An homage to my far more famous namesake

The story behind the book began 21,286 days ago. Math wizards on Substack can tell you that this was Thursday, April 4, 1968.

It is a day I will never forget.

Even though, it’s true: I remember almost none of it.

I was 7 years old, a first grader at Grace Avenue Elementary School in Great Neck, New York. I remember that my teacher was named Mrs. Jackowski. But I have no recollection of the school day.

I don’t remember the weather, but a quick look back in The New York Times informs me that it was a cloudy and rainy day with temperatures reaching into the upper 50s.

I had no sense of a larger world beyond my suburban bubble—not until late in the day, anyway—so the Page 1 headlines about the U.S. agreeing to talks with North Vietnam meant nothing to me. There was some hope about ending the war in Southeast Asia, which sent stock markets soaring. (But that war would drag on for seven more awful years.)

What I remember is this: after dinner, I went upstairs to my parents’ bedroom, where we had a small black-and-white television with rabbit-ear antennas. I sat down on the green rug in front of the bed and started watching my favorite show, “Truth or Consequences.” My mother stood behind me, folding laundry on the bed—laundry I can still smell in memory.

Then there was the beep-beep-beep of the special report and the news that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. I had never heard of Dr. King, but the moment is indelible because my mother, in the most stricken voice I had ever heard, choked out, “Oh my God!” I wheeled around and saw her with her hand over her heart, her face crumpling in horror. “Oh my God!” she said a second time.

“Oh my God!”

And so it began, my fascination with Dr. King.

In junior high school, I wrote a poem about him. In college, I read the “I Have a Dream” speech into a tape recorder, listening to that cassette tape so many times that I still have parts of the speech memorized.

In my first teaching job, at an idealistic Quaker school on a farm in New Hampshire, I began studying King’s nonviolent philosophy.

A few years after I began teaching journalism at Springfield College in Massachusetts in 1999, I learned that Dr. King had delivered the commencement speech there on June 14, 1964. I was surprised. Why would King speak at this small school at the height of his fame, at the peak of the civil rights movement? When I started to research it, I was startled to find a double drama hiding in plain sight. First, there was intense pressure from the FBI placed on Springfield College President Glenn Olds to “disinvite” King, based on dirt the Bureau had dredged up on the civil rights leader from its recent surveillance. It was a great moral crisis for Olds, a fascinating man I got to interview a couple of times before his death in 2006.

After Olds had weathered this moment of truth, summoning the courage to stick to his convictions, King was arrested and jailed in St. Augustine, Florida, on June 11, 1964. He was in jail on the 12^th. And the 13^th. Would he even make it?

Yes, he did: creating the most famous day in the history of a college where I still teach.

That saga was fascinating to me. Fascinating enough to motivate me to write articles in our alumni magazine, and then in The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-the-fbi-tried-to-block-martin-luther-kings-commencement-speech/372258/).

The fascination morphed into obsession when I posed the question: “What’s the deal with St. Augustine?” Back then, I had only an elementary understanding of the highlights of the civil rights movement. The Montgomery Bus Boycott. The dogs and the fire hoses in Birmingham. Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Sit-ins. Freedom Rides.

But St. Augustine?

After many years of immersion, after well over a dozen research trips to the south, after conducting and transcribing hundreds of in-depth interviews, I came to believe that what happened in St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city, is an absolutely pivotal part of American history, one of our greatest under-told stories. I came to believe that it was important.

It all came together as Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida. The book will be published three months from today, on October 15, by Cambridge University Press. As of today, preorders are available at www.civilwriter.com.

It is the best work of my life, and I’m proud to have corroboration from many prominent historians.

“Woven with journalistic rigor and lyrical wonder,” says Ken Burns, “this is a timely and beautiful book.”

Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Jonathan Eig adds, “It’s not easy to find bold new ways to write about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights struggle, but Martin Dobrow has done it.”

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Photos from my visit to the National Mall on July 12, 2026.

This week, my wife, Missy, and I are down in DC visiting family. On Sunday, we made the pilgrimage to the National Mall.

I looked out at the green and murky reflecting pool, fenced off from the public, and imagined the legs of Black and white people dangling in the water during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.

Then I climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and kneeled before the carved spot where Dr. King delivered his majestic words about now being the “time to make real the promises of democracy.”

From there, I took the short walk to the MLK Memorial, where a 30-foot sculpture of Dr. King looked resolute against the backdrop of a cloudy sky, arms folded, face locked in determination.

I loved watching people from so many backgrounds gravitate to these spots as something holy, something hopeful, something that honored the very best of what America can be.