On August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators flocked to the nation's capital for the March on Washington. That day Clayborne Carson, a 19-year-old black student from a working-class family in New Mexico who had hitched a ride to Washington, heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. It was a life-changing occasion for the author as it launched him on a career to become one of the most important chroniclers of the civil rights era. Two decades later, as a distinguished professor of African American History at Stanford University, Mrs. King picked Dr. Carson to edit her late husband's papers. Taking the reader on a journey of rediscovery of the King legend, he draws on new archives as well as unpublished letters. Dr. Carson examines his decades long quest to understand Martin Luther King, Jr. the man, delve into the construction of his legacy, and to understand how King's "dream" has evolved.
