On August 28th, 1963 Clayborne Carson was a 19 year-old attending his first civil rights demonstration. That demonstration was the historic March on Washington, and what he remembers most about that day isn’t Dr. King’s historic speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but the people he met.

Hitchhiking back home to Los Alamos, New Mexico, Carson couldn’t have known that 22 years later Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, would ask him to edit her husband’s papers.

Today Dr. Clayborne Carson is Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of History and Ronnie Lott Founding Director of the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1975.

 

As someone whose life and research are intertwined with the work and legacy of Dr. King, Dr. Carson is uniquely qualified to explain the importance of King’s leadership and his place within the greater struggle for justice in the US and abroad. We are thus honored to have Dr. Carson as our guest on The Road to Now as we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Links:
-Clayborne Carson’s bio
-Clayborne Carson on twitter
-Clayborne Carson, Martin’s Dream: My Journey and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). 
-The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University