Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call For a Poor People’s Campaign

In early 1968, the activist planned a massive protest in the nation’s capital.

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Protest Against a Racist Court System

On Easter Sunday in 1958, the civil-rights leader led a “prayer pilgrimage” in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the inequality of a young man's death sentence.

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The Crisis in America’s Cities

Martin Luther King Jr. on what sparked the violent urban riots of the “long hot summer” of 1967

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Read Martin Luther King Jr. on White America’s Delusions

In 1967, the civil-rights leader foresaw that white resistance to racial equality would stiffen as activists’ economic agenda grew more ambitious.

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‘Let My People Vote’

In June 1965, the Voting Rights Act languished in the House Rules Committee after passage in the Senate. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this letter to the New York Amsterdam News urging its passage as the first step in ensuring access to the ballot.

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Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War

“The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast in the mold of being an arch anti-revolutionary.”

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How Much Had Schools Really Been Desegregated by 1964?

Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King Jr. condemned how little had changed in the nation's classrooms.

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Martin Luther King Jr. Saw Three Evils in the World

Racism was only the first.

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