Reconnected 53 Years Later

Volume VII has reconnected a participant in the civil rights movement to a long-lost picture. In a photograph featured in Volume VII: To Save the Soul of America, January 1961-August 1962 of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., King thanks eleven-year-old Chuck Moran for being the first to volunteer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's voter registration and direct action campaign, at a 27 March 1962, stop in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Nearly 53 years after the photograph was taken, Moran, received his copy of the volume just before the annual King Holiday. In a congratulatory email to Project staff, Moran expressed his thanks: "Today is a very special Martin Luther King Day for me thanks to you and your team. I still can't express how much it means to me that you located the photo that I had hunted for and all but given up on. The fact that you memorialized that incredible, life-changing moment in such a grand volume of Dr. King's papers brings me much joy. I am so grateful to you and your team, and I do hope that you will share my profound thanks with everyone in your group who knows anything about this small part of Dr. King's life. It is anything but a small part of mine.