Clayborne Carson is a historian and one of the nation’s leading scholars on the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He served as a close associate of Coretta Scott King and was appointed by her to direct the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, which preserves, edits and publishes King’s writings and speeches. Carson is the founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, where much of the editorial work on King’s papers has been based. To date, seven of the 14 planned volumes of “The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.” have been published, with King’s original documents housed across institutions including Stanford, Boston University and the King Center in Atlanta. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Carson spoke with The OBSERVER about King’s work, his final years and what the civil rights leader was pushing toward before his assassination.

If someone wants to revisit Martin Luther King Jr.’s work, where should they start?

I would recommend starting with King’s last book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” In it, he clearly lays out his focus on globalizing the civil rights struggle and addressing economic issues on a worldwide scale. If King had lived even one year longer, it would have been more obvious that he intended to launch new initiatives like the Poor People’s Campaign and to participate in broader movements aimed at economic justice.

In that final book, he was laying out an agenda for the rest of his life. Even the title says it all. Yes, he was the most famous civil rights leader in the country, but his real question he was asking was: Where do we go from here?

Do you think people today misunderstand what exactly he was working toward?

Yes, and that’s probably why he wrote that last book. When you go back to his final book and his last speeches, it’s quite clear that global poverty had become central to his agenda. He was deeply involved in efforts to globalize the struggle and to place economic issues — both in the United States and worldwide — at the center of the movement.

I always emphasize that he was assassinated at just 39 years old. He had just published “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” We’ll never know what he would have done in another 39 years if he had lived and continued to write and organize. That’s one of the reasons the King Papers Project exists. Coretta Scott King understood that his work had to continue and that we had to bring public attention not only to what he wrote during his lifetime, but to the broader vision he was still developing.

Do Dr. King’s papers provide any clues about where he would have focused his efforts if he were alive today?

Yes. He was clearly focused on two major issues: poverty in the United States and poverty on a global scale. He wasn’t alone in that. Many leaders in the movement became increasingly international in their outlook. He was assassinated the same year debates were unfolding around the 1968 Olympic boycott. Muhammad Ali and others were bringing national and international politics into sports, and King was part of that broader push.

He was among those in the civil rights movement who were saying we need to think globally. He was contacted about the Olympic boycott, which was extremely controversial at the time, and he was willing to speak out. In fact, he attended a meeting shortly before his assassination where boycotting the 1968 Olympics was discussed.

What do you think Dr. King would say about where we went from there?

I think he would fault those who assumed the movement was simply about desegregation and that once segregation ended and civil rights legislation passed, the struggle was over. He was saying there were deeper issues we still needed to confront, and that we needed to address them on a global basis.

Why do you think so much attention is paid to Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech rather than his other work?

That speech is what really made him famous. I was there, and people understood immediately that it was extraordinary. It’s not often that you attend a speech and walk away thinking, “That was truly great.” That’s what happened for me and for many others.

If you were creating a new curriculum to teach Dr. King in schools, how would you approach it?

One of the most important things would be not to focus entirely on King as an individual. The movement was much larger than one person. If there had never been a Martin Luther King Jr., there still would have been a civil rights movement. The movement created him.

Too often, the narrative becomes that the movement succeeded simply because King was a great orator. There were many powerful speakers in the movement. When he was assassinated, 1968 marked a turning point. He and others understood that unless the struggle shifted toward economic justice and took on a global dimension, the outcome would ultimately be disappointing.