Scott King, the youngest son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., grew up in a world that was forever changing as a direct result of his father's life and, more importantly, of his father's death. In this memoir of his own life, King attempts to illuminate the significance of growing up under the weight of his father's legacy, struggling to live up to everything his last name has come to stand for. He sadly records his failure to finish his degree at Morehouse College, a tradition for male members of the King family going back to "Great-granddaddy A.D. Williams [who] was in the Morehouse class of 1898, the second graduating class of its existence." He recounts his first attempt to serve as president of the King Center for Non-Violent Social Change, where he was elected to the position amid controversy from the board of directors, and subsequently resigned after five months....There are terrific accounts here of the conspiracy theories surrounding his father's assassination, the famous political and entertainment figures that have always been a part of King's circle and an extended family that helped to support and shape the children of a legend, but they are mired in tedious details that detract from the story King is trying to tell. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Celebrated Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson is the director and editor of the Martin Luther King Papers Project; with thousands of King's essays, notes, letters, speeches, and sermons at his disposal, Carson has organized King's writings into a posthumous autobiography. In an early student essay, King prophetically penned: "We cannot have an enlightened democracy with one great group living in ignorance.... We cannot have a nation orderly and sound with one group so ground down and thwarted that it is almost forced into unsocial attitudes and crime." Such statements, made throughout King's career, are skillfully woven together into a coherent narrative of the quest for social justice. The autobiography delves, for example, into the philosophical training King received at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, where he consolidated the teachings of Afro-American theologian Benjamin Mays with the philosophies of Locke, Rousseau, Gandhi, and Thoreau. Through King's voice, the reader intimately shares in his trials and triumphs, including the Montgomery Boycott, the 1963 "I Have a Dream Speech," the Selma March, and the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. In one of his last speeches, King reminded his audience that "in the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives." Carson's skillful editing has created an original argument in King's favor that draws directly from the source, illuminating the circumstances of King's life without deifying his person. --Eugene Holley Jr. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Personal secretary, aide, confidante, and trusted friend to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dora McDonald had a unique place in his private and professional life. This memoir recalls her life in the Movement, working alongside Dr. Benjamin Mays, Andrew Young, and Ralph David Abernathy, among others, and provides unprecedented access to the inner life of Dr. King. Over the eight years she spent with King at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, until his death in 1968, McDonald was with him through the key protests, imprisonments, and sermons. But it is her unique exposure to King's quiet domestic moments, private concerns, and late-night conversations that give this memoir its singular perspective. This intimate, honest, and revealing portrait provides new insight into Dr. King and introduces a woman whose importance in the Movement has been overlooked for too long.
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Crown Pub; ; (November 2003)
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Forget everything you think you know, Pepper insists. James Earl Ray did not pull the trigger. The journalist-turned-lawyer's previous title, Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King Jr., was more a prelude to this title than the final word. Twenty years after James Earl Ray was convicted, Pepper set out to clear him; in the process, he brought to light reams of evidence that were ignored in the original trial. The key to his case is Loyd Jowers, a bar owner who claims to have disposed of the murder weapon at the request of a local mob figure. Partially on the strength of the Orders to Kill material, Pepper won the support of King's wife and children, who brought Jowers and "unknown co-conspirators" to trial in a civil wrongful death suit in 1999. Dozens of witnesses contributed to a forceful, detailed case that accused the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. military, the Memphis police, and local and national organized crime leaders. After only an hour of deliberation, the jury found for the King family. The accusers, led by Pepper, cried vindication and fully expected to be at the center of one of the biggest news stories of the century. But the trial and the verdict barely registered in the media. Appalled by the silence that followed, Pepper remained determined to bring the details of his exhaustive probe and subsequent civil case to the public, and the result is this exacting book, dense with evidence and analysis of the murder.
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Unheroic in appearance, given to "deacon-sober suits" and "ponderous gravity," Martin Luther King Jr. ushered in an epochal era of change in the United States. Closely watching King's journey from Montgomery to Birmingham to the Lincoln Memorial to Memphis was journalist Marshall Frady, who honors the minister's achievement and spirit in this lucid biography. "Almost a geological age ago, it seems now--that great moral saga of belief and violence that unfolded in the musky deeps of the South during the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties." So Frady opens his account, which traces King's transformation from withdrawn, unconfident child to eloquent champion of the oppressed, ever unafraid to trouble the waters. Frady explores King's conflicts, contradictions, and triumphs, as well as the great personal cost he bore in urging nonviolent change in a singularly violent time. Part of the excellent Penguin Lives series, this slender volume sheds much light on a prophet now honored, but still too little understood. --Gregory McNamee
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