Martin Luther King, Jr. Resources: Books by MLK, Jr.

Dr. King's account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolence resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King traces the phenomenal journey of a community, and shows how he at twenty-eight-year-old, with his conviction for equality and nonviolence, helped transformed the nation-and the world.

Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963. King examines the history of the civil rights struggle and the tasks that future generations must accomplish to bring about full equality. The book also includes the extraordinary “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which King wrote in April of 1963.

The classic collection of sixteen sermons preached and compiled by Dr. King. As Dr. King prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love, a volume of his best-known homilies. King had begun working on the sermons during a fortnight in jail in July 1962.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this significantly prophetic work we find King’s acute analysis of American race relations and the state of the movement after a decade of civil rights efforts. Here he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America’s future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education.

In November and December 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered five lectures for the renowned Massey Lecture Series of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The collection was immediately released as a book under the title Conscience for Change, but after King’s assassination in 1968, it was republished as The Trumpet of Conscience. The collection sums up his lasting creed and is his final testament on racism, poverty, and war.

Eloquent and passionate, reasoned and sensitive, this pair of meditations by the revered civil-rights leader contains the theological roots of his political and social philosophy of nonviolent activism.

Celebrated Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson is the director and editor of the Martin Luther King Papers Project; with thousands of King's essays, notes, letters, speeches, and sermons at his disposal, Carson has organized King's writings into a posthumous autobiography. The autobiography delves, for example, into the philosophical training King received at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, where he consolidated the teachings of Afro-American theologian Benjamin Mays with the philosophies of Locke, Rousseau, Gandhi, and Thoreau.

An unprecedented and timely collection of Dr. King’s speeches on labor rights and economic justice. People forget that Dr. King was every bit as committed to economic justice as he was to ending racial segregation. He fought throughout his life to connect the labor and civil rights movements, envisioning them as twin pillars for social reform. King’s prophetic writings and speeches underscore his relevance for today.

This book is a milestone collection of Dr. King's most influential and best-known speeches. The editors of this volume takes you behind the scenes on an astonishing historical journey - from the small, crowded church in Montgomery, Alabama, where "The Birth of a New Nation" ignited the modern civil rights movement, to the center of the nation's capital, where "I Have a Dream" echoed through a nation's conscience.

Here, in the only major one-volume collection of his writings, speeches, interviews, and autobiographical reflections, is Martin Luther King Jr. on non-violence, social policy, integration, Black Nationalism, the ethics of love and hope.

More than two decades since his death, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ideas--his call for racial equality, his faith in the ultimate triumph of justice, and his insistence on the power of nonviolent struggle to bring about a major transformation of American society--are as vital and timely as ever. The wealth of his writings, both published and unpublished, that constitute his intellectual legacy are now preserved in this authoritative, chronologically arranged, multi-volume edition. Faithfully reproducing the texts of his letters, speeches, sermons, student papers, and articles, this edition has no equal.