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.
1. Prologue, Chapters 1-4, The Kings of Stockbridge, Martin Luther, Sweet Auburn, and "Black America Still Wears Chains."
2. Chapters 5-11, The Open Curtain, "A Sense of Responsibility," The Seminarian, "Madly, Madly in Love," The Match, The Dynamic Force, and Plagiarism and Poetry.
3. Chapters 12-16, Gideon's Army, "A Precipitating Factor," "My Soul Is Free," "We Ain't Rabbit No More," and A Warning.
4. Part II, Chapters 17-20, Alabama's Moses, "I'm Glad You Didn't Sneeze," The Pilgrimage, and Leaving Montgomery.
5. Chapters 21-24, "Kennedy to the Rescue," The New Emancipation Proclamation, Temptation and Surveillance, and "The Stuff Is Just In 'Em."
6. Chapter 25, Birmingham Jail. Part III Chapters 26-28, The Dream, Part One, The Dream, Part Two, and "The Most Dangerous Negro."
7. Chapters 29-32, Man of the Year, A Law Observance Problem, The Prize, and The Director.
8. Chapters 33-37. A New Sense of "Some-bodiness," Crowbar, Selma, "The True Meaning of My Work," and "A Shining Moment."
9. Chapters 38-42, Burning, Beware the Day, Chicago, Black Power, and "I Hope King Gets It."
10. Chapters 43-45. "Not An Easy Time for Me," A Revolution of Values and Please Come to Memphis. Epilogue.
Jonathan Eig, King: A Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.