by Dan Bloom, blog staff writer
Writing occasional columns for the San Diego Jewish World website over the past ten years or so often brings me delightful surprises that come in the mail, email in most cases.
- Just the other day, I received an email from Jean Klugman in Boston that read: ''Hello Dan. My cousin Heather Siegel just sent me a copy of the 2011 article you wrote MLK's tutor at Boston University in the 1950s.
''That was my grandfather, Herman Klugman, whose wife was Dora. Good detective work on your part,'' Jeannie Klugman in Boston told me in her email.
A second email from Jean’s cousin, Heather Siegel in Escondido, California, read: ''Herman Klugman
was Jean's grandfather, as she told you in her email, and he was my mother’s uncle. I have two younger brothers
who are actively trying to do research on the family, too.''
To recap the original article from 2011:
I wrote at the time that "a German-Jewish emigre in Boston was Martin Luther King’s German-language PhD exam tutor at Boston University when King was studying for his doctorate in systematic theology in the early 1950s, according to a self-published memoir by a Methodist pastor named Milo Thornberry, who told me he studied with the same tutor when Thornberry was studying for his PHD in 1965 at Boston University.
While Thornberry told me he could not recall the man’s name, he is sure he was a German immigrant who lived in the Back Bay section of Boston and he is sure he was King’s tutor in the early 1950s. For two reasons: one, because his PhD advisors at Boston University, Per Hassing and Harold DeWolf told him so, and two, because the tutor once mentioned it.
"The gentleman was in his 60s when he tutored the young Martin Luther King in his small Back Bay apartment in Boston," Thornberry told me before he passed away in Oregon a few years ago.
''King was in his early 20s, while his tutor was in his 60s,'' Thornberry said.
How did this come about? According to Thornberry, one of MLK’s professors recommended the German-speaking man to King as an excellent German-language exam tutor.
“[That tutor] knows how to get students ready for the exams,” Harold DeWolf told Thornberry in the mid-1960s, when he was stuyding in Boston, and DeWolf recommended the same tutor for Thornberry, adding that the same man had been MLK’s tutor as well.
Now, nine years later, thanks to two American relatives who wrote to me, we know the name of the tutor: Herman Klugman, z'l.
Klugman lived in a small apartment with his wife Dora in the Back Bay section of Boston, and that is where King went for his tutoring sessions with him. It was in September of 1951 that King began his doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University. His dissertation, “A Comparison of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Wieman,” was completed in 1955, and the PhD. degree from Boston University, a Doctorate of Philosophy in Systematic Theology, was awarded on June 5, 1955.
The tutor, according to Thornberry, ''was small in stature, thin, with a head of gray hair, and it was believed that he come to the U.S. from Nazi Germany. He spoke English with a German accent and usually tutored graduate students in German, although he also tutored PhD students in French.''
Thornberry said that the tutor’s apartment in the Back Bay section of Boston was small, and that he had a wife who would serve coffee and then disappear into another room. Klugman would have been in his mid to late 60s in the mid 1950s when he tutored King.
When Klugman was asked about his memories of MLK when he was his student for the off-campus tutoring sessions, Klugman told one of the Boston University advisors who was also Thornberry’s advisor: “Ah yes,he was a good student, that Martin!”
Klugman also told Thornberry: “When Martin was here as a student at BU, I knew I would be reading about him in the newspapers someday, he had that charisma about him already, but I just didn’t know it would be so soon. Within six months of getting his doctorate, he was leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott!”
I then asked, in my article published in 2011: "If any readers out there in cyberspace know the name of this tutor in Boston, please contact me.'' Nothing happene for nine years.
But finally, now in 2020, nine years later, we have confirmation of the story and emails from Klugman's relatives to add to what we now know. Long live the internet, and thanks to Jean Klugman and Heather Siegel for taking the time to find me online.
There's more, I have further learned, thanks to the dogged legwork of the Boston Globe library staff and one determined individual in particular, Jeremiah Manion, who found an old 1974 obituary for Klugman from the Globe on December 6, 1974 that noted that “after he retired from teaching in Boston, [Klugman] became a private tutor. One of his students was Martin Luther King...when he was studying for his PhD at Boston University [in the early 1950s.]”
Krugman was married to Dora Krugman, nee Bloch, the Globe obit noted.
The Globe obit added that Krugman was born in Germany and taught math, languges and religion at Boston University and MIT, and after retiring from formal teaching, became a tutor, and did tutor MLK while King was stuyding for his PHD in theology.
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