Martin Luther King

In 1963, Martin Luther King led 250,000 followers to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and began to tell the assembled mass of all races and creeds of his vision for the future, 'I have a dream....'. The following year the Civil Rights Act became law, and then the Voting Rights Act, but as the effectiveness of peaceful demonstration was called into question by activists demanding more militant action, he turned to a wider front, attaching the Vietnam War, and the conditions of the poor generally. Increasingly controversial and criticised by some for his milder tactics, in April 1968 he was assassinated by James Earl Ray. This short biography traces the life of Dr King from his birth in Atlanta, through his ministry in Alabama, his involvement with the Montgomery Improvement Association, and his leading role in the civil rights movement to the death which made him its martyr. Harry Harmer has written, among other books, The Longman Companion to Slavery, Emancipation and Civil Rights and co-authored The Black Handbook: The People, History and Politics of Africa and the African Diaspora.