Lerone Martin — Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr.
Scholar Lerone Martin presents a landmark origin story exploring the man and minister before MLK became the civil rights movement's defining voice, with Kim Martin at Politics and Prose.
Why we picked this
We know the speeches and the marches. Lerone Martin's scholarship focuses on who King was before he became a symbol—the formation of the man, not just the monument.
Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. is Lerone Martin’s reconstruction of the years before the movement—the formation of a mind and a moral vision that would eventually change the country. Martin, a historian at Stanford’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, traces King’s development as a minister and thinker before the world knew who he was.
The book draws on archival sources to examine how King’s theology, his understanding of justice, and his intellectual formation were shaped in ways that the standard narrative of the civil rights movement tends to obscure. It is a work of origin—of becoming, not just being.
Martin joins Politics and Prose in conversation with Kim Martin. The event is free and open to the public, held at the Connecticut Avenue flagship store.