Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. August 28, 1963.
Observed each year in January, Martin Luther King Jr. Day honors the life and legacy of one of the most influential figures in American history and invites continued reflection on the ideals he championed. Dr. King was not only a leader of the civil rights movement, but also a thinker, organizer, and moral voice whose advocacy challenged the nation to confront injustice through nonviolence, collective action, and civic responsibility.
While Dr. King is often remembered for his role in advancing civil rights legislation, his ideas extended far beyond a single moment or movement, addressing questions of economic justice, peace, and democratic participation. His work encourages us to examine how power, policy, and community intersect, and how individuals can participate meaningfully in shaping a more just future.
Engage with the resources in this month's collection to deepen your understanding of Dr. King’s vision and to consider how his ideas continue to inform conversations about equity, justice, and social change.
Each month, "Discover & Discuss" presents a fresh theme designed to inform, inspire, and connect our community with a curated selection of books and digital resources that invite deeper thinking and dialogue.
Special thanks to our Materials Processing Coordinator, Leah Zande, for compiling this list.
Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Fleming, Daniel (2023)
"Living the Dream" tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over King’s legacy that continued through the decades that followed. Creating the first national holiday to honor an African American was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against conservative and segregationist opposition.
Congressional efforts to commemorate King began shortly after his assassination. The ensuing political battles slowed the progress of granting him a namesake holiday and crucially defined how his legacy would be received. Though Coretta Scott King’s mission to honor her husband’s commitment to nonviolence was upheld, conservative politicians sought to use the holiday to advance a whitewashed, nationalistic, and even reactionary vision of King’s life and thought. This book reveals the lengths that activists had to go to elevate an African American man to the pantheon of national heroes, how conservatives took advantage of the commemoration to bend the arc of King’s legacy toward something he never would have expected, and how grassroots causes, unions, and antiwar demonstrators continued to try to claim this sanctified day as their own. - Publisher's Description
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People's Campaign of 1968
Hamilton, Robert (2020)
This book introduces new audiences to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final initiative, the multiracial Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) of 1968. Robert Hamilton depicts the experience of poor people who traveled to Washington in May 1968 to dramatize the issue of poverty by building a temporary city, Resurrection City. His narrative allows us to hear their voices and understand the strategies, objectives, and organization of the campaign. In addition, he highlights the campaign's educational aspect, showing that significant social movements are a means by which societies learn about themselves and framing the PPC as an initiative whose example can teach and inspire current and future generations. The study thus situates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and teachings in relation to current events and further solidifies Dr. King’s cultural and sociopolitical relevance.
In the decades since 1968, we have seen increasing global inequality leading to greater social polarization, including in the United States. Hamilton offers the insight that the radical politics of Dr. King―as represented in the civil rights and human rights agendas of the PPC―can help us understand and address the challenges of this polarization. Hamilton highlights Dr. King’s commitment to ending poverty and explains why Dr. King’s ideas on this and related issues should be brought to the attention of a wider public who often view him almost exclusively as a civil rights, but not a human rights, leader. - Publisher's Description
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The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.
Baldwin, Lewis; Lanzetta, Beverly (2022)
Martin Luther King Jr. said and wrote as much or more about the meaning, nature, and power of truth as any other prominent figure in the 1950s and '60s. King was not only vastly influential as an advocate for and defender of truth; he also did more than anyone in his time to organize truth into a movement for the liberation, uplift, and empowerment of humanity, efforts that ultimately resulted in the loss of his life. Drawing on King's published and unpublished sermons, speeches, and writings, "The Arc of Truth" explores King's lifelong pilgrimage in pursuit of truth.
Lewis Baldwin explores King's quest for truth from his inquisitive childhood to the influence of family and church, to Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, Boston University, and other academic institutions in the Northeast. Continuing on, the book follows King's sense that he was involved in experiments of truth within the context of the struggle to liberate and empower humanity, to his understanding of the civil rights movement as unfolding truth, to his persistent challenge to America around its need to engage in a serious reckoning with truth regarding its history and heritage. Baldwin investigates King's determination to speak truth to power, and his untiring efforts to actualize what he envisioned as the truthful ends of the beloved community through the truthful means of nonviolent direct action. King believed, taught, and demonstrated by example that truth derives from a revolution in the heart, mind, and soul before it can be translated into institutions and structures that guarantee freedom, justice, human dignity, equality of opportunity, and peace.
Ultimately, King's significance for humanity cannot be considered only his contributions as a preacher, pastor, civil rights leader, and world figure--he was and remains equally impactful as a theologian, philosopher, and ethicist whose life and thought evince an enduring search for and commitment to truth. - Publisher's Description
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The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream
Younge, Gary (2023)
Gary Younge explains why Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech maintains its powerful social relevance by sharing the dramatic story surrounding it. Fifty years later, "The Speech" endures as a defining moment in the Civil Rights movement and a guiding light in the ongoing struggle for racial equality.
Younge roots his work in new and important interviews with Clarence Jones, a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and his draft speechwriter; with Joan Baez, a singer at the march; and with Angela Davis and other leading civil rights leaders. Younge skillfully captures the spirit of that historic day in Washington and offers a new generation of readers a critical modern analysis of why "I Have a Dream" remains America's favorite speech. - Publisher's Description
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Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism
Douglas, Andrew; Loggins, Jared (2021)
Many of today’s insurgent Black movements call for an end to racial capitalism. They take aim at policing and mass incarceration, the racial partitioning of workplaces and residential communities, the expropriation and underdevelopment of Black populations at home and abroad. Scholars and activists increasingly regard these practices as essential technologies of capital accumulation, evidence that capitalist societies past and present enshrine racial inequality as a matter of course.
In "Prophet of Discontent," Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins invoke contemporary discourse on racial capitalism in a powerful reassessment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking and legacy. Like today’s organizers, King was more than a dreamer. He knew that his call for a “radical revolution of values” was complicated by the production and circulation of value under capitalism. He knew that the movement to build the beloved community required sophisticated analyses of capitalist imperialism, state violence, and racial formations, as well as unflinching solidarity with the struggles of the Black working class. Shining new light on King’s largely implicit economic and political theories, and expanding appreciation of the Black radical tradition to which he belonged, Douglas and Loggins reconstruct, develop, and carry forward King’s strikingly prescient critique of capitalist society. - Publisher's Description
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Beyond Borders: Martin Luther King Jr., Africa, and Pan-Africanism
Levitt, Jeremy (2025)
This groundbreaking work unveils a lesser-known facet of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy: his Pan-African vision and relationships. Through meticulous research and compelling narratives, Jeremy I. Levitt unveils King as a truly international figure. Levitt bridges American and African history, politics and law to provide a fresh perspective on iconic global figure, exploring King's often-ignored relationship with African leaders and his role in shaping anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements in Africa. The book offers new insights for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the interconnected history of human rights struggles across the African diaspora.
By illuminating King's Pan-African engagements, "Beyond Borders" provides a more complete understanding of his enduring legacy as a champion for global racial equality. - Publisher's Description
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Memories Set in Stone: How Visitors Make Sense of Memorials
Hugentobler, Larissa (2025)
In this open access book, Larissa Hugentobler explores the world of public memorials: highly visible, and at times contentious, media, which communicate a nation’s values and ideals – its public memory. By celebrating a selection of a nation’s history, the memorial landscape has long rendered marginalized groups virtually invisible.
This book focuses on two rare, celebratory, U.S. memorials in Washington, DC., dedicated to a member of a marginalized community: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The author explores how visitors experience the two cultural sites, including their narratives about King and the Civil Rights Movement. For a holistic understanding, Hugentobler combines analyses of visitor experiences on site and on Instagram with expert interviews and autoethnographies. This allows for insights into the importance of celebratory memorials to individuals from marginalized communities and why those memorials matter to visitors. By acknowledging that the memorial experience is not limited to the time and space of a visit, this book begins to answer the urgent question of the roles of the offline and online realms in commemoration and highlights how each can contribute to a memorial landscape that is meaningful to a variety of people. - Publisher's Description
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Revives My Soul Again: The Spirituality of Martin Luther King Jr.
Baldwin, Lewis; Anderson, Victor (2018)
The scholarship on Martin Luther King Jr. is seriously lacking in terms of richly nuanced and revelatory treatments of his spirituality and spiritual life. This book addresses this neglect by focusing on King's life as a paradigm of a deep, vital, engaging, balanced, and contagious spirituality. It shows that the essence of the person King was lies in the quality of his own spiritual journey and how that translated into not only a personal devotional life of prayer, meditation, and fasting but also a public ministry that involved the uplift and empowerment of humanity. Much attention is devoted to King's spiritual leadership, to his sense of the civil rights movement as "a spiritual movement," and to his efforts to rescue humanity from what he termed a perpetual "death of the spirit." Readers encounter a figure who took seriously the personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical aspects of the Christian faith, thereby figuring prominently in recasting the very definition of spirituality in his time. King's "holistic spirituality" is presented here with a clarity and power fresh for our own generation. - Publisher's Description
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King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South
Theoharis, Jeanne (2025)
The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. "King of the North" follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.
In this bold retelling, King emerges as a someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who—despite his flaws—depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.
"King of the North" speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks’s central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King’s life and work—a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present. - Publisher's Description
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