Mitt Romney's campaign has provided documentation to establish that the Republican presidential candidate's father participated in a series of marches in support of Martin Luther King Jr. in his home state, but establishing whether King and former Michigan Gov. George Romney actually marched arm in arm has become a bit of a parlor game.

The GOP presidential candidate has stated several times that he's proud of his father's leadership and the lessons he instilled in teaching his children about equal rights for all Americans.

In a speech on faith in College Station, Texas earlier this month, Romney said, "I saw my father march with Martin Luther King." He's sticking by that claim, but in Iowa on Thursday said he was being "figurative" during the address, and that he did not personally witness King with his father.

"I speak in the sense that I saw my dad become president of American Motors. I wasn't actually there when he became president of American Motors, but I saw him in the figurative sense. He marched with Martin Luther King. My brother remembers him also marching with Martin Luther King and so I in that sense I saw him march with Martin Luther King. I don't know exactly where they were standing at the time," he said.

"If you look at the literature or the dictionary the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I have described. It is a figure of speech and very familiar and very common and I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."

The campaign provided several pages of excerpts from news articles and other sources detailing George Romney's civil rights history. The excerpts show that Romney gave the keynote address in 1963, at a conference that touched off King's "Freedom Marches" in Detroit. Romney later made a surprise appearance and marched in an NAACP-sponsored rally in the summer of 1963 in Grosse Pointe, Mich. 

"Governor Romney is very proud of his father and his father's record of fighting for civil rights in this country," spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said in an e-mail. "George Romney had a long record of supporting Martin Luther King Jr. He attended his funeral in 1968 and believed his death was a great national tragedy."

The Boston Phoenix and Detroit Free Press reported that the historical evidence still does not place Romney with King at any march, seemingly contradicting Mitt Romney's statements in Texas, even though he's repeated the claim about his father since, including during an appearance on Tim Russert's "Meet the Press."

The Free Press reported George Romney did not attend King's massive civil rights march in Detroit in June 1963, because it was on a Sunday and that he avoided public appearances because of his religion. The paper reported Romney did participate in a civil rights march in Grosse Pointe shortly after, but King was not there.

Click here to read the Detroit Free Press article.

Click here to read the Boston Phoenix article.

Even though Romney said Thursday that he believes his father broke his self-imposed Sunday rule, New York Times clippings from June 1963 back up the Free Press account. A June 24 story said Romney, who was Mormon, would not make appearances on Sunday and instead issued a proclamation and sent two personal representatives to King's Detroit march. A June 30 story said Romney then led a "racially mixed group of 1,000" through Grosse Pointe on June 29.

The accounts counter an excerpt from a 1967 book by Stephen Hess and David Broder that says the two marched through the "exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit."

Hess told the Detroit Free Press he couldn't remember the source for the reference in the book, but he doesn't think it matters to voters or Romney's candidacy whether Romney's father and King were literally side by side.

FOX News' Shushannah Walshe contributed to this report.