Superhero films often demonstrate the importance of origin stories in showing how people and experiences shaped a given character, Stanford University scholar Lerone A. Martin said.
Martin made the point to illustrate his motivation for writing his newly released book, Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr.
Lerone Martin
“My kids make me watch Marvel movies, and they have helped me understand that every superhero has a backstory, and that you really can’t fully understand the superhero without knowing his or her backstory,” said Martin, professor of religious studies and African American studies and director of Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute.
“And that’s what I think with Dr. King,” he added. “You can’t fully understand him and understand his courage, his commitment and his moral compass without understanding his backstory.”
The idea for the book took shape when Martin became senior editor of the institute’s Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project in 2022, which exposed him to a handful of letters King wrote during his youth.
“I began to encounter things I had not seen before or even heard about or read about Dr. King,” he said. “I started thinking about him as a kid and about his early playmates, and about him as a little boy singing in church and wanting to be a fireman. So, I wanted to take the reader through King’s life from birth all the way up to when he began his ministry.”
Knowing that as a child King loved to read and dance the jitterbug while also struggling in school makes King more relatable to readers who otherwise know him only as a Civil Rights giant, Martin said.
King’s first and pivotal encounter with racism came between the ages of 4 and 6 when the parents of a white friend said the two boys no longer could play together because King was an “N-word,” Martin noted. “He says that is the angriest he had been up to that time in his life. And this is when he says he becomes aware of this thing called racism, and he goes home and tells his mother.”
Her response is one that shaped not only his childhood but his future ministry and Civil Rights work, as well, Martin explained. “She tells him, ‘Never forget that you are somebody, that God loves you, that God created you and that you’re just as good as any other child.’ And King will use that phrase the rest of his life in his sermons and activism.”
A central moment in King’s childhood theological development came when he was 12 and became convinced his grandmother died because he had ditched worship one Sunday morning.
“He was raised in a Baptist church that had a fundamentalist commitment to Scripture, and he truly believed what he heard every Sunday, namely that ‘the wages of sin is death,’” Martin said. “He truly believed God was punishing him for lying, skipping out on church and going downtown to go to a parade.”
But the crisis only deepened when his pastor and father, Martin Luther King Sr., assured him God was not angry with him for missing church and that it had simply been his grandmother’s time to go.
Martin Luther King with siblings
“Martin doesn’t find that very comforting and he actually says it makes him start doubting everything he’s been told,” the author said. “King will say that this begins a period of intense religious doubt to the point where, by the time he’s 13, he starts challenging core Christian beliefs in Sunday school and starts fancying himself as an agnostic.”
It was at Morehouse College, where King graduated in 1948, that the future preacher and Civil Rights advocate began to find his voice and purpose.
The institution’s president, Benjamin Elijah Mays, became King’s lifelong spiritual mentor, while theologian George Kelsey helped convinced King he could address issues of racial and social reform as a minister.
“These two individuals, King says, really shaped for him the idea that a minister can be smart, intelligent, respectable and aware of modern science and still preach the gospel,” Martin said.
It also was at Morehouse where King first realized he had received a sub-par education in the segregated school system in Atlanta, Martin added. “His curiosity, his vocabulary, the way he thought and processed information was really sharp, but his ability to articulate himself was not where it needed to be, and as a result he started to work on his grammatical and writing skills.”
Martin Luther King with fellow graduates at Morehouse.
The longest chapter in the book is devoted to the transformative influence of Coretta Scott, the future wife King met on a blind date in February 1952 while studying for his doctorate at Boston University.
“It’s often overlooked that she was the more experienced activist of the two. She had participated in protests, she had gone to political conventions, she was far ahead of him when it came to thinking about peace and nonviolence and protest.”
“During their first conversation, they started talking about Jim Crow and how they wanted to change America, how they wanted to address poverty, how they hoped their lives would have a meaning beyond themselves. And she says during that conversation he immediately became handsome to her because she had never heard another minister talk like that.”
Young King was written to show how developed his conscience and convictions were in the context of family, community, education, love and struggle, Martin added. “You get a chance to walk with a young man in this book who struggles, who doesn’t always get the best grades, doesn’t always know what he wants to do with his life, and yet ends up putting himself in a position to serve his community and to make the world a better place.”