From MLK to Black Power: Books trace the Civil Rights Movement

In a sermon titled “Loving Your Enemies” that he delivered often in the early 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that he had taken the biblical command to heart. “Put us in jail, and we will go in with humble smiles on our faces, still loving you,” he preached. “Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we will still love you ... But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.” 

In the years leading up to King’s 1968 assassination, he was jailed 29 times, assaulted repeatedly, and threatened constantly. He had to contend not only with die-hard segregationists but, appallingly, with his own government. The FBI, convinced he was being influenced by communists, tapped his phones. When the bureau found