Martin Luther King Jr.
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
Martin Luther King, Jr., lived 14,325 days, but then of them changed his world—and ours. Follow Dr. King’s journey from his teenage refusal to give up his bus seat to his famous “I Have a Dream” speech that inspired the world. This essential book includes historical black-and-white photographs, a selected bibliography, and an important introduction to the Civil Rights Movement—including the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, and Dr. King’s time in a Birmingham jail cell.
David Colbert
David Colbert is the author of New York Times bestseller Michelle Obama: An American Story. In addition to the 10 Days series, he wrote the acclaimed Eyewitness series of first-person history and the Magical Worlds series for children. More than two million copies of his books are in print in almost thirty languages.
Read more from David Colbert
Abraham Lincoln Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Anne Frank Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thomas Edison Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Benjamin Franklin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Martin Luther King Jr.
Related ebooks
Colin Kaepernick: Athletes Who Made a Difference Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5History's Greatest Speeches: Black Voices Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBecoming King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Making of a National Leader Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRaising King: poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Have a Dream, Martin Luther King Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Celebrating Juneteenth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Great Money Trick: Another World Is Possible Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDreams: The Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Uncle Tom's Cabin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ready Reference Treatise: The God of Small Things Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJim Crow: Segregation and the Legacy of Slavery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Selma Campaign: Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmie Lee Jackson, and the Defining Struggle of the Civil Rights Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Civil Rights Movement: Then and Now Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Country, 'Tis of Thee: My Faith, My Family, Our Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Singing for Equality: Musicians of the Civil Rights Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbraham Lincoln & Frederick Douglass: The Story Behind an American Friendship Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Malcolm X Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Changing Laws: Politics of the Civil Rights Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFirst In His Class: A Biography Of Bill Clinton Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Martin Luther King Jr. (SparkNotes Biography Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMartin Luther King Jr.: Walking in the Light Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRace Man: Selected Works, 1960-2015 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAny Means Necessary: The Life and Legacy of Malcolm X Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Outside Agitator: The Civil Rights Struggle of Cleveland Sellers Jr. Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Child Shall Lead Them: Martin Luther King Jr., Young People , and the Movement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Rabbi and the Reverend: Joachim Prinz, Martin Luther King Jr., and Their Fight against Silence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Children's Biography & Autobiography For You
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cross and the Switchblade: The True Story of One Man's Fearless Faith Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Hiding Place Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Farmer Boy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hidden Figures Young Readers' Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lincoln: A Photobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Elk's Vision: A Lakota Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Farewell to Manzanar Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Prairie Girl: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reaching for the Moon: The Autobiography of NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5U.S. Presidents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dav Pilkey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hitler's Last Days: The Death of the Nazi Regime and the World's Most Notorious Dictator Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trombone Shorty Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Family Divided: One Girl's Journey of Home, Loss, and Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Amanda Gorman: Inspiring Hope with Poetry Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWoodsong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki: and the Thousand Paper Cranes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lincoln's Last Days: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Life of Fairness Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beethoven for Kids: His Life and Music with 21 Activities Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Archimedes and the Door of Science Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Martin Luther King Jr.
3 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great book! I had some mixed emotions. I think this country has come a long way in 50 years. I would recommend this book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brilliant book, that is sadly shorter than I would like it to be, but just enough to fill me with love and strenght. For we all have a dream.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A very accessible look at the defining moments of MLK Jr's life, with enough backstory linking the days covered that those who are not overly familiar with his life will be able to easily follow the flow. The content warrants 4 stars, but there were a surprising number of grammatical errors throughout that were fairly distracting.
Book preview
Martin Luther King Jr. - David Colbert
CONTEST
Franklinton, Georgia.
"You need to get up, now, the bus driver says, looking at fifteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.
These other folks need to sit down."
M. L. (that’s what everybody calls him) stares straight ahead. Why? M. L. thinks. Why should I have to get up? But of course he knows the reason. He’s black, and white people want his seat. They expect it.
He knows what can happen to African Americans who refuse to obey the bus laws. He knows they can be forced off the bus or even arrested. He has seen blacks savagely beaten for less. He looks out the window and sees the sign at the bus stop: FRANKLINTON. He’s ninety miles away from Atlanta and home.
You need to get up,
the bus driver repeats angrily. He sees only a black teenager—a disobedient black teenager. In the culture of the South, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter than this young man plays the violin, enjoys opera, excels at sports, and earns top grades in high school, where he has already skipped one grade and will later skip his senior year. It doesn’t matter that M. L. is a minister’s son who lives in a household with rules, expectations, and discipline; or that he goes to church all day on Sunday and almost every other day of the week; or that he’s often dressed as he is today, in a smart suit. It doesn’t even matter that earlier today M. L. represented his school at a statewide oratory contest.
There’s no innocent explanation for the driver’s demand: He’s not merely asking a polite young man to give up his seat for an older person. One of M. L.’s teachers, Sarah Grace Bradley, who has accompanied M. L. to the contest, is also being told to move.
JIM CROW
Usually M. L. is treated like a prince. He’s a member of the affluent and educated elite of Atlanta, one of the most important cities in African American life. Nearly half of Atlanta’s 300,000 citizens are African American. The city is home to some of the nation’s best black colleges—Clark, Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University—which have attracted intellectuals like the prominent scholar W. E. B. Du Bois. Economically, the black community ranges from business tycoons to sharecroppers. Socially, there’s no more important institution in black Atlanta than the church, and the church where M. L.’s father is pastor, Ebenezer Baptist, has been at the center of the community for three generations. M. L. and his older sister and younger brother are well known within the community because of their father’s position. They’re aware that their family has many advantages not shared by the many black citizens of Atlanta who are kept from c jobs because of racism. But neither their social status nor their affluence protects them from bigotry. M. L. has known it all his life. When he was five, the father of his best friend, a white boy, had forbidden his son to play with M. L. because M. L. was black. M. L. never forgot the shock of that first lesson in racism.
M. L. has inherited his father’s ability to captivate an audience, and it was no surprise that a few days earlier he won a spot at the oratory contest. By this time, the subject of his speech was also no surprise: He was already furious at the injustices Southern blacks faced, and the poverty that resulted from it. The title of his speech was The Negro and the Constitution.
It called for the full enforcement of laws already in the U.S. Constitution that should have guaranteed equality for African Americans. It demanded access to education, jobs, and health care, all of which were kept from African Americans by local laws—which the Constitution should have overruled—that maintained segregation.
Those laws were known casually as Jim Crow.
The name came from a character in minstrel shows, a popular entertainment that made fun of African Americans, portraying them as lazy, stupid, and superstitious. White actors played Jim Crow in blackface
(dark, clownish makeup). There were Jim Crow laws against eating in the same restaurants, drinking from the same water fountains, swimming in the same pools, and, of course, sitting together on buses.
THOMAS D. RICE (1808–1860) CREATED THE 1828 SONG AND DANCE ROUTINE JUMP JIM CROW.
HE WAS MIMICKING AN AFRICAN AMERICAN STREET PERFORMER.
The first Jim Crow laws were passed a few decades after the Civil War, when political compromises allowed Southern states to reestablish some of the local power they had lost when they lost the war. The laws ignored the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, passed after the war, guaranteeing that blacks were free, that they would receive equal protection under the law, and that they could vote.
Jim Crow laws were designed specifically to make sure blacks stayed poor, uneducated, and utterly powerless to change their circumstances. They also kept the two races physically separated in public. Hypocritically, it was common for even the most admired men in the white community to have relationships with African American women, and these were usually ignored by friends provided the man was discreet. For example, Strom Thurmond, a governor of South Carolina and then a senator from the state, who actually ran for president of the United States in 1948 on a segregationist platform, had a secret daughter who resulted from his relationship with a family maid. This was only made public after his death in the year 2003—when his daughter was almost seventy-eight years old. (Thurmond lived to just less than 101 years.)
A segregated movie theater in Florida. This is the back entrance. The front entrance was reserved for