A Call to Conscience is a milestone collection of Dr. King's most influential and best-known speeches. Compiled by Stanford historian Dr. Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project, and by contributing editor Kris Shepard, this volume takes you behind the scenes on an astonishing historical journey-from the small, crowded church in Montgomery, Alabama, where The Birth of a New Nation ignited the modern civil rights movement; to the center of the nation's capital, where "I Have a Dream" echoed through a nation's conscience; to the Mason Temple in Memphis, where over ten thousand people heard Dr. King give his last, transcendent speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop," the night before his assassination. In twelve important introductions, some of the world's most renowned leaders and theologians - Andrew Young, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Mrs. Rosa Parks...
During his undergraduate years at UCLA, Dr. Carson was a participant and observer of African-American political movements. Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, he has taught at Stanford University, where he is now professor of history and director of the King Papers Project. Dr. Carson has also been a visiting professor at American University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Emory University and a Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
Dr. Carson's scholarly publications have focused on African-American protest movements and political thought of the period after World War II. His writings have appeared in leading historical journals and numerous encyclopedias, as well as in popular periodicals. His first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, a study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was published in 1981. In Struggle won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians. His other publications include Malcolm X: The FBI File (1991). Dr. Carson also served as senior advisor for a fourteen-part, award-winning, public television series on the civil rights movement entitled "Eyes on the Prize" and co-edited the Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (1991). In addition, he served as historical advisor for Freedom on My Mind, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1995, as well as for Chicano! (1996) and Blacks and Jews (1997).
Dr. Carson has lectured at many colleges and universities in the United States and abroad on a wide range of topics including King, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Black-Jewish relations, and the need for a multi-cultural curriculum. He has served as a Visiting Scholar for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and as a speaker in the Organization of American Historians Lectureship Program.
In 1985 Coretta Scott King invited Dr. Carson to direct a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This project was initiated by the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and is being conducted in association with Stanford University and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Estate. Under Dr. Carson's direction, the King Papers Project has produced four volumes of a projected fourteen-volume comprehensive edition of King's speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. In addition to these volumes, he has written or co-edited numerous other works based on the papers, including A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998); The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), compiled from the King's autobiographical writings; and A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001). He also wrote Passages of Martin Luther King, a docudrama that was initially produced by Stanford's Drama Department in 1993 and more recently presented at Dartmouth College, Willamette University, and the University of Washington. More recently, Dr. Carson collaborated with Roma Design Group of San Francisco to create the winning proposal in an international competition to design a national memorial in Washington, D. C., for Dr. King.
Dr. Carson was born in Buffalo, New York. His wife, Susan Ann Carson, is managing editor of the King Papers Project. The Carsons, who live in Palo Alto, have two grown children. Malcolm Carson, a graduate of Howard University and University of California's Boalt Law School, lives in Oakland and is assistant city attorney for the city of San Francisco. Temera Car
