The Young Man Who Became a Civil-Rights Icon

Editor’s Note: Read The Atlantic’s special coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.

Before Martin Luther King Jr. became a great man, he was a young man, and he often acted like one. In The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, to be published this spring, Patrick Parr focuses on the future icon’s three years at Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania, from 1948 to 1951. Surrounded by white professors and staff and a predominantly white student body, he became the student-body president. But long before King entered the seminary as a 19-year-old college graduate, this son of a leading black preacher in Atlanta had already felt the humiliations of racial segregation.

The excerpts here reveal competing facets of the young King: the first, as the angry victim in the incident that inspired his passion for social change; the second, as a fun-loving, chain-smoking, pool-playing student. Throughout the book, Parr refers