Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)

Unfortunately, Martin Luther King’s legacy is often distilled into being a person who gave great speeches and advocated for a colorblind society. What’s missing in that simplistic view is his genius at organizing, his tactical brilliance, and his ability to create a vision that everyone could see. This book goes into all of that, in his own words. That helps as his actions aren’t being filtered or interpreted by someone else. King provides a great snapshot—almost like a show more historian—of 1963 and how the world was focusing their attentions after the assassination of President Kennedy. The main focus is on the actions in Birmingham and his ability to create a form of economic and racial justice for the people there. He also backtracks and provides a great deal of strategies—be it Biblical teachings, Gandhi, or his own understanding of America’s inhumane caste system. With social injustice still happening around the world, this book is important for anyone who has dedicated themselves to creating positive change. show less

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. reflects on the events of 1955-1956 surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott and his part in it.

King begins with how he came to Montgomery as a minister and what the city was like, mentioning Claudette Colvin's arrest and that there were some talks but that nothing came of them. The groundwork laid, we then get his account of Rosa Parks' arrest and the protest itself. He spends a whole chapter discussing the several writers who influenced his thoughts on nonviolent show more protest, including Henry David Thoreau, Reinhold Neibuhr, and of course Gandhi. We then get the contrast of that method with that of the opposition, who used violence, intimidation, and misinformation to try to get the protest to end. One of the most fascinating parts of it, for me, were how organized they were and how different that time was from our own. Yes, I know, I should have expected it - I know there were no smart phones and Internet in 1958. But they did so much with phone calls and newspapers, getting the word out and having mass meetings, keeping their message clear and on point. And their goals, in retrospect, were not really asking for much: "(1) a guarantee of courtesy; (2) a white reserved section at the front of the bus, and a Negro reserved section at the rear, with first-come, first-served obtaining for the unreserved, middle section; (3) special, all-Negro buses during the rush hours" (124). (That third goal shifted to the bus company being willing to hire Black drivers.) Throughout the year of protest, King describes the escalation of violence against him and other leaders, and his own moments of doubt and fear, but most of all his faith and why it was central to him as a Christian to insist on justice for all.

If my history classes touched on Civil Rights (most years we ended soon after World War 2), events of the 1950s and 1960s were sort of smooshed together and you'd think that there was a clean line from the Supreme Court rulings on desegregation to Southern resistance to finally Civil Rights workers, Black and white, resisting and demanding justice in all areas of life. But the reality, as Dr. King shows in his memoir, was much more complicated than that. It was not a quick and steady progress to justice, but long battles where even the people protesting didn't always agree on how to protest or how much to ask for. In 1958, when the book was published close on the heels of the bus boycott, the protesters gained a victory but still didn't expect folks to be so integrated as to share the same bench, let alone intermarry or have equal voting rights. And as I read the final chapter, "Where do we go from here?" I couldn't help but be saddened that there are still so many who would like to see us go right back to the 1950s in the oppression of others and demand for white privilege. Ever more necessary reading that I can't recommend highly enough. show less

Coretta Scott King says of this collection of sermons that it is the most requested and read of the books produced from King’s life. Interesting, that King himself was reluctant to put the collection together, worrying that the reading of the sermons would lose something. But they are powerful essays on social justice and how religious faith should inspire the best in us, not the worst. And they read as important to the chaotic and mean-spirited world of today as they were when he preached show more them as sermons during the Civil Rights Movement. In reading them, it feels that we haven’t come very far, but King would quibble with that conclusion, and actually does in one of the sermons, even then. As he often said, the arc of the moral universe may be long – sometimes painfully long – but it tends toward justice.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended, especially for today. show less

When Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, had been pastoring his first church in Montgomery, Alabama for little more than a year, still a young 26 year old man. Unbeknownst to him, he would over the next twelve years forever change the history of our nation and our world. This collection of speeches, essays, interviews, and book excerpts represents the story and purpose of those twelve years as told by King himself. He pleads for his philosophy of nonviolent show more resistance, taking up the method of Ghandi with the motivation of Christ. He makes his case for integration in the face of both segregationist whites and separatist blacks, such as Malcolm X. He explores the uprising of riots and Black Power, a term which he discouraged but understood. He decried to war in Vietnam, as the country spent billions to fight for freedoms abroad which it would not spend to fight for freedoms at home, all the while dealing death and destruction en masse. He fought passionately for the poor, white and black alike. He was a brilliant orator and a powerful man of faith, and his writings stand as a timeless testament to that Gospel which inhabited his work and touched the world. show less