From Literary Hub At some point during Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1944 train trip from Atlanta to Simsbury, Conn., the hungry, rambunctious teenager left the company of his fellow Morehouse students and went to the state-of-the-art dining car to enjoy Southern Railway’s fine dining on wheels. He had no idea what was awaiting him. The tagline of the Southern Railway Company was “Southern serves the South.” The company motto referred to more than just geography, but also the “Sou

From BookPage This revealing, vividly told biography illuminates a fact worth remembering: Our greatest leaders do not emerge fully formed in the moment in which they are most needed, but are molded by family, community and education. Martin’s captivating Young King shows how these influences and experiences “coalesced to produce a man, a minister, and a dreamer who changed the world.” Read more ...

From St. Louis Magazine Before Lerone Martin joined Stanford in 2022 as director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, he spent years in St. Louis asking how religion moves through public life: through Black preaching, recorded sound, political institutions, state surveillance, and the moral vocabulary of American power. At Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, he pursued those questions as a scholar of African Ame

From Religious News Only one of those titles would be commonly guessed to describe the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But a new 420-page book by scholar Lerone Martin reveals those and other little-known pieces of King’s history. In “Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr.” — which will be released Tuesday (May 5) — he describes the family, friends and educators who helped shape King into the man who would one day draw some 250,000 people to the 1963 March on Washington

From Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences Lerone A. Martin’s Young King reveals the boy behind the man. Lerone A. Martin, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor and director of Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, might not seem like he has much in common with Cher. But there is one thing: Both had books on BookPage’s list of the most anticipated nonfiction of 2026. And while we can’t speak to Cher: Part Two, we can confirm that

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From New York Post A Stanford professor looks at the early years of “Little Mike” to better understand what fueled him and who he became. The book also includes rarely seen photos from the civil rights icon’s high school and college days.

From Stanford Photo: Jess Alvarenga As a high school student in Ohio, Lerone Martin wondered about the world beyond his hometown. His parents worked in factories, assembling car parts. It provided a comfortable life and taught him the value of hard work. Still, Martin wanted to build on that foundation, like many kids. But how? His parents didn’t attend college. His older brother had played football in college—maybe sports was a way to see the world. Or perhaps he could becom