Lerone Martin, a prominent scholar of Black religious history, leads the Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. His new book, Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr, grew from “professional and personal” roots.

Professionally, Martin “started coming across things that I had never seen before” about the civil rights leader’s childhood in Atlanta, his years at Morehouse College, and his time at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania. One key episode happened in 1944, when King was 15. Travelling north from Georgia, he spent a summer working in the tobacco fields of Simsbury, Connecticut. It’s known as a transformative stay, vital in King’s eventual decisions to follow his father as a preacher and to fight for civil rights. Nonetheless, Martin found an underexploited resource.

“We have the five letters that he sent back from Connecticut, talking about experiencing life out of the Jim Crow south,” Martin said. “I read books on King, and had never seen anyone really talk about that in detail at all. So that got me thinking about this origin story.”

“The personal side” of why Martin decided to write Young King also involved origin stories. In 2022, the year Martin started at Stanford, he got married too.

“I have two stepsons,” he said, “and my wife and I have welcomed a third son together, and watching them at different stages of life, asking questions about parenthood, asking questions about what goes into raising a responsible, committed, dedicated human being, that got me thinking.”

His boys provided another inspiration.

“All the doggone Marvel movies that my sons watch,” Martin said, laughing. “Every superhero has a backstory. It made me think, what about Martin Luther King Jr’s backstory? And so all of that ended up being this book.”

Accordingly, a graphic novel version of Young King is in the works, “ground-level research” having taken Martin back to school, where he told his son’s fifth-grade class “a bit about Young King and what King was like at their age. And then I asked: ‘What would you like to see if this were a graphic novel? And they gave me wonderful feedback. Twenty-eight fifth-graders wrote little sticky notes for me. For that 25 to 30 minutes, I was cool. I wasn’t dad any more. And so we’re working on the graphic novel. It’s a journey I’m excited about.”

King’s journey began in Atlanta on 15 January 1929, the oldest son of a prominent Baptist preacher. It was a comfortable childhood but like every other Black child in the south, he grew up in the shadow of Jim Crow. Martin describes everyday racism from which King’s parents sought to protect him. Just like Black children today, King was given “the talk”, about what to do if stopped by police. In summer 1947, aged 18, King went back to Connecticut for a second summer. After a party, he was stopped by police.

Researching much-studied figures means finding gaps in the record. Details of what happened to King in Connecticut are scarce. A friend gave a secondhand account and “rumors spread, claiming there was beer and teenage horseplay”. But as Martin said, “no arrest, no jail time, no citation” has ever been found. Martin said he went looking for “any type of city records, to try to see if there was any type of write-up of a stop”.

“When I couldn’t find that, I decided to do research around the area at that time,” Martin said. “That’s when I was able to find newspapers that were concerned about this wave of rural southern migrants coming into town, and people blaming them for a rise in crime. So that was helpful.

“And then I stumbled upon a book written by a Jamaican woman [Fay Clarke Johnson] trying to understand Jamaicans in Connecticut, men who were also picking tobacco on these farms outside of Hartford when King was there, and who testified to anytime they left the farm being followed by police or being made to feel unwelcome at restaurants and bars.

“Finally, I thought about the top police agency in the country, the FBI. What was the FBI talking about in 1947? Of course, it’s talking about 18-year-olds being the face of crime. And Martin King, he was 18.”

That was familiar ground. Martin’s last book was The Gospel of J Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism. He knows how Hoover’s FBI hounded King as an adult, seeking to bring him down. He knows about the horrors of Jim Crow.

In a key passage of Young King, Martin considers Jim Crow travel. As King went north, southern racism followed. Noting the potency of trains as a metaphor in Black culture, from the Underground Railroad out of slavery to “so many Baptist gospel songs about the train, This Train (Is Bound for Glory), Death’s Black Train”, Martin said: “The train was such a central point in Black life, especially during the Great Migration period, and yet it was also a space where so many had just heart-wrenching experiences, of being forced to remember that somehow their skin has made them less than other people.”

In Connecticut, King wasn’t the only future Black leader in the Simsbury fields. Malcolm Little was there in 1947, selling suits for a Boston tailor, a year or so shy of the burglary rap that led to prison time and the Nation of Islam, his name change to Malcolm X and his own rise. There’s no record he and King crossed paths, but Martin allowed himself to wonder.

He laughs. “Oh, man. Shout out to my editor, Biz Mitchell. She was like: ‘This is beautiful, but you need to be clear to the reader that you have no evidence that they actually met.’ Because it’s so tantalizing. It’s a moment you could see happening, you could see in a novel, a play. What would these two young men say to one another? They’re travelling in opposite directions. King arrives on the verge, as he says, of hating all white people, but starts to change because of what he sees in Connecticut. And then Malcolm, who’s been in the north his entire life, he’s headed in the opposite direction: actually, these people are just evil.

“Both of them have said they want to be lawyers. They see Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston and Pauli Murray, lawyers battling for Black equality. Yet here they are on a farm in Connecticut, moving in different directions.”

King and Malcolm X met just once, briefly, in Washington in 1964. But Martin also points out that when King and his wife, Coretta, “had their first apartment together in Boston [in the early 1950s, as King completed his PhD], Malcolm’s place was less than two miles away. They’re in the same spaces a lot of times. It’s like a great metaphor: they’re so close, yet so far away.”

Coretta Scott-King enters Young King near its end, courtship and marriage completing King’s growth. King’s relations with women run through Martin’s book: King’s love for his mother and grandmother, his adolescent jokes with male friends, how as Atlanta church royalty he was coveted as a prospective husband, his failed relationship with Juanita Garnetta Sellers, his student relationship with Betty Moitz, who was white.

The adult King’s treatment of women has become a subject of controversy. Martin wanted “to get the reader to not see Martin as a grown man”.

“I wanted them to see a teenager doing what teenagers do. One day they’re in love, one day they’re out of love, the next they’re playing games, Martin said. “What I tried to do was use Coretta’s own words to admit that she was playing games at times too. Really liking him, but being afraid to admit it. Telling him: ‘If you were to break up with me, it wouldn’t bother me at all.’ They’re in their early 20s. That seems very normal.

“I was also trying to point out that King went through rejection. People narrate him as this ladies’ man. But that’s when he’s famous. Prior to being famous, he’s a regular guy, telling people he’s going to be a minister, maybe in the deep south, and as I point out in the book, many women he tries to approach, they’re not interested in that. It makes you laugh. According to one woman, he approaches her and tells her: ‘I want to marry you.’ He leads with that. On first dates, he’s telling women: ‘I’m looking to get married.’ That’s just not appealing. He tells one woman: ‘I want a woman who’s going to take care of me the way my mother did.’ That’s not marital bliss.”

Nearly 60 years after King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968, he is a giant of US history, memorialized in granite. That man is not Martin’s subject. His King is simply a young man: unformed, unsure, making mistakes and learning lessons.

“I was trying to get the reader to see these are these normal moments of someone in their late teens and early 20s,” Martin said, “in a way that does not try to justify or give historical reasons to some of the rumors we see about him today – whatever things the FBI and others tried to peddle. That this was just a young man, as Coretta says, in a hurry to get on with his destiny.”

• Young King is out now