Stanford Politics

Since 2005, Stanford has been home to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. The university doesn’t seem to care.

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n 2005, Dr. Clayborne Carson founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute to little public fanfare. Carson had been invited by the late Coretta Scott King to direct the King Papers Project in 1985, a project to edit and compile Dr. King’s published and unpublished works. As a consequence of Carson’s appointment, the King Papers Project, originally initiated by the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, became a cooperative venture of the Center, the King Estate, and Stanford University, where Carson was — and still is — teaching. 

At Stanford, the King Papers Project never found a permanent home. In its early years, the project operated out of a small office space in Meyer Library; soon after, the University offered up the space where the project is currently housed, Cypress Hall, promising that a permanent home was coming. The promise never came to fruition. Dr. Carson’s periodic inquiries into the status of a new, permanent space always received the same response: it’ll come in a few years. Despite the relatively cramped quarters of Cypress Hall D, however, Carson and the King Papers Project made themselves at home. To date, they have published seven of a planned fourteen volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. In his little Cypress Hall office, Carson has hosted dignitaries such as the Dalai Lama, Jesse Jackson, and Coretta Scott King herself. And with a $1 million grant from NFL Hall-of-Famer Ronnie Lott, Carson was able to officially found the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute in 2005.

The relatively modest quarters have never truly bothered Carson, who has maintained that the work of the Institute itself could be performed “in a basement” — which is where it was done in the early years of the King Papers Project. Though individual students objected to the University’s apparent lack of support for the Institute, it remained out of the spotlight. 

In many ways, Dr. King’s affiliation with Stanford occurred by coincidence. Though King himself delivered an address at Stanford in 1967, it was only through Carson’s appointment as director of the King Papers Project that the University was able to establish any formal relationship with the King Center or the King Estate. Despite the ostensible gravity of the King Papers Project and Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, however — the Institute’s mission is to “support a broad range of activities illuminating Dr. King’s life and the movements he inspired” — it has, for the most part, existed (quite literally) out of public view. Many students graduate without ever learning of its existence. 

Earlier this year, Carson announced his plans to retire in Fall 2020, throwing the future of the King Institute in limbo. This time, the local media took notice. The Mercury News ran story with the headline “At Stanford, King’s legacy lives on in what was supposed to be its temporary home”; a letter to the editor ran a week later, arguing for the Institute and its work to be moved to Berkeley, a campus with “social justice embedded in its DNA.” For more than thirty years, Carson did his work without seeking recognition. He was fighting for something larger — the preservation of MLK’s legacy — and he did his work with the minimal resources provided by the University itself. With Carson’s impending retirement, however, the Institute faces a new battle for survival: one whose outcome may very well define King’s legacy at Stanford for decades to come. 

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s a child, Carson had other dreams. He was born in Buffalo, NY, in 1944, but moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico at a young age. Los Alamos was not an ethnically diverse neighborhood: Carson and his family were among the city’s only black residents. These experiences, Carson recalled in a 1980 interview with Stanford Today, helped spark his lifelong interest in the Civil Rights Movement: “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.” 

When he graduated from high school, however, Carson enrolled at the University of New Mexico to study computer programming. It was only at a student conference in Indiana where a path towards the Civil Rights movement began to emerge: there, Carson met Stokely Carmichael, a participant in the 1961 Freedom Rides who later became a core leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was Carmichael who invited Carson to participate with SNCC in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 — the same march where Dr. King would give his now-immortalized “I Have a Dream” speech. 

Attending the march was not an easy decision. “It was the first important decision I made in my life where I knew if I told my parents, they’d say ‘No.’ And I knew I had enough resources to get there, but I didn’t have enough resources to get home,” Carson said in an interview with Stanford Politics, likening his attitude at the time to “riding a motorcycle without a helmet.” 

Still, on August 28, 1963, Carson found himself in the audience with thousands of other black Americans, watching as Dr. King spoke in the muggy, late-summer heat. “I realized that I had a chance to go there, and if I didn’t take it, I might regret it,” he said. “So I took the chance. And that, I think, was when I became an adult.” 

After the March was over, Carson made his way back to the West Coast. In 1964, he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he would complete his undergraduate education, having changed his major from computer programming to American history. He finished his M.A. in 1971, and completed a doctoral dissertation on Stokely Carmichael and SNCC in 1975 to earn his Ph’D. The dissertation was expanded, modified, and eventually published in 1981 by Harvard University Press under the title In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Not long after completing his Ph’D, Carson began teaching classes. 

The call from Coretta Scott King came in 1985. She wanted Carson to lead a project in editing, compiling, and publishing the late Dr. King’s published and unpublished works. It would be a long-term project, with no concrete end date: Carson would, to some degree, have to put some of his other academic interests on hold. 

“Coretta called me and I knew what I was going to lose,” he said. “I was going to lose a lot of freedom in deciding what was my next project in life. And I was uncertain about working with her — you know, just all kinds of uncertainties.” Carson, who was 41 at the time, did not consider himself to be a specialist on Dr. King’s works. In a 2008 interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, he recalled that he had considered himself primarily a “SNCC” person, not a King biographer. 

Carson ultimately accepted the offer: “I remember my wife said, ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your career looking over your shoulder, saying you could have been the editor of Dr. King’s papers?’” Thus began the work of the King Papers Project. 

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or much of Carson’s time at Stanford, the Project has received modest funding and attention. In 2005, NFL Hall-of-Famer Ronnie Lott wrote a one million dollar check to the University which gave Carson the endowment necessary to found the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Currently, the institute is housed in Cypress Hall, a pale, nondescript Eichler home which counts various departmental offices among its occupants alongside the King Institute. Inside the institute itself, there are portraits of Dr. King in the lobby, as well as copies of all seven volumes of The Papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — the crowning accomplishment of the King Papers Project — but the space itself is small, even cramped. 

Logan Welch ‘22, who worked at the King Institute over the summer after taking Dr. Carson’s class called “American Prophet: The Inner Life and Global Vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” has been frustrated by the University’s treatment of both the Project and the Institute. 

“I think it’s disrespectful to Dr. Carson and to King’s legacy,” he said. “We’re literally working in a shed, and right across the street you can see all the new buildings in the Engineering Quad.” 

Welch’s days at the Institute often began at 8 A.M., when he arrived at the King Institute. He would work until the Institute closed at 5 P.M., taking only a short break for lunch and in the early afternoons, when Dr. Carson often shared stories about his early life with Welch and the other interns over tea in a cafe in the Engineering Quad. 

The majority of Welch’s work over the summer revolved around planning and publicizing the international Gandhi-King Conference, which was scheduled to take place at Stanford in mid-October on the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. Carson saw the event as a success — after six months of planning, the Conference drew attendees ranging from family members of King and Gandhi to local politicians such as Fremont Mayor Lily Mei. Despite the efforts of Carson, Welch, and the King Institute’s employees, however, the Conference received relatively minimal attention from the Stanford student body itself. “I don’t think there will ever be another event in which you bring together this group of people. For the students who missed it, they missed a historic opportunity,” he said in an interview with The Stanford Daily. 

For Welch, the low attention and attendance from the student body reflected broader trends in Stanford’s attitude toward the King Institute itself. He remembered walking past Memorial Auditorium once and noticing a plaque which had been installed to commemorate a speech, called “The Other America,” which Dr. King had delivered at Stanford in 1967. The installation, he said, felt perverse, paying lip service to Dr. King’s message even as the University did comparatively little to promote King’s legacy. 

In his speech, called “The Other America,” King posited the existence of two separate Americas. The first, he said, was “beautiful”;  in later versions of the speech, he noted that this America was “flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality.” This America had, historically — and, even in 1967, two years after the signing of the Voting Rights Act — remained a distant fantasy for many poor, black Americans, who lived in the “Other” America, one which remained poor, still devastated by the aftermath of years of discrimination and segregation. In “The Other America,” King expressed a degree of urgency, stating to the gathered crowd in Memorial Auditorium that the notion that only time could solve the problem of racial injustice was little more than a myth: “It may well be that we may have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time.” 

Social progress, King stated, never “rolls in on the wills of inevitability — it comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of the dedicated individuals. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must help time and we must realize that time is always right, to do right.” 

In late January, Stanford’s official news website reposted an edited clip from the speech commemorating the event. The short synopsis of the speech included the following quote: “For more than 30 years, Stanford has been at the forefront of scholarship about King’s legacy through the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.” 

The quote feels oddly self-congratulatory given the minimal attention the Institute has received from much of Stanford’s student body and little funding it has been given from the administration itself.  Until Lott’s donation, the King Papers Project was effectively unhoused; Cypress Hall was, according to the Mercury News, supposed to be only a “temporary home.” 

Welch found the installation of a plaque commemorating King’s speech darkly ironic. “I just think it’s shameful. The Institute’s been in a shack for years — it’s the same complacency and indifference of ‘good people’ which Dr. King indicted in his speech all those years ago.” 

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arson has spent the past 35 years working on the King Papers Project, and only in 2005 was he able to establish the King Institute with Lott’s financial support. He will turn 76 in June and will retire on September 1, 2020, becoming the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of History Emeritus. While Carson will continue to serve part time as the Director of the King Institute, the Institute’s long term future at Stanford remains unclear. 

For one, the part of campus where the Institute is housed is scheduled for renovation. According to an article from CBS San Francisco, the area surrounding Cypress Hall will eventually be torn down to make way for new buildings as the University seeks to remain competitive in science, computing, and engineering. Currently, the University’s development office — which receives its direction from Stanford’s administrative leadership — handles all fundraising surrounding the Institute. A spokesperson for the office noted that the King Institute had received many gifts for the Institute over the years; no plans, however, have been made to move the Institute to a more permanent location. Carson himself is barred from soliciting donations from outside sources, and Lott’s gift has, thus far, provided one of the only sources of consistent funding. 

Despite the minimal attention the Project and Institute have received from Stanford, however, Carson feels grateful for the support he has been given through the years — not once, he said, has he found Stanford’s support inadequate. “Oh, sure, I wish it’s more, but I’m very fortunate to be at a rich university where I can look down the hall and everybody has an office. We have nice computers, nice equipment, all that sort of stuff.” 

The building itself has, ultimately, been unimportant to the work of the King Institute. When the Mercury News came and asked if he was satisfied with the Institute’s physical location, he believed he made it clear that he was: “If you took a vote of the staff, they would say we could do this work in a basement. We don’t need a pretty facility to do our work.” Given the option between receiving twenty million dollars for a new building or to develop more programs, Carson said he’d choose the funding for programming in a heartbeat. 

But at a campus like Stanford, where physical appearances often betray the University’s interests, it’s difficult to ignore the implications of the King Institute’s location. Just across the street is the Engineering Quad, whose most recent additions such as the Jen-Hsun Huang Center were completed as recently as 2014. Most campus tours, which begin at the Visitor Center near the football stadium, even make it as far as the Engineering Quad, stopping several hundred feet short of the King Institute itself. 

On May 29, in the wake of nationwide protests following the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, Provost Persis Drell sent an email out to students with the subject line “Confronting Racial Injustice.” She wrote about the university’s “[commitment]to making racial progress through specific actions,” pointing out the work which had been done to “use the university’s intellectual resources and wellspring of talent to further address social inequity, and through our research and teaching, advance public policy changes and much needed social reform.” Provost Drell even quoted Dr. King’s “Other America” speech, but there was no mention of the King Institute, or ways through which the Stanford community could support the King Institute or access its resources. 

“It’s more if I were a leader, student, or an alumnus at Stanford, I would want Stanford to do more, to care more. I would be long gone by the time any new building is finished, but Stanford does care what’s going to be here in ten years,” Carson said, gesturing toward the new buildings outside his office. “I know this part of campus is coming down. Is this going to be just a memory?” 

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Kyle Wang, a sophomore, is a staff writer for Stanford Politics.