Oral History Education

The National Museum of American History features a webcast that includes oral history interviews with the three surviving members of the Greensboro Four.  At the time, they were young college students staging a sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, 51 years ago today, February 1, 1960.  Now, they offer their reflections on a student movement that they helped to spark across the country, leading to desegregation of that lunch counter, and many others.

As we look to the leader of the largest social justice movement in the history of the United States, Martin Luther King, Jr., we are reminded of the role character plays in history, and in making change. There is no single perspective on Dr. King, rather there are many. And in all of the different ways we can understand him — whether intellectually, since he was a scholar, or spiritually, as he was a pastor, or as a leader that represented the single most powerful movement of the 20th century — what matters is that we continue to explore his role in history and the movement he represented so as to better understand ourselves.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, here are two excerpts of oral history interviews from different perspectives on his historic life through student led interviews with Dr. Clayborne Carson, Director of the Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford, and Clarence B. Jones, attorney to Dr. King.

Clarence B. Jones

Dr. Clayborne Carson