of things that indicated that he had the
potential for leadership. He did go through a crisis in
the sense of his religious faith. He did. He was
done a fundamentalist like his father. He questioned the Bible.
(05:13):
He questioned many of the stories in the Bible. And
it was only when he took the course by George
Kelsey as professor at Morehouse. That was the only course
he got an a in. But it was also the
course where he learned to reconcile some of his doubts.
What Kelsey would call the deeper truths of the of
the Bible. Some of the stories might be not literally true,
(05:35):
but they conveyed oral truths, and that those were more
important than whether Jonah was really swallowed by the whale,
and that many of the stories that are in the Bible.
So was that a departure from his father's ideology, then yes,
I think he saw his father as more of a fundamentalist,
that the Bible was just the truth, it was the
(05:56):
word of God, it was not to be questioned. But
I think Martin was someone who questioned things and that
actually prepared him for his ministry. Martin graduated more house
In at the age of nineteen was a b a.
In sociology. He then went on to Crozer Theological Seminary
(06:17):
to continue his education. Closure with Theological Seminary was one
of the more advanced of What I mean by that
is it was more than simply training people to be ministers.
It was training then to answer these theological questions. They
had to understand that the Bible was a historical document
(06:38):
that was not all written at the same time, and
it was important to distinguish the different books of the Bible.
Some of them were contradicted one another. So all of
these things were part of the deeper study of the
Bible that he did during his time at Crozier, and
it was there also that he he really developed it
(06:59):
into actual gifts. He was not a gifted student as
an undergraduate, but once he got to Crozier, he realized
that his mind really was drawn to theological questions and
he wanted to know what was the role of the
modern minister. How can ministry actually help the people in
terms of their everyday problems. One of the papers that
(07:21):
he writes when he's at Closure, he says that as
a minister he will deal with problems like unemployment, slums,
and economic insecurity. I think he's still maybe nineteen or
twenty years old when he writes that, so he's he's
already laid out his life plan, that he's not simply
going to be preaching to his congregation. He's going to
(07:43):
be preaching a gospel. He called it the social gospel
that will help them deal with their everyday problems. Was
that a departure from how one went about being a minister?
That that was not the norm? I think it was
unusual in the sense that within the Baptist Church, most
(08:04):
ministers felt that their job was simply to deal with salvation,
to emphasize the need for belief. His dolosion was that, yes,
you need to do that, but you need to do
bore than that. You need to address the social issues
that your congregation is dealing with. Wasn't enough to simply
save their souls. You needed to make the world in
(08:27):
which they lived something where they would be able to
provide for their families and deal with the problems that
he thought were important, you know, especially these economic issues
of poverty. He turned Christianity into means of making the
society better. That's something that doesn't happen in those churches,
(08:48):
at least at that time. Most ministers were content to
simply tell the biblical stories and draw the moral lessons
from them, and not see the need to involved themselves
in issues like civil rights. Let's take a quick break here,
we'll be right back. After King graduated from Crozer Theological
(09:17):
Seminary in ninette, he again decided to continue his education,
this time working on his doctorate at Boston University. And
he was a very social affable. It seems that he,
even in those early years, got along well with people had,
(09:39):
I guess I would say a real charisma. People were
already drawn to him. People who knew him when he
was going to Dustin University sometimes referred to him as
the prince. You know. He he was a person who, well,
many students struggle economically while they're going through school. He
had a new car when he came to Boston. He
(09:59):
had a an apartment paid for by his father. He
was popular among both men and women. He was socially
engaging person, someone who was well respected by those around him.
So he had that charisma that you see later in
his life. And he was drawn to Coretta Scott, two
years older than him, a singer, musically talented, somebody who
(10:24):
perhaps was less interested in being behind him and only
a support and not having any accolades of her own.
When he first called her in Boston in nine two,
she wasn't that interested in going out with him. She
was training to have a career in music, and the
(10:44):
last things she wanted to do was become a minister's wife,
kind of raising the kids and staying in the background.
That she wanted to have her own career. She was reluctant,
but after they went out a few times she began
to be drawn to him. She saw his talent and
his charm and was I think convinced that maybe she
(11:08):
could achieve some of her life goals by being his wife.
That took a while. Their courtship was difficult. If you
look back at the letters that he wrote to her,
you can see that they went through some difficult times,
especially when he asked her to come to Atlanta and
meet his parents. She wasn't quite ready to do that.
(11:29):
She knew how strong an influence Daddy King was on
his son, so they fought over that, and you can
see that there was a chance that the relations should
kind of broken up over that. She knew what she
was giving up, and she had studied very hard. And
one of the things that happened even after they became
(11:50):
engaged to each other that she insisted that she complete
her education at the New England Conservatory of Music, and
even after their marriage, as she was the one who
organized what she called freedom concerts that would raise money
for the movement, and during that time she was also
(12:11):
a strong pacifist. She was affiliated with an organization called
the Women's International Strike for Peace, so she had her
own political involvement. She had been a member of the
Progressive Party during the ninet Was she influenced by him
in that way? I mean, was that something that she
(12:31):
came to him with that they happened to agree on.
I think it was more the opposite is that she
was the one who was the bar politically engaged when
they met. Martin had never been involved in the protest,
and she was the first of all just older. She
do black political leaders like Paul Robeson. She had signed
a concert with him, so she knew these the older
(12:54):
generation and admired this older generation and black activists. There's
a wonderful sure I have of her at the Progressive
Party convention in so at a time when when Martin
is still a teenager, she's already at a national political convention.
And later on in the sixties she's the one and
(13:15):
speaks out against the Laar in Vietnam before Martin does so.
Is she the major influence for him in terms of
the aspect of his career that had to do with
pacivism and using non violent methods to make change. I
think what I would see is that they both influenced
(13:35):
each other. That we shouldn't see her as simply following
him and not the other way around either. I think
both had strong ideas. His came out of his religious faith,
hers came out of her political activism. She went to
a very liberal arts school in Antioch. Many of the
students were I guess what you would call leftists politically engaged,
(14:00):
and he had never had an opportunity to do that
because his education was more in the South at more House,
and he was exposed to ideas. I remember once she
told me, said I met Martin. He had a lot
of wonderful, really interesting ideas, but he had never really
done very much. So I think that if he had
(14:20):
just not had the opportunity to develop politically because of
his own background, and because when they met he was
fairly old enough to vote. After school, Martin and Coretta
moved back to Coretta's home state of Alabama, deciding Montgomery
was the best place to start their family. They both
(14:41):
wanted to return to the South. She had grown up
in rural Alabama, he of course, in Atlanta, Georgia, and
they had both agreed that they would try to move
back to the South and bring their progressive ideas into
that region and try to be part of the movement
for change. So he becomes a minister of Dexter a
New Baptist Church right and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church had
(15:04):
been a place where many of the politically active black
residents of God bring that was that was their church,
and the previous minister, Burdon Johns, had been a politically
active minister. So that's one of the reasons why he
chose that church, as he helped these were people who
would be receptive to his kind of theology. He didn't know,
(15:27):
of course, that that there was going to be a
bus boycott movement there. That was more an accident of
history that he was in the same place as Rosa
Parks at that point he had to make a decision
about whether he was going to take a role as
a civil rights leader in terms of the best boycott.
In December of Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to
(15:51):
follow a bus driver's order to move to a seat
in the back of the bus to accommodate a white passenger.
The local chapter of the n Double A c P
had to waiting for a test case like this challenge
the issue of bus segregation. Then Double A CP met
at Dr King's church, and King was eventually elected to
lead the boycott, It's hard to know what would have
(16:13):
happened if he didn't happen to be in the same place.
I think that that's one of the aspects of department
of the King's life that I think most people don't understand,
is that the some degree he was in the right
place at the right time, that we wouldn't be talking
about Martin Luther King if he had gone to Mobile, Alabama,
lather in Montgomery, Alabama for his first church. Sometimes when
(16:36):
we're talking about someone great in history who created something,
discovered something, who there were other people percolating around at
the same time who might have been the one. But
for were there other people who might have been the
Martin Luther King if it wasn't him, Yes, definitely, the
fun degree ROSA. Parks had been a man and then
(16:57):
a prominent person in the community actually had become the leader,
you know. But I think that he himself had some
doubts about whether he should put himself forward when he
was unexpectedly selected to lead the boycott movement. He had
just declined an offer to become an officer, maybe the
president of the local in double a c P chapter.
(17:20):
So he probably felt that, you know, this is his
first church, maybe I should spend a few years kind
of getting used to being a minister. And also he
do the dangers of becoming a civil rights leader. What
in his past do you think would have prepared him
or enabled him to take on that risk. He himself
(17:42):
said I'm not going to live past forty, and indeed
he did not, but he clearly did understand the dangers,
and many men might have said I can't do this
or just steered away. I think that his father gave
him a role model of someone who outspoken even when
it involved risk. His father leads on March back in
(18:05):
the nineteen thirties. He was probably taking as much of
a risk as as Martin is going to take later on.
So I think he saw his father as a role
model in this. And I think he also just had
a deep religious faith. Whenever he had doubts, which he
did have many times during the Montgomery a little bit
of should I have done this, you know, especially when
(18:26):
it leads to the bombing of his home, when his
wife and newborn baby are in the home. These are
things that calls doubt for anyone, absolutely, and the threats
that he received constantly. He talks about the crisis that
he faced one evening when he receives a particularly threatening
(18:48):
called threatening nut like himself, but his his wife and daughter.
He recalls that as time when he thought, do I
have the strength to face up to this and to
carry on despite these threats? Basically his deep faith that
God is with him in the struggle that allows him
to carry on? And did Coretta feel the same way?
(19:09):
Did she also feel supported by her faith in terms
of supporting him doing these things? Yes, yes, I think so.
There's a moment a couple of months into the boycott
and both his father and Kretta's father, this is after
they've been threatened house bombing, and both of their fathers
(19:32):
come and try to persuade them to leave, especially Coretta,
to leave and take the baby and not be in
Montgomery anymore. And they both say, now we're going to stay.
We're going to come through this. But there is that
effort on the part of Daddy King and her father
(19:53):
to say, you need to think of your daughter, you
need to take care of yourselves. How much was ambition
for him a driver in terms of need to not
turn back and push forward. I think he wanted to
be a great minister. I don't think that his ambition
from the beginning was to become a great civil rights leader.
(20:14):
I think that that is something that he grew into.
And again, some of that is happens then, some of
it is things that he could not have predicted. First
of all, he could not have predicted that the Dontgomery
bus boycott was going to succeed. That's what thrust him
into the national livelight. If you go back after the
success of the Montgomery bus boycott, which could not have
(20:36):
been predicted because it really came about not so much
because the local white leaders gave into the boycott itself,
but the Supreme Court intervened and overturned the best segregation statute.
That came at a time when Martin thought maybe the
movement wasn't going to succeed because the city leaders were
(20:57):
issuing an injunction against the boycott. So I think that
only gradually does Martin realized that, yes, I am a leader.
I didn't choose this. But he has a number of
talents that make him a very effective leader, in particularly
the fact that he's articulate and can articulate the goals
(21:18):
of a little bit. I think that's what his great
skill was. Did he have religious thoughts that he was
in some way chosen to be the leader. I think
that he always felt that that was more accidental. It
seems that even as he had doubt, there was something
about him and his temperament, his character that he was
(21:40):
willing to take risks, especially obviously in this instance with
what was on the line. I think after a while
he finds that he doesn't have a choice. To be
a leader, a black leader during the nineteen sixties, especially
in the South, you take a risk. There are leaders
like Vendor Rappers who our staff dated during that time.
(22:01):
So he understands that death could be around the corner.
He's assaulted even before the Birmingham campaign. He has a
stabbing incident in New York where a woman comes up
and stabs him in the chest, and that might have
been the end of him. He has another moment in
Birmingham or he's there giving a talk and a Nazi
(22:24):
who is sitting in the audience comes up and assaults him.
That person could have had a gun and he would
have been dead. So he has a number of incidents
that remind him of his own mortality. I remember talking
with Andrew Young, and he ventured that Marten had a
scar on his chest from the stabbing in and every
(22:46):
morning when he dressed, he would see that scar around
his chest, and that was a constant reminder of his
mortality and how close he had come to being killed.
Let's take a quick break here, we'll be right back.
(23:09):
In nineteen sixty three, six large civil rights organizations came
together to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
In the end, between two hundred and three hundred thousand
people of various races and backgrounds attended the march. The
most well known moment by far is Dr King's famous
I have a dream speech. My poor little children one
(23:37):
day live in a nation where they will not be
judged by the colored mass skin, but by the content
of that character. I have a plan. He is making strides.
He meets with the President, he rallies larger and larger
numbers of people to him. So at the same time
(23:58):
these obviously dane wors things are happening, these frightening things
are happening, he sees himself making some progress. I think
his greatest fear was not of death, because I think
he had to come to terms with that. I mean,
it was certainly a fear, But I think as great
as fear was failure when he becomes a leader. Every
(24:19):
time he puts his leadership on the line, you know,
like he does in Albany, Georgia, or Birmingham, each of
those occasions the boom that can fail. Towards the end
of the Montgomery bus boycount, he goes to court thinking
that in the courtroom he's going to find out that
the city leaders in Montgomery are going to issue an
(24:40):
injunction manning the bus boycott, so he thinks it might
be over. But instead he gets the message that the
Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the boycott. After
leaving the jail in Birmingham, many of his staff say
that the movement is likely to fail because he had
donned the jail written a letter from Birmingham jail. But
(25:01):
when he comes out of jail, the situation in Birmingham
and not changed very much. There was no indication that
the city leaders of Birmingham were going to get into
the demands of the po So there were many instances
where he felt and rightfully so on the edge of
success or failure. But things went well, yeah, sometimes for
reasons that couldn't have predicted, like the children's marches that
(25:25):
happened after he came out of jail. It was really
the teenagers who went to jail who turned the tide
in Birmingham, and no one could have predict that. And
throughout all this Coretta supports him. She's raising his children. Obviously,
he has to travel a lot, he's moving around. He
is certainly an admirable father, but she's the present mother.
(25:49):
There's been long discussion over fidelity and Martin Luther King Jr.
And clearly he stayed married for his life. It's described
as sometimes tumultuous, but certainly a loving marriage. But he's
not always faithful. How do we understand that in the
(26:09):
context of this man. The way I understand it is
that a lot of great people are not perfect people.
If we have the qualification that you cannot show greatness
in one area of life while you are less than
admirable in another area of life, that we would eliminate
a lot of people who become wonderful presidents and leaders
(26:30):
in varieties of areas of life. Simply because someone is
a minister doesn't necessarily mean that they always live up
to their own expectations. And I think that that really
gets to the heart of Martin and Corretta. I think
that throughout their marriage they loved each other, drawn to
each other because of their common interests in changing the
(26:53):
world for the better, their common interests in their children.
But there were a lot of streams, And particularly when
you're of a husband who is traveling throughout the country
after the success with the Montgomery and Busboy Acount Martin,
he goes to be invited everywhere. There are months in
the early nineteen sixties for he might be away from
(27:14):
home more than he's at home, and he's goes to
places where there's admiring crowds waiting for him, that tempatients
are always there. When I look at his own reflections
on this, he unders parents that there are examples at
the Bible, and he cites them as King David and
and one of the things that I think is true
(27:35):
is that he does feel as he's reaching the end
of his life and he has these visionary goals of
eliminating poverty, eliminating war, as well as eliminating racial discrimination.
That maybe he won't be able to succeed because he
is a flawed leader. And he gives that wonderful sermon
(27:56):
Unfulfilled Dreams, where he talks about that and just says,
you know, look, all I can say is I tried
to be a good man and hopes that God will understand.
You don't need to draw up this morning saying that
mardin Luther King is a said don't know I want
you to know this morning, but I'm sure. But a
(28:23):
lot of leaders who people surround and you know, admire,
develop a hubris over time, you know, the experience of
being the leader, and aren't able to even to themselves
acknowledge their flaws. It sounds as though you're saying he
was aware and he had remorse for the things that
(28:44):
he might have done that were essentially, in his own mind,
not moral, and perhaps that made him a better leader
in many ways. I've never encountered a saint, at least
that I know of, and I think that as I
studied people in the past, what interests me is that
they are complex individuals. What makes them interesting is that complexity.
(29:06):
If you have someone who is always living the perfect life,
they might be a wonderful person, but not very interesting
to a historian who looks at people who are in
very many ways complex individuals, who do things that are good,
things that are not so good, and and you just
take all of that together and you don't try to
(29:28):
make them into, say, like people. Well, there's no question
that our world has been changed forever by Martin Luther
King and by so many other people who are also
complex individuals. And we focus on him because he's the
most famous, but he's not really, in some respects that
much different from many other people who who also played
(29:52):
important roles during this period of change. In nineteen sixty eight,
doctor King was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting the black sanitation
workers while they were on strike for higher wages and
better treatment. At a rally for the workers, King gave
his I have been to the Mountaintop speech. In it,
(30:15):
King references bomb threats made recently against him and says, quote,
and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get
there with you, but I want you to know tonight
that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.
So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. And
to night, where about fid Mona Sell. The very next day,
(30:45):
Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated while standing on
his motel's second story balcony. Do you have thoughts as
a historian had he not been assassinated the ways in
(31:07):
which he might have changed things? Further? Were there things
on the horizon that it looked like he might impact
had he lived a longer life. Oh, of course, yeah,
I think that he had just started his life. When
you compare him to someone like Gandhi at the age
of thirty nine, Gandhi had done nothing early in India.
He had achieved some change in South Africa, but all
(31:30):
the things that we think of in terms of Gandhi's accomplishments,
they were still in the future when he was building.
From Martin Luther King to be assassinated at what is
really an early age, what I would see is that, yeah,
he had a lot he would like to have accomplished.
One of the ironies is that because his visionary goals
(31:50):
were so visionary, there would be no Martin Luther King
holiday if Martin Luther King had lived, because he would
have been seen as someone trying to chief things that
were unachievable in eliminating poverty, as we said, eliminating war.
Do you think he could have really on his own
stop the war in Vietnam and stopped all the wars
(32:10):
since then? He was trying to do something very radical.
Just think of of the poor People's campaign. I described
it to by students in terms that they would understand
and said, I badget and occupy movement. Some of them
remember the occupied openses ten years ago. Imagine that a
leader today said I'm going to go and occupy the
(32:31):
National Mall of the United States until Congress passes anti
property legislation. You know, just think of how radical that
would be, how audacious that would be. So I think
that Martin ledder King, if he had lived, he would
have been seen as this radical leader. And you don't
make radical leaders into national holidays. So I think that
(32:51):
what happened was that because he was assassinated before that
saw the end of what he was doing in terms
of of People's campaign, that it was then impossible to say,
let's honor this person because he was associated with this
great civil rights movement, right and that is the place
that he made impact, and that is the place where
(33:13):
we saw incredible change following his time, the Civil Rights
Act of nineteen sixty four, the Civil Rights Act of
vanteen sixty five, or romentous changes in the history of
the United States, perhaps as important as the amendments to
the Constitution. So we make Martin Luther King in national
holiday because he is the person most associated with that
(33:37):
civil rights revolution. You know, you can't choose a better
person for that. For him, that was simply part of
his vision, part of what he wanted to accomplish with
his life. But our national psyche, I guess what you're
saying is the combination of his success in this in
this particular arena and his sudden death, which essentially martyred him,
(33:59):
made us see him in a certain light. Yeah, I
noticed that on Martin Luther King Holiday there's a tendency
to replay the I Have a Dream speech, but not
his speech attacking the war in Viet Tom because that's
still controversial on what he says in that speech. We
have destroyed that to most cherished institution, the family and
(34:24):
the village. It is our national psychology that has essentially
in some ways immortalized him further. Well, that wraps things
up for this episode. A huge thanks to Dr Claiborne Carson.
For more on mlk's life and work, check out his
(34:46):
edited volumes of the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Also,
if you're interested in more information about the people we
discussed in this series, you can check out my book
The Power of Different and make sure to follow me
on Twitter at Dr Gale Salts or at person Oology
m D to follow along with all the latest news
about the show. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio.
(35:13):
The executive producers are Dr Gayl Saltz and Tyler Clang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The Associate producer is
Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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