June 18, 2015 -- Several years ago, Wayne Neal, of Antioch, CA, became interested in William Rufus DeVane King once he found that some of his cousins on his mother's side were kin to the King family. Wayne's Aunt Maggie Moss (Evans) married Rufus Lafayette Neal. Rufus's mother was from the King family. Then in 2007-08, Wayne was assigned to Selma AL, to help with the construction of a wood-pellet plant near there. This gave Wayne a chance to visit much of Dallas County that was King's home, and also King's burial crypt in Selma.
Since leaving Selma in 2008, Wayne has continued to learn as much as possible about King, and in the process, he learned of a 1955 Doctoral Thesis by John Milton Martin that could only be found at the library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wayne's sister, Joy (Neal) Brown, of Springfield MO, and a retired administrator at Missouri State University, worked over several months with the UNC-Chapel Hill library staff, and just recently managed to get the library's one extra copy of John Milton Martin's work sent on temporary loan to the Springfield-Greene County (MO) Library, plus permission to copy it. So Joy's husband, Ken Brown, "The Digital Packrat" scanned the entire Thesis of almost 400 pages, and processing it into readable and searchable PDF format, chapter by chapter, that is presented here. Click on each chapter below to read and/or download the thesis.
|
