In King's own words: New
book explores courtship, marriage
"My life without you
is like a year without a spring time which comes to give
illumination and heat to the atmosphere saturated by the
dark cold breeze of winter."
With those words, the
23-year-old Baptist minister launched a love note to his
intended. But in the following paragraph, the romantic
overture shifted to a political discussion, prompted by a
book that Coretta Scott had sent to Martin Luther King
Jr., then a Boston University graduate student.
"By the way (to turn
to something more intellectual) I have just completed
Bellamy's Looking Backward. . . . I imagine you
already know that I am much more socialistic in my
economic theory than capitalistic."
Excerpts of that 1952
letter from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Corretta
Scott, the aspiring mezzo-soprano concert artist he had
met only six months earlier, will be published for the
first time in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King
Jr. Due out in November from Time Warner Books, the
book is edited by Clayborne Carson, professor of history
and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project
at Stanford.
"I thought it was
very revealing about the early relationship between them,
particularly about how their relationship was always this
mixture of personal and political," Carson says
about the letter.
Portion
of a letter written by Martin Luther King Jr.
©
Estate of Martin Luther King Jr.
"People tend to see
Coretta Scott King in relation to her husband, as
somebody who was completely in the background, but she
was just as politically engaged as Martin was. When you
look at the pictures of the major protests of the 1950s
and '60s, she's right there by his side, leading the
marches."
As a student at Antioch
College, Coretta Scott was active in the peace movement
and attended the 1948 Progressive Party convention.
"She was a strong
Henry Wallace supporter at a time when that was not a
typical thing for college students to be involved
in," Carson adds. "Indeed, she was more
politically active at the time they met than Martin
was."
The Autobiography of
Martin Luther King Jr. is the latest product of
Carson's long-term effort to assemble and publish King's
most significant papers. He began his monumental work on
King in 1985, when Coretta Scott King telephoned him from
Atlanta on a January evening to ask if he would consider
heading up the Papers Project. Since then, he has edited
three volumes of King's correspondence, sermons, speeches
and published writings, from his early life through the
1956 Montgomery boycotts. The fourth of 14 projected
volumes, which covers events in 1957 and 1958, is due out
next year.
King's papers prior to
1962 are housed at Boston University, but the remainder
of his lifework is at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center
for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and also
scattered among 200 archives worldwide. Carson has now
photocopied all of the documents that relate to King's
public life and also has had unprecedented access to his
widow's personal papers.
"There's not a lot
that Martin wrote about his relationship with Coretta,
but I knew I needed to have something which would convey
the depth of the relationship," Carson says.
"That's why I went to her and urged her to allow me
to use one of his early letters to her."
The excerpt of the 1952
letter that will be published next month follows an
earlier note in which King tried to overcome Coretta's
reluctance to stay a few days with the King family in
Atlanta when she returned from Boston to her parents'
home in Alabama.
"They had been
courting for only five or six months, and he wanted to
marry her, but she was holding back," Carson says.
"So in a previous letter he had gotten really angry
at her and threatened to call off the engagement.
"As a result, she
wrote a letter that mollified him, agreeing to go to
Atlanta, and she also sent him the Bellamy book. In the
letter I've included in the book, he is affirming their
relationship, and what you see is a reaffirmation of both
their love and their common political commitment."
In the letter, King tells
Coretta how capitalism has "out-lived its
usefulness," and that "like most human systems
it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting
against." Bellamy's emphasis on evolutionary rather
than revolutionary change, King adds, "is the most
sane and ethical way for social change to take
place."
Carson says he has been
impressed by way in which the letters he wrote to Coretta
reveal King as a multi-faceted individual who could get
angry and who was aware of his own limitations and
vulnerability. The 1952 letter, in particular, gave him
yet another insight into the couple's relationship:
"How many young people in love today would be
sending each other books on Edward Bellamy's ideas about
socialism?"
Carson has been working on
the King autobiography for the past two years, drawing on
interviews, sermons and speeches to tell the story of the
civil rights leader's life in his own words. With two
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of King already in
circulation - David J. Garrow's 1986 Bearing the Cross
and Taylor Branch's 1988 Parting the Waters -
Carson says he had to take a different approach.
"I like the idea of
doing something unique," he says. "There may be
other biographies, but the autobiography has not been
done before, and will never be done again. I became
convinced, after studying King's papers for more than 13
years, that he wrote his autobiography, but that these
autobiographical writings were dispersed among the
several hundred thousand documents that comprise his
papers. I knew that King's papers illuminated his
childhood, his academic experiences and every significant
episode of his public life."
"My task, therefore,
was not to create an autobiography but to assemble King's
dispersed autobiographical writings into a coherent
narrative. My resulting edited work is King's
autobiography in every sense that is, a comprehensive
narrative of his life written by him and enriched by his
reflections about the meaning of his life."
Also included in Carson's
new book is a letter King wrote to his wife in 1960 from
Georgia's Reidsville State Prison. The King Estate has
made the letter available to scholars in the past, but it
has not been published previously.
King writes about being
arrested for a minor traffic violation, and then being
transferred from the DeKalb County jail to the state
prison at 4 a.m. He assures Coretta that "it is
extremely difficult for me to think of being away from
you and my [children] Yoki and Marty for four
months," but adds that "this is the cross that
we must bear for the freedom of our people."
"It's from a crucial
historical episode," Carson says. "When
[Robert] Kennedy intervened on King's behalf, to get his
release, that helped to determine the outcome of the
presidential election in 1960."
In addition to its
historical interest, Carson says King's letter from
prison also adds to the personal portrait he is painting,
as an editor, in the new autobiography.
"What I sensed in the
letter was that combination of the political and
personal, the way in which it conveys the impact of
Martin's action on Coretta, who was pregnant at the time.
The letter demonstrates the mutual involvement of the two
in the civil rights struggle." SR
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