Martin Luther King, Jr. Resources

A collection of papers by Black artists and scholars who attended a symposium on the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. In We Shall Overcome, America's leading scholars and activists from the civil rights years speak on a fascinating range of experiences surrounding King and his era, from his early personal religious conversion to his impact on the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa; from his place in the history of the African-American church to the rise in Third World liberation struggles.

Stewart Burns draws not only on King's speeches, letters, writings, and well-reported strategizing and activities, but also on previously underutilized oral histories of key meetings and events, which present a dramatic account of King and the movement in the crucial years from 1955 to 1968. In a striking departure from earlier books on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, Burns focuses on King's biblical faith and spiritual vision as fundamental to his political leadership and shows how these threads wove together a "single garment of destiny," making King the most important social prophet of the twentieth century.

A private citizen who transformed the world around him, Martin Luther King, Jr., was arguably the greatest American who ever lived. Now, after more than thirty years, few people understand how truly radical he was. In this groundbreaking examination of the man and his legacy, provocative author, lecturer, and professor Michael Eric Dyson restores King's true vitality and complexity and challenges us to embrace the very contradictions that make King relevant in today's world.

In the masterly and riveting Martin Luther King, Jr., Marshall Frady draws on his twenty-five years of award-winning commentary on American race relations to give an inspiring portrait of this amazing leader and the turbulent era in which he lived. Martin Luther King, Jr., deftly interweaves the history of the civil rights movement with King's rise to fame and influence and includes fascinating insight into factions within the movement itself. Frady explores the complexities of King's relationship with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, J. Edgar Hoover's relentless pursuit of King's demise, and King's own anticipation of his death.

The story of King is dramatic, and Godfrey Hodgson presents it with verve, clarity, and acute insight based in part on his own reporting on-scene at the time. He interviewed King half a dozen times or more; heard his speech at the March on Washington; was in Birmingham, Selma and Chicago; and met many of the characters in King's life story. Martin Luther King combines the best of his own reporting, plus the work of other biographers and researchers, to trace the iconic civil rights leader's career from his birth in Atlanta in 1929, through the campaigns that made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to his assassination in Memphis in 1968.

April 4, 1968, and a gunshot rings out in the Memphis sky, fatally wounding Martin Luther King Jr. In 'Let the Trumpet Sound', award-winning biographer Stephen B. Oates resurrects the heart, soul and life of the tireless civil rights campaigner.

This book explores the extraordinary performances through which King played with all of these possibilities, and others too, blending and gliding in and out of idioms and identities. Taking us deep into King's backstage discussions with colleagues, his preaching to black congregations, his exhortations in mass meetings, and his crossover addresses to whites, Jonathan Rieder tells a powerful story about the tangle of race, talk, and identity in the life of one of America's greatest moral and political leaders.

Originally written for an adult audience in 1969, this absorbing, moving, and important story of the growth of the Civil Rights Movement has been revised especially for young adults. Introduction by the author's children, Bernice, Dexter, Martin, and Yolanda King. 16-page photo insert.

Dexter King was just seven years old when an assassin took his father Martin Luther King's life. The bond between father and son was a close one and for years afterwards Dexter was haunted by a memory of himself and his dad riding their bikes through Atlanta's streets and by his father's laugh as he romped with his family. Dexter tried to find courage in his father's example of selfless heroism but as his shattered childhood ripened into adolescence the weight of the King legacy pressed down more heavily.

This outstanding biographical study won the Patron Saints Award of the Society of Midland Authors. Bennett has succeeded in giving his readers an intimate look into the physical, mental, and spiritual growth of Dr. King. Both Bennett and King are graduates of Morehouse College, and were schoolmates. The title of the book is an excerpt from a famous Biblical quotation. It is used here in a symbolic sense as an invocation of a man who moves not natural elements but social forces and millions of human beings.

In these eloquent essays, noted scholar, activist and friend of King, Vincent Harding, reflects on the forgotten legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. The widening of King's message and tactics reflected an expansion of his critique of American injustice and his solidarity with the oppressed. Harding writes passionately of King’s later years, when his message and witness became more radical and challenging to the status quo at every level.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Spirit-led Prophet tells the compelling story of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr pastor, theologian, scholar, orator, civil rights leader, martyr. Spirit-led Prophet chronicles Kings activities illustrating his nonviolent faith and how he lived it out in his ministry. In the midst of a tumultuous public life, King prayed for guidance and depended upon Gods spirit to lead him. Despite the cruelty and violence of the forces arrayed against the movement, King stressed the necessity to love ones enemies, to believe that unearned suffering is redemptive and to have faith in Gods just purposes.

In this new exploration of the "I have a dream” speech, Eric J. Sundquist places it in the history of American debates about racial justice--debates as old as the nation itself--and demonstrates how the speech, an exultant blend of grand poetry and powerful elocution, perfectly expressed the story of African American freedom. This book is the first to set King’s speech within the cultural and rhetorical traditions on which the civil rights leader drew in crafting his oratory, as well as its essential historical contexts, from the early days of the republic through present-day Supreme Court rulings.