Clayborne Carson

Clayborne Carson (born June 15, 1944) is an African-American professor of history at Stanford University, and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985 he has directed the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Carson was born in Buffalo, New York. He grew up near Los Alamos, New Mexico, where his was one of a small number of African-American families. He attributes his lifelong interest in the Civil Rights Movement to that experience. "I had this really strong curiosity about the black world, because in Los Alamos the black world was a very few families. When the civil rights movement started, I had this real fascination with it, and I wanted to meet the people in it."

On August 28, 1963, 19-year-old Carson attended the historic March on Washington. After a freshman year at the University of New Mexico, where he was one of 150 Black students among 20,000 undergraduates, Carson was overwhelmed to find himself among hundreds of thousands of African Americans at the March. Recalling the March, at which Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Carson says, "I have a lot of vivid memories, but not of King’s speech." What left the biggest impression, he says, were "the people I met there."

Carson earned his B.A. (1967), M.A. (1971), and Ph.D. (1975) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While studying at UCLA, he was involved in civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests. He speaks of that experience in his current writing, highlighting the importance of grassroots political activity within the African American freedom struggle.

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