Top Highlights

• PREFACE Almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural eye—what we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response. This subliminal force recommends care in choosing a point of view for a history grounded in race. Strictly speaking, this book is not a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., though he is at it...
• truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies.
• Nearly a century later, Martin Luther King welcomed the honor of preaching the Emancipation Day sermon at First African. To the history-laden congregation, he had delivered an early version of his “I Have a Dream” speech just before the Kennedy inauguration.
• The rally already had been postponed once, partly because of leadership resentment against King’s closest ally there, Rev. C. L. Franklin, and the Evers Bail Fund feud had exacerbated local rivalries to the point of open feud. Franklin’s people levied charges that the NAACP leaders were “a bunch of Uncle Toms,” and were answered by public claims th...
• he urged them not to allow a “magnificent new militancy” to sour into mistrust. “There are some white people in this country who are as determined to see the Negro free as we are to be free,” he declared. In his final peroration, he delivered a longer and richer version of the “Dream” sequence that became famous two months later in Washington. He q...