In the Churches, in the Streets: Taylor Branch on ‘the King Years’

Article

At the height of the watershed civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, as the battle in the streets turned in favor of the demonstrators, a jubilant Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed an overflow crowd at St. Luke’s Baptist Church and saluted those who had braved police dogs and filled the …

Martin Luther King’s Vision of the Beloved Community

Article

Central to the thinking of Martin Luther King was the concept of the "Beloved Community." Liberalism and personalism provided its theological and philosophical foundations, and nonviolence the means to attain it. True, King’s initial optimism about the possibility of actualizing that community in history was in time qualified by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. But the …

Non-Violence and Racial Justice

Article

It is commonly observed that the crisis in race relations dominates the arena of American life. This crisis has been precipitated by two factors: the determined resistance of reactionary elements in the South to the Supreme Court’s momentous decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, and the radical change in the Negro’s evaluation of himself. …

The Impact of a Cultural Revolutionary

Article

No one had a greater impact on the cultural consciousness of African-Americans during the second half of the 20th century than Malcolm X. More than anyone else he revolutionized the black mind, transforming docile Negroes and self-effacing colored people into proud blacks and self-confident African-Americans. Civil rights activists became Black Power militants and declared, “It’s …

The King Assassination: After Three Decades, Another Verdict

Article

In December, 1968, a jury in Memphis, Tennessee, concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and “others, including governmental agencies.” Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the …