|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Clayborne Carson was in a rush, riding his motorcycle to his tech job in Los Angeles, when he hit a railroad track and crashed.
Unable to work for weeks, Carson realized he was living too fast and needed to decide what he wanted to focus on in life.
While it paid less, he chose to concentrate on freelance writing for an alternative newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, and going to class.
“It was a good decision,” he said. “That summer of 1966 was probably the most exciting year of my life.”
He covered and participated in the anti-war and Black power movements and met famous civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
Carson – who has a doctorate in history – has become a pioneer in civil rights and anti-colonial studies. He was selected to publish Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writings, published multiple of his own works, founded Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute and the World House Program among other things.
He grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the town with a fence around it. Quickly, Carson became curious about the world outside of the secret city, which was used by the federal government to develop the nuclear bomb.
While attending University of New Mexico, he was offered the opportunity to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King, Jr., would deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. Aside from the many speakers, Carson was especially entranced by the immense crowd of people.
So when he visited his sister in Los Angeles and was shocked by the lively city, he didn’t return to New Mexico.
Instead, he began attending UCLA and working various tech jobs as he navigated his new environment.
After participating in various protests and sit-ins, Carson joined the Los Angeles Free Press, writing about pivotal movements like the Non-Violent Action Committee.
Upon graduating from UCLA in 1967, he and his wife Susan Beyer – who he had recently married before their trip – traveled to Europe to avoid the draft.
They traveled to England and through Western Europe, following a guidebook titled “Europe on Five Dollars a Day.”
The pair returned to the United States after Beyer became sick, the same time Carson learned King had been assassinated. Soon after Beyer recovered, they returned to Los Angeles.
Aware of Carson’s work with the Los Angeles Free Press, a UCLA professor asked Carson to be his teaching assistant and eventually begin studying for a graduate degree. Two years later with another degree under his belt, Carson quit his tech job and began working toward his doctorate.
He decided to write his dissertation on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – a coalition of young people that engaged in peaceful protest beginning in 1960.
“We had a VW camper, with Susan and our son David,” Carson said. “We took this long trip, something like 30,000 miles across the country, interviewing 60 people who had been involved in the civil rights struggle.”
That dissertation culminated into his book, “In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s” – which won best first book by an American historian. And its success led to an assistant professor position at Stanford University.
“I was the teacher at Stanford who did the classes that didn’t exist before, like Black history courses, urban history, labor history,” Carson said.
At the time, the university required students to take a Western history course, which was widely protested at the time. Instead, Carson offered to lead a different class, “Western History: An Alternative View,” a course balancing critics and proponents of Western culture.
In 1985, Carson received a phone call from King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. She had asked him to lead the extensive project of organizing and publishing all of King’s work.
After negotiating to remain in Palo Alto, Carson accepted the job and assembled a team to go through King’s thousands of statements and writings. Through that work he founded Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, which garnered millions of dollars to further their work and provide educational materials to the public.
In 1992, Carson published the first of many volumes of “The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. I.” And as Carson’s studies and publications grew more extensive, he traveled to over 20 nations to learn more about King’s world house.
World house is the idea that humans, although vastly different in backgrounds, must learn to live together in peace.
Each country’s movements tend to be influenced by one another, yet original to themselves Carson said.
“You realize that a lot of the problems are the same, racism, colonialism,” he said. “These issues tend to be worldwide.”
For Carson, all his work dates back to his hometown and his subsequent move to Los Angeles.
“It starts with curiosity on what’s on the other side of the fence,” he said.