Lerone Martin traces Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1944 faith shift
Martin Luther King Jr. was 15, agnostic and working outside the segregated South for the first time. A new 420-page book by scholar Lerone Martin says that summer in Connecticut helped push martin luther king toward ministry and faith.
Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. is set for release on Tuesday, May 5. Martin's book draws on King’s letters home, jukebox songs from his college years and a health examination that recorded his 5-foot-7 height.
Connecticut summer of 1944
In the summer of 1944, King joined about 100 Morehouse College men in Simsbury, Connecticut, to pick shade tobacco for college money. The book says that trip was his first time outside the segregated South and the first time he worshipped in an all-white church.
King wrote home from Connecticut, saying, “Mom and Dad, you won’t believe it. Negroes and whites worship together here in Connecticut.” That summer, Martin says, King began to explore the idea of being called to ministry after previously refusing that path because he wanted to be different from his father.
Booker T. Washington High School
The book places another turning point in 1944, when King won an African American fraternal order oratorical contest at Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta. The school was then the only African American high school in Atlanta and had roughly 5,000 students.
That detail sits alongside the book’s larger claim that King had already expressed agnostic views and harbored resentment toward white Americans because of racism he had experienced before the Connecticut summer. Martin’s portrait is of a teenager whose beliefs were still unsettled, even as public speaking and religious questions were starting to define him.
Young King on May 5
The new book adds a different starting point to the public record on King’s early life, before the 1963 March on Washington drew some 250,000 people. Readers who know King mainly as the mature civil rights leader get a more specific account of how a 15-year-old from Atlanta began moving toward the pulpit during one summer job in Simsbury.
When Young King reaches shelves on Tuesday, May 5, the fresh material will sit in the details: the Connecticut church, the tobacco fields, the letter home and the teenage student who had not yet settled on the role history later gave him.
