THE QUESTION IS ANSWERED! from THE SIEGEL SIDEBAR / January 26, 2020

THE QUESTION IS ANSWERED!

By Heather e Siegel at THE SIEGEL SIDEBAR in California
[with some additional reporting by Dan Bloom in Taiwan]
January 26, 2020

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., (MLK), was studying for his doctoral
degree, in the early 1950s, he faced a major stumbling block. In order to
earn his Doctorate of Philosophy in Systematic Theology, the degree-
granting institution, Boston University, (BU), required that King have a
reading knowledge of a language other than American English.

B.U. academic records show that King chose to study the German syntax.
Why did MLK, an African-American, born and raised in Atlanta, select
German as his language of choice for his studies at Boston University?

Perhaps because King had traveled to Germany as a youth with his father, in
1934, and, 30 years later, returned to Berlin in 1964. His knowledge of
German was useful to Dr. King during his entire career, according to
Stanford University’s MLK Research and Education Institute, founded in
2005.

Little was known about the German tutor, however, until Milo
Thornberry, a Methodist missionary educator in Taiwan earlier in his life, published his memoir, Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan’s White Terror, in early 2011 with Sunbury Press in Pennsylvania (Available at Amazon).

Thornberry, then 73, (deceased March 8, 2017) wrote in the book that he had worked
with the same tutor, as MLK had, when he, Thornberry, was studying for his
own doctoral degree, ten years later, in 1965, also at Boston University. Although the tutor tutored Thornberry inn French, according to sources.

While Thornberry could not recall the tutor’s name, he was sure that the tutor was a
German emigre to the USA who fled Nazi Germany and who lived in the Back Bay section of Boston.

Dan Bloom, a journalist in Taiwan who was a friend of Thornberry and helped published the memoir in the USA,  took up the thread, in March 2011, when he, Bloom, published an
article about  Thornberry’s book in the San Diego Jewish World website. Bloom titled his article
with this intriguing headline: [''Was a Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany Martin Luther King's tutor at Boston University in the 1950s?''] Bloom was not able to name the tutor by name because Thornberry could not remember the name, and Bloom just didn't know how to find out.

And that question remained unanswered until the latest celebration of MLK
Day in 2020.

On January 17, 2020, Heather Siegel was researching her family history,
when she by chance came upon Bloom’s 2011 article. Like every amateur
genealogist, she was both shocked and intrigued by her "discovery.” You
see, Siegel is Dr. Herman Klugman’s great niece. She knew the answer.
Siegel but just did not know that Bloom had been asking the question for 9 years.

He finally learned the truth in early 2020 when Siegel and her cousin Jean Klugman contacted him by email.

Herman Klugman, Ph.D., was a retired MIT physics professor who lived in
Brookline, a Boston suburb, at the time that MLK was pursuing his doctoral
thesis at Boston University. Born in Germany, Klugman had escaped Nazi
persecution and had relocated his family to Boston. Being a native speaker of German,
Dr. Klugman devoted both his time and his interest to help King meet the
requirements of his academic program.

Martin Luther King, Jr., became Dr. King in 1955, thanks to the help from a
German emigre tutor in Boston.

Dr. Klugman passed away in 1974, according to an obituary that appeared in the Boston Globe newspaper that year..

NOTE: Heather Siegel, a well-known American disability rights activist, publishes her own
Internet blog, THE SIEGEL SIDEBAR. Siegel researches her family history
weekly at the Family History Center in Escondido, California.

To contact her, please use email at heatheresiegel@cox.net