Martin Luther King Jr.

The core book is entitled King: A Life by Jonathan Eig  and is the first biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. in thirty years and is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in  Biography.  It draws on a landslide of recently released sources including White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material. The book is vividly written and exhaustively researched.  He makes it plain that King was not acting in a vacuum, and he traces the work of organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., CORE and SNCC, and of men like Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Julian Bond and Ralph Abernathy. He shows how King was too progressive for some, and vastly too conservative for others.  The author provides a sober and intimate portrait of King's life that captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: dogs, bombs, Klansmen and segregationists wielding legal and political authority  and the ideas, tactics and strategy used to fight them. Join us in studying the movement whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were during King's lifetime.