Several years ago, near Chester, Pennsylvania, Jason Ipock's aunt was looking to downsize now that she had retired. In her possession was a collection of old family home videos that took up too much room.
Some of the films were in worn-out film canisters, and Ipock worried they'd soon be unplayable. "I decided that I should have the family films digitized, so that we'll always have a copy in the event of a catastrophe," he said.
One had a label that stood out from the others: "Martin Luther King." Ipock had heard stories about this film for years from his aunt and grandmother, Mary Ipock, and decided to digitize it first by going to a film store in Philadelphia.
The result was an MP4 file, a 13-minute film - in color.
The first eight minutes of the film show footage of the Ipock family - Jason Ipock's grandmother, aunt and father - at the Philadelphia zoo in May 1950. The man behind the camera was Garrison Durham Ipock, Jason's grandfather. Garrison Ipock was a divinity student at Crozer Theological Seminary, in Upland, Pennsylvania, one year ahead of Martin Luther King. The last five minutes of the film show footage of 9 May 1950, the day of Garrison's graduation ceremony.
Garrison Ipock, who died in 1993 at age 76, was a second world war veteran and served as a communications officer in the US Navy. In 1947, he enrolled at Crozer, joining a post-war national trend of young men turning to seminaries after enduring the trauma of a battlefield.
Being a communications officer meant understanding the newest technology. Garrison was an amateur radio enthusiast, and after he and Mary moved into an apartment near Crozer's campus, he bought one of the first televisions in the area. This attracted other enrolled seminarians looking to catch baseball games or boxing matches. One family story has it that King - who went by ML, not Martin Luther, at the time - often came over to the house to watch television.
It's no surprise, on that 9 May graduation day, that Garrison, then 32, came prepared with a state-of-the-art camera. His film footage covers outdoor lawn gatherings of seminarians and professors, many in black robes, walking between the Old Main building - where King lived between 1948 and 1951 - and Commencement Hall.
In the film are many of King's Crozer professors. One moment shows Dr Morton Scott Enslin, who taught King classes such as "The Gospels" and "The New Testament", sharing a laugh with someone unknown. King's music instructor, Ruth Grooters, in charge of vespers, stands alone and smiles at the camera. Then there is Robert Keighton, who taught King various sermonic formats in public speaking class, and Dean Charles Batten, who helped to coax out of King one of his more honest autobiographical pieces of writing, posing with a smile in front of the camera.
Then, for three seconds, Ipock catches King. He's in a white coat standing next to a young white woman named Betty Moitz, his girlfriend at the time. Together, they discover Ipock's camera and turn toward it. Betty smiles, and King seems content. Nearby is a friend, fellow seminarian Cyril Pyle, and Betty's mother, Hannah.
The clip stands - unless the King family has previously unreleased home videos stashed away - as the earliest film recording of Martin Luther King Jr in motion. To top it off, he is standing next to the first woman he ever seriously considered marrying.
For Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Garrow, the film continues a story that started 40 years ago. In his 1986 King biography, Bearing the Cross, Garrow was the first to note Betty’s first and last names, which allowed me, thanks to some internet tracking and cross-country trips, to find her and learn the whole story. “I think the scene in the film underscores what a genuinely happy/privileged life MLK had up until the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955,” says Garrow.
In January 2021, I gave a book talk via Zoom about the research for my first biography, The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr Comes of Age. The event had been organized by the then-J Lewis Crozer library director Mark Winston and the head of programming Susan C Waller. After 45 minutes there was an unrecorded question-and-answer session. Jason’s wife Gretchen was in attendance and she told me about this film and asked whether I’d like to view it when it was available. Of course I said yes and sure enough on 11 January 2024 I received an email from Jason. There it was: a few minutes of my book’s setting and the people ... moving around becoming real.
When I saw King with Betty I shook my head in disbelief. Betty had told me when I spoke to her that the spring and fall of 1950 was when their relationship was at its most serious; when they were in her words “madly madly in love the way young people can fall in love”.
King had worked in the kitchen when he first arrived on campus in 1948 helping Betty’s mother Hannah with the dishes. He was at this May graduation for two reasons: to help Hannah; and to represent the next graduating class as the newly elected student body president. At the start of his second year he’d been elected to the position of devotions committee chair which meant organizing the weekly church service program. King may have given a short speech congratulating the graduating class after being introduced by the Crozer president Sankey Blanton.
Seeing Betty’s mother and Cyril Pyle standing next to King and Betty immediately brought me back to a 28 January 1986 cassette-recorded interview conducted by Garrow. Pyle admitted to Garrow that he’d kept his eye on King’s romance with Betty saying: “I thought it was a dangerous situation that could get out of hand; and if it did get out of hand it would smear King. It would make [his future] hard for him.” Pyle did have a point: 29 states including the entire American south still had laws banning interracial marriage; with a 1958 Gallup poll showing only 4% of people approved of “marriages between white and colored people”.
So how important are these three seconds? Well besides being the earliest film recording of King it further authenticates the relationship between King and Betty Moitz. It’s also worth noting that just one month later in the early morning hours of 12 June 1950 King was involved in his first civil rights-related incident after being refused service at a café/bar in Maple Shade New Jersey—a 30-minute drive from Crozer’s Old Main building.
King’s years at Crozer (1948-1951) were vital toward his intellectual development and allowed him a chance to find his own voice away from the domineering shadow of his father back in Atlanta. In this micro moment of 9 May King had not yet committed to his future destination Boston University—and would soon consider other opportunities at Yale and even Edinburgh University in Scotland. He and Betty were in love—as forbidden as it was—and King’s interest in Edinburgh stemmed from his desire to continue his relationship with Betty away from the harsh judgment of his peers.
Ultimately they chose to part ways; society’s negativity toward interracial marriage being a major factor; leaving King—as his Crozer mentor Rev J Pius Barbour put it—“as a man with a broken heart. He never recovered.”
After viewing the clip, King biographer Jonathan Eig weighed in on its value. "It's a thrill," said Eig, whose King: A Life won the 2024 Pulitzer prize for biography, "like seeing a long-lost friend on the street, only better. It's a new window on one of our most important lives - and we see young ML happy, in love and relatively carefree. What a gift!"
As Jason Ipock, 52, puts it, the film was "merely an interesting footnote about Dr King", one that his grandfather had labeled "Martin Luther King" after witnessing from his own Baptist pulpit as the southern preacher burst to global fame. But after learning about King's relationship with Betty Moitz, Jason felt that "the film became much more than just a private heirloom - it was another part of history meant to be shared".
The Ipock film gives us a never-before-seen glimpse into King's life pre-boycott. At the very least, it should inspire others to re-investigate their own old home-movie recordings.
As for me, the footage is an unexpected treasure: a biography I wrote came alive, if but for an instant.