Encyclopedia
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an
American political activist, the most famous leader of the American civil rights movement, and a
Baptist minister. Considered a
peacemaker throughout the world for his promotion of nonviolence and equality treatment for different races, he received the
Nobel Peace Prize before he was
assassinated in 1968. He was posthumously awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by
Jimmy Carter in 1977, the
Congressional Gold Medal in 2004, and in 1986, Martin Luther King Day was established in his honor. King's most influential and well-known speech is "
I Have A Dream."
Family and background
King was born in
Atlanta,
Georgia to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. After high school he attended
Morehouse College, where he was mentored by the school's president, civil rights leader Benjamin Mays; he graduated in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in
sociology. Later he graduated as valedictorian from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. in Systematic theology from
Boston University.
King married
Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953. King's father performed the wedding ceremony in Scott's parents' house in
Marion, Alabama.
King and Scott had four children:
All four children have followed their father's footsteps as civil rights activists, although their own issues and some opinions differ. Coretta Scott King died on January 30, 2006.
Civil rights activism
In 1953, at the age of twenty-four, King became pastor of the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the most distinguished black church in
Montgomery, Alabama. On December 1, 1955,
Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to comply with the
Jim Crow law that required her to give up her seat to a white man. The
Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by King, soon followed. It lasted for 382 days, the situation becoming so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a
United States Supreme Court decision outlawing
racial segregation on intrastate buses and all public transport.
Following the campaign, King was instrumental in the founding of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, a group created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King continued to dominate the organization until his death. King was an adherent of the philosophies of nonviolent
civil disobedience used successfully in
India by
Mahatma Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to the protests organized by the SCLC.
The FBI began wiretapping King in 1961, fearing that communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, but when no such evidence emerged, the bureau used the incidental details caught on tape over six years in attempts to force King out of the pre-eminent leadership position. Garrow, op.cit. p. 126.
Pacifist A. J. Muste, the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, served as an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. King correctly recognized that organized, nonviolent protest against the racist system of southern segregation known as
Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Indeed, journalistic accounts and
televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that made the
Civil Rights Movement the single most important issue in American politics in the early-1960s.
King organized and led marches for blacks' right to
vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into
United States law with the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out in often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent. King and the SCLC were instrumental in the unsuccessful protest movement in
Albany, in 1961 & 1962, where divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts; in the
Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963; and in the protest in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. King and the SCLC joined forces with SNCC in
Selma, Alabama, in December 1964, where SNCC had been working on voter registration for a number of months.
Stance on compensation
On several occasions King expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. Speaking to
Alex Haley in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government program to "equip [the Negro] to compete on a just and equal basis" as well as other disadvantaged people His 1964 book
Why We Can't Wait elaborated this idea further, presenting it as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor.
The March on Washington
King and
SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, then attempted to organize a march from
Selma to the state capital of
Montgomery, for March 25, 1963. The first attempt to march on March 7, was aborted due to mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day since has become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the
Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. King, however, was not present. After meeting with
President John F. Kennedy, he had attempted to delay the march until March 8, but the march was carried out against his wishes and without his presence by local civil rights workers. The footage of the police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively across the nation and aroused a national sense of public outrage.
The second attempt at the march on March 9 was ended when King stopped the procession at the
Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, an action which he seemed to have negotiated with city leaders beforehand. This unexpected action aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, with the agreement and support of President Kennedy, and it was during this march that Willie Ricks coined the phrase "Black Power" .
King, representing SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were:
Roy Wilkins,
NAACP;
Whitney Young, Jr.,
Urban League;
A. Philip Randolph,
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and
James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality . For King, this role was another which courted controversy, as he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of President
John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation, but the organizers were firm that the march would proceed.
The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in
the South and a very public opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Organizers intended to excoriate and then challenge the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks, generally, in the South. However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone.
As a result, some civil rights activists felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony;
Malcolm X called it the "Farce on Washington," and members of the Nation of Islam who attended the march faced a temporary suspension.
The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public school; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for the
District of Columbia, then governed by congressional committee.
Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial onto the
National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in
Washington's history. King's
I Have a Dream speech electrified the crowd. It is regarded, along with
President Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. President Kennedy, himself opposed to the march, met King afterwards with enthusiasm - repeating King's line back to him; "I have a dream", while nodding with approval.
Throughout his career of service, King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience as a preacher. His "
Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a passionate statement of his crusade for
justice. On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the
Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the
United States.
Bayard Rustin
African American civil rights activist
Bayard Rustin counseled King to dedicate himself to the principles of non-violence in 1956, and had a leadership role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. However, Rustin's open
homosexuality and support of democratic socialism and ties to the
Communist Party USA caused many white and African American leaders to demand that King distance himself from Rustin, which he did on several occasions, but not all — such as when he ensured Rustin's role in the March on Washington.
Chicago
In 1966, after several successes in the South, King and other people in the civil rights organizations tried to spread the movement to the North, with Chicago as its first target. King and
Ralph Abernathy, both middle class folk, moved into Chicago's slums as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor.
Their organization, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference formed a coalition with CCCO, Coordinating Committee of Community Organizations, an organization itself founded by Albert Raby, Jr., and the combined organizations' efforts were fostered under the aegis of The Chicago Freedom Movement . During that Spring a number of dual white couple/black couple tests on real estate offices uncovered a now banned by the Real Estate Industry practice of "steering" and the racially selective processing of housing requests by the couples who were exact matches in income and background and number of children and other attributes, with the difference being the race of the couples. Without exception, the black couples were rejected and the white couples were accepted at the real estate offices which were then picketed by CFO.
The needs of the movement for radical change grew and several larger marches were planned and executed including those in the following neighborhoods: Bogan, Belmont-Cragin, Jefferson Park, Evergreen Park , Gage Park and Marquette Park, among others.
In Chicago, Abernathy would later write, they received a worse reception than they had received in the South. Thrown bottles and screaming throngs met their marches and they were truly afraid of starting a riot.
King had always felt a responsibility to the people he was leading. He would not unnecessarily stage a violent event, something personal to him as a radical social leader of the 1960s or any other decade. If King had intimations that a peaceful march would be put down with violence he would call it off for the safety of people. But he himself still faced death many a time by marching at the front in the face of death threats to his person. And in Chicago the violence was so formidable, it shook the two friends.
But worse than the violence was the two-facedness of the city leaders. Abernathy and King secured agreements on action to be taken, but this action was largely bureaucratically killed after-the-fact by politicians within Mayor
Richard J. Daley's corrupt machine. Some of their small successes, such as Operation Breadbasket, translated into People United to Save Humanity P.U.S.H. as large as the desegregation cases of the bus boycott in the South. They lit the fire of ideas like affirmative action and organizing labor as legitimate techniques in the minds of the people.
Abernathy could not stand the slums and secretly moved out after a short period. King stayed and wrote about how Coretta and his children suffered emotional problems from the horrid conditions and inability to play outside.
When King and his allies returned to the South, they left
Jesse Jackson, a seminary student with experience with the movement in the south since he had joined King, in charge of their organization. While Jackson had a great deal of heart and oratorical skill, he managed to start the very first boycotts which showed success against what we would have called "Big Box" stores today. One such campaign was that against A&P Stores which refused to hire blacks as clerks in their stores. The campaign was so effective, that it laid the groundwork for the equal opportunity programs of the Seventies and on. Jackson also initiated the first "Black Expo" under the auspices of SCLC as Operation Breadbasket, and continued free standing as Operation P.U.S.H. after a split with SCLC. Black Expo became P.U.S.H. Expo, which continued to showcase the many long-standing and newly formed Black Businesses such as Johnson Publishing, Parker House Sausage, Seaway National Bank, and many businesses that were start-ups then, that exist today, and which owe their existence to P.U.S.H. EXCEL, the current form of the organization.
Further challenges
Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the
Vietnam War. On April 4, 1967 -- exactly one year before his death -- King spoke out strongly against the US's role in the war, insisting that the US was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." But he also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes:
- A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just."
King was long hated by many white
southern segregationists, but this speech turned the more mainstream media against him.
TIME called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", and
The Washington Post is the largest newspaper [i] in Washington, D.C. [i], the capital of the United States [i] ...
declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
With regards to
Vietnam, King often claimed that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands." King also praised North Vietnam's land reform. He accused the
United States of having killed a million Vietnamese "mostly children." He once even equated U.S. involvement in Vietnam to
Nazi Germany's use of concentration camps. ]]
The speech was a reflection of King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, sparked in part by his affiliation with and training at the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Toward the end of his life, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to
communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism:
- You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry.... Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong... with capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system [i] in which the means of production [i] are owned mostly privately, ...
.... There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic
socialism.
King also stated in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech that "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. The New York Times article, "A Negro is Killed in Memphis", discusses the Memphis Sanitation Strike, and explains what the workers were looking for; higher wages and better treatment. The African American workers were paid $1.70 per hour. They wanted a 15 cent raise, but were only offered an 8 cent raise.*[ProQuest "A Negro is Killed in Memphis"] by Walter Rugaber,
The New York Times, March 29 1968, retrieved March 11 2006.
However, according to the article "Coalition Building and Mobilization Against Poverty", King and SCLC's Poor People's Campaign was not supported by the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including
Bayard Rustin. Their opposition incorporated arguments that the goals of Poor People Campaign was too broad, the demands unrealizable, and thought these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.
The campaign culminated in a march on
Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."
King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness." His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of racism, poverty, militarism and materialism, and that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced." Garrow, op.cit. p. 214.
In April 3, 1968, King prophetically told a euphoric crowd during his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech:
- It really doesn't matter what happens now.... some began to... talk about the threats that were out -- what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.... Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain! And I've looked over, 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. And so I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the coming of the Lord!
Assassination
King was assassinated at 6:01 p.m. April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the
Lorraine Motel in
Memphis, Tennessee. Friends inside the motel room heard the shots and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the throat. He was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. The assassination led to a nationwide wave of
riots in more than 60 cities. Five days later, President
Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral that same day. Vice-President
Hubert Humphrey attended on behalf of LBJ, who was meeting with several advisors and cabinet officers on the
Vietnam War in
Camp David. Also, there were fears he might be hit with protests and abuses over the war.
Two months after King's death, escaped convict
James Earl Ray was captured at
London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the
United Kingdom on a false
Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to
Tennessee and charged with King's murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969 . Later, Ray would be sentenced to a 99-year prison term.
Ray, a presumed white supremacist and
segregationist, allegedly killed King because of the latter's extensive civil rights work. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray took a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty, although it is unlikely that a death sentence would have been carried out, due to the
U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 decision in the case of
Furman v. Georgia that invalidated all state
death penalty laws then in force.
Ray fired Foreman as his attorney claiming that a man he met in
Montreal, Canada with the alias "Raoul" was involved, as was his brother Johnny, but not himself, further asserting that although he didn't "personally shoot Dr. King," he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it," hinting at a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.
On June 10, 1977, shortly after Ray had testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he did not shoot King, he and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee. They were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison.
More years were then added to his sentence for attempting to escape from the penitentiary.
Allegations of conspiracy
Some have speculated that Ray had been used as a "patsy" similar to the way that alleged
John F. Kennedy assassin
Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have been. Some of the claims used to support this assertion are:
- Ray was a small-time thief and burglar, and had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon.
- The weapon that Ray is believed to have used in the assassination had only two of Ray's fingerprints on it.
- According to several fellow prison inmates, Ray had never expressed any political or racial opinions of any kind, casting doubt on Ray's purported motive for committing the crime.
- The rooming-house bathroom from which Ray is said to have fired the fatal shots did not have any of his fingerprints at all.
- Ray was believed to have been an average marksman, and it is claimed by many that Ray had not fired a rifle since his discharge from the United States Army in the late-1940s.
Many suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point out the two separate ballistic tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster had neither conclusively proved Ray had been the killer nor that it had even been the murder weapon. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house, not from the rooming house itself, shrubbery which had been suddenly and inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination. Also, Ray's petty criminal history had been one of colossal and repeated ineptitude; he'd been quickly and easily apprehended each time he committed an offense, behavior in sharp contrast to his actions shortly before and after the shooting; he'd easily managed to secure several different pieces of legitimate identification, using the names and personal data of living men who all coincidentally looked like and were of about the same age and physical build as Ray; he spent large sums of cash and traveled overseas without being apprehended at any border crossing, even though he had been a wanted fugitive. According to Ray, all of this had been accomplished with the aid of the still unidentified "Raoul." Investigative reporter Louis Lomax had also discovered the
Missouri Department of Corrections, shortly after Ray's April 1967 prison escape, had sent the incorrect set of fingerprints to the
FBI and had failed to notice or correct this error. Lomax had been publishing a series of investigative stories on the King assassination for the North American Newspaper Alliance, stories challenging the official view of the case, and had been reportedly pressured by the FBI to halt his investigation.
According to a former
Pemiscot County, Missouri deputy sheriff, Jim Green, who claimed to have been part of an FBI-led conspiracy to kill King, Ray had been targeted as the patsy for the King assassination shortly before his April 1967 prison escape and had been tracked by the Bureau during his year as a fugitive. After several trips to and from
Canada and
Mexico during this time, Ray had gone to Memphis after agreeing to participate in what he was told was a major bank robbery while King was in town--since city police resources would be dedicated toward maintaining security for King and his entourage, the intended bank heist would be much simpler than usual. Green had claimed Ray had been ordered to stay in the rooming house and as a diversion for the purported bank heist, to then hold up a small diner near the rooming house at approximately 6:00 p.m. on April 4. King was shot a minute later by a sniper hidden in the shrubbery near the rooming house. Meanwhile, according to Green, two men, one of them allegedly a Memphis police detective, were waiting to ambush and kill Ray, while Ray was on his way to the planned diner holdup and then plant the Remington rifle in the trunk of Ray's pale yellow 1966
Ford Mustang, effectively framing a dead man. However, moments before the assassination, Ray had apparently suspected a setup and instead quickly left town in his Mustang, heading for
Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta police found Ray's abandoned Mustang six days after King had been shot.
Recent developments
In 1997, Martin Luther King's son
Dexter King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a trial.
In 1999,
Coretta Scott King, King's widow , along with the rest of King's family, won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that "governmental agencies were parties" to the assassination plot. William Pepper represented the King family in the trial.
In 2000, the
Department of Justice completed the investigation about Jowers' claims, but did not find evidence to support the allegations about conspiracy. The investigation report recommends no further investigation unless some new reliable facts are presented.
Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted:
"The fact is there were to disrupt the march. [And] within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. ... I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray."
King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. He is supported by King assassination author Gerald Posner.
On April 6, 2002, the
New York Times reported a church minister, Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson, - not James Earl Ray - assassinated Rev Martin Luther King Jr. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way."
King and the FBI
King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation , especially its director,
J. Edgar Hoover, who felt tracking King was a waste of federal money. The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was
New York City lawyer Stanley Levison. The Bureau of Investigation found that Levison had been involved with the
Communist Party USA—to which another key King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked by sworn testimony before the
House Un-American Activities Committee . The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. The Bureau also informed then-Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy and then-President
John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison. For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to communism, stating in a 1965
Playboy interview
King is the second most admired person in the 20th century, according to a Gallup poll.
King was voted 6th in the Person of the Century poll by
TIME.
King was elected the third
Greatest American of all time by the American public in a contest conducted by the
Discovery Channel and
AOL.
Authorship issues
Beginning in the 1980s, questions have been raised regarding the authorship of King's dissertation, other papers, and his speeches. Concerns about his doctoral dissertation at
Boston University led to a formal inquiry by university officials, which concluded that approximately a third of it had been plagiarized from a paper written by an earlier graduate student, but it was decided not to revoke his degree, as the paper still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." Such uncredited "textual appropriation," as King scholar Clayborne Carson has labeled it, was apparently a habit of King's begun earlier in his academic career. It is also a feature of many of his speeches, which borrowed heavily from those of other preachers and white radio
evangelists. While some have criticized King for his plagiarism, Keith Miller has argued that the practice falls within the tradition of African-American folk preaching, and should not necessarily be labeled plagiarism. However, as Theodore Pappas points out in his book
Plagiarism and the Culture War, King in fact took a class on scholarly standards and plagiarism at Boston University.
Books by Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Stride toward freedom; the Montgomery story
- The Measure of a Man
- Strength to Love
- Why We Can't Wait
- Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?
- The Trumpet of Conscience
- A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings a
