Clayborne Carson: Where Do We Go from Here? Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Still Unanswered Question for the World

Stanford Emeriti/ae Council Autobiographical Reflections

In a lecture on Nov. 15, 2022, Clayborne Carson, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History, emeritus, spoke in the Emeriti/ae Council’s “Autobiographical Reflections” lecture series. He traced the path of his early life growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, undergraduate and graduate studies at UCLA, becoming a “historian” rather unintentionally, and his almost fifty-year career at Stanford. He described his early interest in the civil rights movement, focused principally on young activists his own age, especially those in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which became the subject of his first book. Carson explains how he was asked by Mrs. Coretta Scott King to edit and publish her late husband’s speeches, sermons, and other writings, and became the founding Director of the King Institute at Stanford. He also spoke about his collaboration with PBS on the Eyes on the Prize documentary series which led him to write two plays about King’s life and teachings, which have been performed in China and in Palestine. Carson is continuing his online educational efforts by establishing the World House Project at the Freeman Spogli Institute, collaborating with international human rights advocates to realize King’s vision of a global community in which all people can “learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”