Martin Luther King - Softcover

Hodgson, Godfrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184916262X ISBN 13: 9781849162623

Publisher: Quercus Publishing, 2016

Synopsis

Martin Luther King left an indelible mark on 20th-century American history through his leadership of the non-violent civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The election of Barack Obama as America's first black president in November 2008 has spawned a renewed interest in King's role as an agent and prophet of political change in the United States.

Writing with verve and clarity but also with acute insight, Godfrey Hodgson traces King's life and career from his birth in Atlanta in 1929, through the campaigns that made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to his assassination in Memphis in 1968. Hodgson sheds light on every aspect of an extraordinary life: the Black Baptist milieu in which King grew up, his theology and political philosophy, his physical and moral courage, his insistence on the injustice of inequality, his campaigning energy, his repeated sexual infidelities.

Martin Luther King is a rounded and fascinating portrait of a Christian prophet and the most brilliant orator of his age, the central message of whose life and ministry was that Americans would never be fully free until they accepted that black and white Americans must be equal.

About this title

About the Author:

Godfrey Hodgson has worked as a journalist for newspapers, magazines, radio and television in Britain and the United States. Born in 1934, he trained as an historian at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, and has written a number of books, most of them about 20th-century American history.

From Booklist:

British journalist and author Hodgson recounts the life of Martin Luther King Jr. from his birth in 1929 to his assassination in 1968, touching on the major high and low points of King’s activism and personal life. Hodgson, who has written several books on American politics, examines the racial landscape of the U.S. and how King coped with, challenged, and eventually changed it. Hodgson explores King’s transformation from a Southern Baptist preacher to a national civil rights leader and international peace and human-rights activist. He recounts King’s relationships with other civil rights figures, including Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and leftist Stanley Levison. He chronicles the successful and failed strategies, the tensions between King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the more assertive Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as younger generations challenged the slow pace of change, as well as the stress of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI surveillance. Hodgson offers no new insights or deep analysis, but his viewpoint as a British journalist who interviewed King on several occasions from 1956 to 1967 adds an interesting perspective. --Vanessa Bush

About this edition

• Publisher: Quercus Publishing
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 184916262X
• ISBN 13: 9781849162623
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272