Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr.

From a preeminent King scholar, the origin story of the man, minister, and civil rights hero who would lead the nation and change the world. We know who Martin Luther King, Jr. became, but who was he at the beginning of his life? How did his youth inform his outlook and activism? Before Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights leader, a Nobel Laureate, and a global hero, he was an emotional boy, a middling high school student devoted to fashion, dancing, and dating. Lerone A. Martin, Faculty Director of the Martin Luther King Institute at Stanford University, traces these roots to develop a fuller understanding of the influential preacher’s emotional life, his youthful confusion about his future and career direction, his teenage missteps, and his inspiration to fight for justice. Revelatory, humanizing, and compassionate, Young King unearths: MLK’s days as “Little Mike”—the ever-eager middle child and a precocious prankster—on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia: Sundays at Ebenezer Baptist Church and afternoons at the Auburn Avenue Library The early, formative experiences of racism and segregation he endured and the summers he spent working on a tobacco farm in Connecticut, marking his first trip outside of the Jim Crow South The liberating effects of his time at Morehouse College, where he played intramural basketball, hosted house parties, studied sociology, and joined the Ministers’ Union His winding path to seminary; the co-development of his activist consciousness, his spiritual devotion, and his relationship with his wife-to-be; and his burgeoning career as a pastor As America undergoes another era of turmoil and change, this powerful biography provides a vital roadmap for how greatness comes to light. This essential work is a testament to how history shapes a leader. Young King includes rarely seen black-and-white photographs of an adolescent MLK from his high school days and college years.