King & Reddick

The first biography written about Martin Luther King, Jr. was Crusader Without Violence by Dr. L. D. Reddick and published by Harper & Brothers in 1959. Prior to its publication, Reddick joined the Kings on a trip to India as guests of the Gandhi Memorial Fund. The biography has been republished for its 60th Anniversary with a new introduction by Dr. Derryn E. Moten, Professor and Chair Department of History and Political Science at Alabama State University. Here is an excerpt from the introduction about how Reddick and King met:

Dr. Lawrence Dunbar Reddick wrote Crusader without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. during his chairmanship of the History Department at Alabama State College. He had met King in Atlanta during Reddick’s sojourn in Atlanta University and King’s matriculation at Morehouse College. They had mutual friends and acquaintances in Atlanta. The two reunited in Montgomery while King was pastor there of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, a stately red-brick building completed in 1889 on the city’s main street just one block from the State Capitol. Reddick was forty-five upon his arrival in Montgomery in 1955 and King had been twenty-five when he landed in the city in 1954.

L. D. Reddick was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1910 and was named after poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Prior to assuming the chairmanship in 1955 of Alabama State College history department, Reddick had faculty appointments at Kentucky State College, Dillard University, City College of New York, and the new School for Social Research, and was chief librarian at Atlanta University Center. In between, he replaced the famed Arthur Schomburg as the curator of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature from 1939 to 1948.

Reddick arrived in Montgomery fortuitously in the months immediately before the start of a movement that would transform the city and the nation. In “How This Book Was Written,” the last chapter in Crusader Without Violence, Reddick acknowledged his bewilderment at the first mass meeting on December 5, 1955, but soon gleaned that he was witnessing history in the making.