HOUSTON – 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.
“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 Wednesday, 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.
