New Books In American Studies

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: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. (Amistad, 2026) unearths MLK’s days as “Little Mike,” the ever-eager middle child and a precocious prankster; his early experiences of segregation and the summers he spent on a Connecticut tobacco farm, his first trip outside the Jim Crow South; his transformative time at Moreho