1.         What is the Institute?

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University serves as the institutional home for a broad range of activities relating to King’s life, the civil rights movement in the United States and the history of struggles worldwide to achieve social justice. 

2.         What are the Institute’s programs? 

We reach multiple audiences through four core programs: 

• editing and publishing a comprehensive collection of King’s speeches, sermons, correspondence and other papers;

• providing research fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students;

• preparing classroom materials and teaching models for high school teachers through the Liberation Curriculum project; and

• offering a range of public programs including general audience publications, workshops and lectures.

3.         What is the King papers project?

In 1985, Coretta Scott King asked our director, Professor Clayborne Carson, to assemble and edit her late husband’s papers. 

Since then, we’ve been engaged in a long-term scholarly effort, the King Papers Project, to publish a comprehensive multi-volume collection of King’s most important correspondence, sermons, speeches, unpublished manuscripts and other materials.  We have published five of a planned fourteen volumes  The series is an essential reference work for the study of modern U.S. history and social thought. 

Our website, www.kinginstitute.info, is the world’s largest online archive of King-related materials, receiving over 500,000 hits a month.  We are a pioneer in making historical materials accessible online.

4.         What does the research fellowship program involve?

We involve undergraduate and graduate students at Stanford and other universities in our scholarly work through the King Research Fellows program.  The program includes academic year and summer internships, research projects, support for honors theses and participation in other Institute programs.

Past participants in our summer program have included students from a variety of disciplines and from colleges and universities around the country, including UC Berkeley, Columbia, Emory, Harvard, Howard, Michigan State, Morehouse, Ohio State, Oregon, Princeton, Spelman and Yale. 

We are committed to engaging students from diverse backgrounds in historical research and to contributing to the pursuit of academic careers by students of color.

5.         What is the Liberation Curriculum?

The Liberation Curriculum is a long-term project to provide high school teachers and students with classroom materials that explore themes of social justice and transformation.   We give teachers access to historically accurate and pedagogically effective educational materials that go beyond traditional textbook learning and engage students in historical thinking.  The materials meet state and national standards.  Resources include online lesson plans, historical documents and background reading materials. 

We collaborate with teachers and the Stanford Graduate School of Education to develop materials and teaching models and to strengthen institutional linkages among university scholars and local schools.

6.         What are the public programs?

We reach the public through multiple vehicles including:

• the www.kinginstitute.info website;

• books and other publications for general audiences; and

• sponsorship of conferences, workshops, lectures, dramatic works and other events designed to increase public understanding of King’s life and to bring history to bear on contemporary peace and social justice issues. 

Our general audience publications include books, audio books and multiple foreign language editions of the highly acclaimed The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998) compiled from King’s autobiographical writings; A Knock at Midnight:  Inspiration from the Great Sermons of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998); and a Call to Conscience:  The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001). 

Our website receives over 500,000 hits per month, more than any other King-related site on the internet. 

We host each January the King Symposium on Peace with Social Justice; the 2007 theme will be religion and the struggle for social justice. 

Visitors to the Institute have included the late Coretta Scott King and other King family members.  We’ve hosted His Holiness the Dalai Lama and prominent activists from the civil rights struggle including Robert Moses, Dorothy Cotton, Clarence Jones, Angela Davis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

7.         How much of the King Papers work is done?

We’ve published, through the University of California Press, five volumes of a planned 14-volume series: 

• Volume I:  Called to Serve: January 1929-1951 (1992) covers King’s childhood and family history, his time as a undergraduate at Morehouse College and his life and studies at Crozer Theological Seminary.

• Volume II:  Rediscovering Precious Values: July 1951-November 1955 (1994) covers King’s graduate studies at Boston University, including the full text of his doctoral dissertation, his courtship of and marriage to Coretta Scott King and the beginnings of his pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

• Volume III:  Birth of a New Age:  December 1955-December 1956 (1997) covers King’s leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott.

• Volume IV:  Symbol of the Movement:  January 1957-December 1958 (2000) covers the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and King’s rise to national and international prominence as a civil rights leader.

• Volume V:  Threshold of a New Decade:  January 1959-December 1960) (2005) covers King’s growing political sophistication and effectiveness, his response to the student sit-in movement and his influence on the presidential election of 1960.

We in early 2007 will publish Volume VI:  Advocate of the Social Gospel, September 1948-March 1963, a groundbreaking collection of King’s sermons and religious writings that includes his earliest known homilies.  

Volumes VII and VIII will cover King’s relationship to the Freedom Riders, the Albany movement and the watershed year of 1963, including King’s involvement in the campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama and the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

8.         What does the papers work involve?

The work includes acquiring documents from hundreds of archives and other sources around the world, digitizing and indexing the documents, researching and writing introductory and explanatory text and preparing the final annotated volumes for publication.  The work also includes selecting and preparing documents for online access through the www.kinginstitute.info website and maintaining an extensive digital document database for use by Institute staff, scholars and the public. 

9.         What’s on your website?  Do people actually use it?

Our website contains the world’s largest online archive of King-related materials.  The website also includes easily accessible text and audio clips for King’s most famous speeches.  The site receives over 500,000 hits per month, more than any other King-related site on the internet.    

We are a pioneer in the online dissemination of historical materials.  Many of the documents contained in the first five volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. are accessible through the www.kinginstitute.info website, making available thousands of documents that once were inaccessible, even to scholars. 

We are focused on using new media technologies to broaden the scope, scale and outreach of our scholarly, educational and public activities, including content for community projects and institutions.

10.        Who is Clayborne Carson?

Clayborne Carson is professor of history at Stanford University and founding director of the King Institute.  In 1985, Coretta Scott King asked Dr. Carson to assemble and edit her late husband’s papers.  In 2005, Dr. Carson and Stanford created the Institute as a permanent endowed center to house the King Papers Project and related educational initiatives.

Dr. Carson received his doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Dr. Carson’s first book, In Struggle:  SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, a study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was published in 1981 and won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians.  He co-authored the recent textbook African-American Lives:  the Struggle for Freedom (2005). 

He is the author of the play “Passage of Martin Luther King, Jr.” and served as advisor for numerous documentaries, including the award-winning public television series, “Eyes on the Prize.” 

Dr. Carson often lectures on King and civil rights throughout the United States and abroad. His topics have included King, SNCC, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, black-Jewish relations, and affirmative action. He has appeared on many national radio and television shows, including Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, Fresh Air, Charlie Rose, Tavis Smiley and Marketplace.

11.        Is the Institute related to the King Center in Atlanta?

We have a vital cooperative relationship with the King Center but are not institutionally affiliated with that organization.

12.        Is the Institute related to the national King memorial in Washington?

No.  Dr. Carson was involved in the design process but the Institute is not institutionally affiliated with that organization.

13.        Are King’s papers actually located at Stanford?  Do you own them?

The originals of the documents included in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. are not located at Stanford.  We photocopy and scan documents held by or available from archives and other repositories that house the original documents; our work does not include archival preservation or collection curatorship.  There are archival collections of original documents located at the King Center, Boston University and, in the future, Morehouse College.  The King Estate owns the literary rights in King documents.

14.        Does the sale of a collection of papers to Morehouse College affect the Institute’s work?

We’ve had access to these papers for many years and have photocopied and scanned them. 

Our next volume of the papers, Advocate of the Social Gospel, will contain more than a hundred of the documents going to Morehouse, and we expect to publish the texts of other of these documents in forthcoming volumes. 

With the cooperation of the King family and the King Estate, we’ve taken actions to ensure that King’s ideas, as expressed in these and other documents, will continue to made available to scholars and the public.

15.        Did the Institute receive any of the money from the sale of the papers to Morehouse?

No.  We’ve had continuing access to the documents for many years be we didn’t and don’t own them, and we won’t receive any of the sale proceeds.

16.        How is the Institute related to Stanford?

We are one of many academic centers at Stanford.  We are led by Professor Clayborne Carson, our founding director and a long-time professor of history at Stanford.   We are affiliated with Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and collaborate with other schools and centers at the university, including the Graduate School of Education.  

17.        Does the Institute have a permanent staff and facility?

We employ a full-time staff of approximately twelve researchers, teachers and technical experts, and many students each year participate in the King Research Fellows program.   We are housed in dedicated offices on Stanford’s core campus in Stanford, California.

18.        How is the Institute funded?

We are funded through multiple sources:  individuals, foundations, government funding sources and Stanford.

19.        Who are the key donors?

Founding donors of the Institute, each of whom donated $1 million, are Ronnie Lott, the Mumford Family-Agape Foundation and Stephen Luczo.  Our key institutional supporters include:

• the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation;

• the Lilly Endowment;

• the National Endowment for the Humanities;

• the National Historical Publications and Records Commission; and

• Stanford University

20.        How much are you seeking to raise?  Is Stanford providing funding?

We seeking to build a $12 million endowment in order to provide a permanent funding base and ensure the long-term continuation of our scholarly and educational work  --  regardless of the future political landscape or shifts in funding sources.   Gifts of $100,000 or more will be added to endowment.  We also seek support for our ongoing operational needs.  

We are roughly halfway to our endowment goal.

21.        Are there gift matching programs?

Stanford University, through the Hewlett Challenge program, matches gifts of $250,000 to $1 million on a 50% match basis and gifts of $1 million to $5 million on a 100% basis. 

22.        Do you have a museum or displays for visitors to see?

We maintain a small public exhibit of documents and photographs.  Visitors are always welcome.

23.        Is there a complete audio copy of King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech?

Yes, you can find it on our website under Popular King.  Look for “Voice of King” and “Address at March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”  If you wish to purchase the full audio of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the speech is included in the Time Warner audiobook A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

24.        Is it possible to order audio of King’s speeches and sermons?

Some audio clips are available on our website in the “Voice of King” section.  Original recordings of King giving sermons, speeches and personal statements are available through the Time Warner audiobooks A Call to Conscience:  The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. and A Knock at Midnight:  Inspiration from the Great Sermons of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

25.        I am looking for pictures of Dr. King.  Can you help?

We do not own the rights to sell photos.  You can find photos through sites such as Google, stock photo and Corbis.

26.        Are there any teaching materials available on King?

We are developing teaching materials through our Liberation Curriculum program including materials focused on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Letter from Birmingham Jail.  We also make primary materials and other classroom resources available online through the Liberation Curriculum site.

27.        Is there a way to search the King documents online for particular phrases or quotes?  How can I verify a King quote that I’ve found?

We have a search engine accessible from the upper left-hand corner of our page.  If you don’t find the quote you are looking for, take a look at our “Quotes” pages.  Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations provides a limited number of King quote; they are accurate.

28.        Are you able to verify quotes and accept research requests?

Because we are on a publishing schedule, we are unable to perform in-depth research in response to outside requests without charging a fee.  Depending on the nature of the request, we may be able to verify quotes and accept research requests that are not considered in-depth.   Please note that we are unable to respond to research requests submitted by e-mail; please contact us by phone.