By Melissa Dunson
mdunson@joplinglobe.com
At the time, Clarence Bozeman was a college student trying to make a little money by driving a black minister around Alabama when he wasn’t studying to become a history teacher.
Now, Bozeman, 72, said he realizes that those hours in the van with civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. make him a part of history.
Bozeman served as King’s driver to various speaking engagements for two years in the early 1960s, while King was pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.
“I didn’t know what I had,” Bozeman said in a telephone interview with the Globe. “Some of the things we talked about didn’t have an impact on me until years later.”
Bozeman, currently a Cleveland, Ohio, resident, said he and King discussed many things on those long drives, including religion, ethics and, most of all, the civil-rights movement. King also liked history, Bozeman said, even while he was making it.
“Many times, after taking other people home from church, I would go back to the church to pick (King) up,” he said. “I would have to sit and wait for him because there were so many people that came to talk with him, people from Europe and India. They would be lined up.”
Bozeman will share some of those conversations as well as the lessons America can take from King’s life during a Martin Luther King Day address Monday at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin.
“(King) taught us how to love and forgive,” Bozeman said. “It’s a lesson we absolutely still need today.”
He said he lost touch with King after the minister moved to Atlanta in the 1960s to lead another church, but said he had dinner with King when he came back to visit Montgomery.
When King was killed in 1968, Bozeman said he was devastated. He finished his bachelor’s degree in American history and social studies at Alabama State University and his master’s degree in educational administration from Fordham University. He also has a specialist degree from Cleveland State University.
Bozeman spent 32 years as an educator, most of it at Shaw High School in Cleveland, and said he still tries to convey the message that King instilled in him as a young man.
“Most of the time, in my classroom, my kids would remember (King) as a historical figure, y’know, back in ancient times,” he said. “But I wanted to make people understand that he was a man, to make them realize that he is not some ancient statue standing some place.”
Bozeman had some contact with King’s family since his death, including a visit with King’s widow, the late Coretta Scott King, while he was in graduate school in New York.
Bozeman has retired from public education, and currently works as a consultant with Edwards Educational Systems, speaking to urban schools and offering insight into curriculum restructuring and changes in classroom management.
He also does some speaking around the country on his relationship with King and issues in education. He was actually in Joplin a year ago to speak to a college class on “What Makes A Great Teacher.” Bozeman said his address Monday will focus on a comparison of Barack Obama’s journey to president of the U.S. with King’s struggle for civil-rights equality.
Want to go?
Clarence Bozeman will speak at noon Monday in Corley Auditorium in Webster Hall on the Missouri Southern State University campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, call 625-9506.
