via bcnn1.com Audrey Hoffman’s hesitant first letter — written on a college dorm mate’s dare — apologized for seeming “bold and wrong.” The recipient, William Lawson, a seminarian and neophyte preacher in rural Kansas who had resigned himself to life as a celibate missionary, was surprised and charmed.
The Rev. William Lawson and his wife, Audrey, stand in front of an exhibit at the African American Library at the Gregory School, where they are donating their correspondence.
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“Lady,” he wrote back two days later, “the fact that you wrote at all is flattery of the most ego-boosting brand!”
Thus began a remarkable courtship by mail that, from September 1952 to January 1954, resulted in the exchange of more than 600 love letters between the Nashville, Tenn., college girl and the future founding minister of Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church.
In January 1954, Hoffman, who had spurned the proposals of five previous suitors, and Lawson were wed. Prior to the nuptials, they had met face to face only eight times.
On Tuesday, the Lawsons — now the parents of four adult children — will donate their correspondence to the archives of the African American Library at the Gregory School and the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, both arms of the Houston Public Library.
The letters, Gregory archivist Vince Lee said, provide rare insight into Lawson, a longtime Houston religious and social leader who, in the 1960s, was a confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“They highlight and spotlight an aspect that the public doesn’t get to see very often,” he said. “They offer a new dimension of him during the courtship of his wife.”
Audrey Lawson said she and her husband decided to donate the letters because they feared that, outside the guardianship of an institution, the correspondence eventually could be lost.
The Lawsons’ decision to make the letters public is supported by their children, said Cheryl Lawson, the couple’s second-oldest child.
“We have been charmed by their love letters,” she said. “We certainly admire them for putting the letters in the public realm. They consider themselves part of the community in a way most couples don’t.”
