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Top 10 Books About the Life and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. |
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Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare
by James H. Cone
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream for the nation; Malcolm X saw America as a realized nightmare. Theologian Cone examines the two modern spokespersons who articulated these persistent themes in African-American protest thought. In a brilliant exposition and interpretation Cone concludes that Malcolm's and Martin's views were not only complementary but converging. He sees King as a political revolutionary who moved from civil rights to a commitment to the Third World poor at home and abroad. He sees Malcolm as a cultural revolutionary who moved from black nationalism to a vision of a larger community. Cone sketches the two men's autobiographies, analyzes their divergent positions in the freedom movement, and shows how their religious beliefs influenced their opinions. When Malcolm broke from Elijah Muhammad and Martin saw this country destroying both Vietnam and its own cities, both men changed their thinking and their perspectives began moving closer together. "Martin and Malcolm illuminate the two roads to freedom that meet in the African-Americans' search for identity," Cone writes, and his book stands as a classic presentation of their juxtaposition and interconnections.
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To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K HoneyMartin Luther King Jr. was an advocate of nonviolent resistance in the quest for African American civil rights, but scholar and southern civil rights organizer Michael Honey (humanities, Univ. of Washington, Takoma) highlights a parallel aspect of King's important work--his quest for economic justice for poor Americans. Honey presents the numerous instances of King's commitment to the poor and the working class, and his efforts to promote union rights. King met with labor leaders, spoke to unions, and crisscrossed the South backing various beleaguered workers. He helped organize a Poor People's Campaign to call attention to the economic injustices many faced in the capitalistic system, and to encourage a social Christian vision for the common good. Drawing on the work of various scholars, the King Papers (especially King's speeches), labor union records, and newspapers and magazines, Honey presents a rich portrait of a man whose campaign to end segregation was the first step toward the long-term goal of economic justice. The examination of the Scripto strike is informative. The two detailed chapters on the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis reveal King's collaboration with labor and the working poor. King's dream to create social and economic justice is more relevant than ever. |
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Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America by Randal Maurice JelksEvoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," these meditations, written in the form of letters to King, speak specifically to the many public issues we presently confront in the United States-economic inequality, freedom of assembly, police brutality, ongoing social class conflicts, and geopolitics. Award-winning author Randal Maurice Jelks invites readers to reflect on US history by centering on questions of democracy that we must grapple with as a society. Hearkening to the era whenJames Baldwin, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Richard Wright used their writing to address the internal and external conflicts that the United States faced, this book is a contemporary revival of the literary tradition of meditative social analysis. These meditations on democracy provide spiritual oxygen to help readers endure the struggles of rebranding, rebuilding, and reforming our democratic institutions so that we can all breathe.
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Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation by Clarence B. JonesWith the assistance of filmmaker and Huffington Post contributor Connelly, Jones, who was present at the creation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, revisits the forces that generated the 1963 March on Washington and that animated the speech that now represents an entire era. The author, a former attorney for King, does not offer a detailed account of how King and his advisors crafted the speech; for that, see Drew Hansen's The Dream (2003) or Eric J. Sundquist's King's Dream (2009).In fact, writes Jones, he did not even see a final copy before he heard it, but he was pleased that King kept his suggestion for the initial image of the promissory note. However, the author provides numerous intriguing insider insights about life on the road with King notably, the amusing moment when Jones, frustrated with the egos of some of the other speakers elbowing for position in the event's final, prime slot, asked if any of them really wanted to follow King to the podium; none did. Jones also confirms a couple of stories: that the Justice Department did indeed have a "kill switch" on the sound system, and that gospel singer Mahalia Jackson urged King during the speech to talk about his dream, at which point King turned his prepared remarks face down and continued somewhat extemporaneously. Jones explains how and why he, at the last minute, copyrighted the speech, and he pays homage to Nelson Rockefeller and Sen. Ted Kennedy though he is less generous to JFK and RFK. He describes severe worries and frustration, given that the daunting logistics of the March, and ends with some reflections on America's enduring racism, the contentious issue of reparations and the uneven presidency of Barack Obama. Essential reading about a moment of surpassing political and moral importance. |
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What Would Martin Say? by Clarence B. JonesAttorney Jones served as an advisor and confidante to Martin Luther King Jr. for eight years and came away from that close relationship with a solid grounding in the great civil rights leader's general thoughts as well as his thinking on specific subjects. In an exercise of intriguing certainly not idle speculation, Jones (with coauthor Engel) presents a handful of major civil rights issues in today's world that were not as prominent in King's day and takes very educated guesses at what King's responses to these issues would be if he were still alive. To such questions, then, as What would Martin say about today's black leadership? or What would Martin say about affirmative action? or even What would Martin say about Islamic terrorism and the war in Iraq? Jones seeks to translate King for a modern audience. A gimmick? Absolutely not. The lengthy responses Jones fashions, each one based on his intimate knowledge of King's vision, are well thought out and great material for discussion. |
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A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Martin Luther KingThe most powerful and inspirational speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., are collected here, along with commentary and contributions from Andrew Young, George McGovern, Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin, Edward Kennedy, and the Dalai Lama, among others.
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Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther KingDr. King's best-selling account of the civil rights movement in Birmingham during the spring and summer of 1963. On April 16, 1963, as the violent events of the Birmingham campaign unfolded in the city's streets, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in response to local religious leaders criticism of the campaign. The resulting piece of extraordinary protest writing, "Letter from Birmingham Jail", was widely circulated and published in numerous periodicals. After the conclusion of the campaign and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, King further developed the ideas introduced in the letter in Why We Can't Wait, which tells the story of African American activism in the spring and summer of 1963. During this time, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States, but the campaign launched by King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action. Often applauded as King'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. Disappointed by the slow pace of school desegregation and civil rights legislation, King observed that by 1963 during which the country celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation Asia and Africa were moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence but we still creep at a horse-and-buggy pace. King examines the history of the civil rights struggle, noting tasks that future generations must accomplish to bring about full equality, and asserts that African Americans have already waited over three centuries for civil rights and that it is time to be proactive: "For years now, I have heard the word Wait! It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This Wait has almost always meant Never. We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that justice too long delayed is justice denied." |
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You Have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America by Paul KixThoroughgoing study of the civil rights movement as it played out on a critical Alabama battlefield. Though founded after the Civil War, in 1871, Birmingham was a center of neo-Confederate revanchism. “These people are vicious,” said one police officer at the time, referring to those “who could be the Klan.” As historian Kix notes, the city was poor, dangerous, polluted, and marked by one of the lowest literacy rates in the nation. Its infamous sheriff, Bull Connor, “was never quite the disease of Birmingham but a symptom,” a high school dropout who shrewdly realized, after working dead-end jobs, that “a hatred of Blacks and drawn-out populism toward whites could propel a political rise.” Pit the violent, autocratic Connor against nonviolent Martin Luther King Jr., and the outcome seems almost foreordained—except that King’s nonviolence and the savagery of Connor’s policing, evidenced most plainly by an infamous photograph showing a Black teenager being mauled by a police dog, led to nationwide sympathy for the civil rights marchers. They also finally got John and Robert Kennedy, hitherto indifferent to the Black struggle for equality, off the fence to bring about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the beginning step in dismantling desegregation. All that didn’t stop Connor, whose deputies arrested 973 children in a single demonstration, but again, “the piercing screams of the children” created nothing but sympathy. Kix’s vivid and often maddening account of police brutality, ignorant racism, and the power of misguided ideas makes for sobering reading. Of course, the struggle for civil rights continues, but Birmingham wrought meaningful results: the ability of the author, for example, to marry a Black woman, expanded voter rights, and more, including King’s world-changing “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Even so, writes the author, “America has always been home to both hope and hate,” and the latter always persists. An eloquent contribution to the literature of civil rights and the ceaseless struggle to attain them. |
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Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights by Steven LevingstonIn January 1963, African Americans earnestly hoped in vain for decisive federal action to mark the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, action giving belated substance to Lincoln's promissory note. Levingston here recounts the story of how those cruelly disappointed hopes surged anew just five months later when President Kennedy delivered a stirring speech urging Congress to pass civil rights legislation conferring full citizenship on the nation's largest minority group. Since the president delivering the galvanizing speech in June was the same one ignoring black activists' pleas in January, Levingston's story necessarily traces one man's change of heart. But the inspiration for that remarkable change comes largely from a second man namely, Martin Luther King Jr. Readers watch as the Kennedy-King relationship matures between 1960 and 1963 as King's bold rhetoric and bolder acts first capture the attention, and then pierce the conscience, of a patrician president initially paralyzed on civil rights issues by fears of political backlash. The author of Profiles in Courage learns real-life valor from a fearless Baptist pastor: Kennedy finally recognizes what he must do after seeing this preacher of Christian love and nonviolence press for racial justice even when it means imprisonment and death threats. A riveting episode in American history. |
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King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop by Harvard SitkoffDrawing upon published writings, sermons, and the relevant scholarly literature, Sitkoff (Univ. of New Hampshire) offers readers a fine, concise biography of Martin Luther King Jr. The author begins by saying he seeks to bring to life the King who changed the habits of thought and action more than any other American of his century. In this task, Sitkoff is successful. He uncovers King's creative fusing of Gandhian nonviolence and the Christian Social Gospel, and notes King's mostly quiet belief in democratic socialism about which he became more outspoken in his last months. The book illuminates the numerous turning points marking King's career--the Montgomery boycott as well as Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, and his opposition to the Vietnam War that led him to the Poor Peoples March. Dr. King emerges as an unswerving man of principle, yet flawed and made vulnerable by his personal shortcomings. He sometimes equivocated, as in the case of the march from Selma (he held back from defying a federal injunction), but in the end, his role was central to adoption of the Voting Rights Act. Sitkoff effectively challenges the portrait of King as a leader who did not go beyond his nonviolence; rather, he fused nonviolence with mass action. A compelling introduction to King's life and the great movements of the 1960s. |
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Centerville Library
111 W. Spring Valley Rd
Centerville, OH 45458
(937) 433-8091
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Woodbourne Library
6060 Far Hills Ave Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 435-3700
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Creativity Commons
895 Miamisburg Centerville Rd
Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 610-4425
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