Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and one of the central leaders of the modern civil-rights movement. Born in Atlanta in 1929, he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and emerged nationally during the 1955–56 bus boycott. As president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he promoted nonviolent direct action, mass protest and civil disobedience against segregation and racial discrimination.

King helped lead campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. His later activism increasingly linked racial injustice with poverty, labour rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, positions that brought wider political criticism. On 4 April 1968 King was assassinated in Memphis while supporting striking sanitation workers. His work profoundly shaped federal civil-rights legislation and subsequent movements for equality.

Ken Follett’s Edge of Eternity brings Martin Luther King Jr. into George Jakes’s involvement in the American civil-rights movement, placing fictional political careers alongside the campaigns, demonstrations and federal confrontations that make King a national leader. David Hackett Fischer’s Liberty and Freedom approaches King through political culture rather than biography, using the civil-rights era and its public language and imagery to show how older American ideas of liberty and freedom were redefined by the struggle against segregation.