Best Books about Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We've got some difficult days ahead," civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., told a crowd gathered at Memphis's Clayborn Temple on April 3, 1968. "But it really doesn't matter to me now because I've been to the mountaintop. . . . And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

These prohetic words, uttered the day before his assassination, challenged those he left behind to see that his "promised land" of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last twelve years of his life.

These words and other are commemorated here in the only major one-volume collection of this seminal twentieth-century American prophet's writings, speeches, interviews, and autobiographical reflections. A Testament of Hope contains Martin Luther King, Jr.'s essential thoughts on nonviolence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, the ethics of love and hope, and more.

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.

Dr. King’s best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963
 
Often applauded as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most incisive and eloquent book, Why We Can’t Wait recounts the Birmingham campaign in vivid detail, while underscoring why 1963 was such a crucial year for the civil rights movement. During this time, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States, but the campaign launched by Fred Shuttlesworth, King, and others demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action. 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.

Combining the latest insights from King biographies and movement histories, this book provides an up-to-date analysis of the relationship between the ¿man and the movement.¿

• Martin Luther king is the most important black American of the twentieth century and defined racial equality in the United States.
• No one book offers such a succinct yet critically engaged analysis of King and his relationship to the rest of the civil rights movement.
• It offers a synthesis and assessment of a much larger body of scholarly and popular literature on King and the civil rights movement.
• Most studies offer straightforward biographies of King or histories of the civil rights movement: this book is distinctive in placing King¿s leadership within the wider context of the movement