The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

A life assembled from his own words

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is not a book King wrote. He was killed in 1968 at 39, before he could write one. In 1998 the historian Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, assembled this book from King's own words. He drew on King's published books, such as Stride Toward Freedom and Why We Can't Wait, and on sermons, speeches, letters, interviews and unpublished papers. He arranged the passages in time order and in the first person, so the book reads like a memoir.

Carson adds short editorial notes and selects the material, but the sentences are King's. Each chapter usually ends with an excerpt from a key speech or document of that period. The result is a life story that covers almost all of King's public career, from 1929 to 1968.

Childhood, college and the search for a method

King is born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, the son of a Baptist pastor. His father leads Ebenezer Baptist Church and stands up to segregation in daily life. King recalls a shoe store where a clerk tells them to move to the back; his father refuses and walks out. He also recalls a white boy who was his close friend until the boy's parents ended the friendship when the two started school. These moments teach him early what segregation does to people. He writes that, as a boy, he decided he would hate every white person, and that his parents taught him it was his duty as a Christian not to. The tension between anger and love runs through the rest of his life.

He enters Morehouse College at 15. Its president, Benjamin Mays, shows him that a minister can be both a thinker and a fighter for justice. King decides to enter the ministry. He studies at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and then earns a doctorate at Boston University. In Boston he meets Coretta Scott, a music student, and they marry in 1953.

In these years King searches for a method of social change. He reads the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, which says Christianity must care about poverty and injustice. He reads the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who warns that groups act more selfishly than individuals. A lecture on Mahatma Gandhi convinces him that love can be a force for social change, not only for personal ethics. From these sources he forms his belief in nonviolent resistance: oppose injustice firmly, accept suffering without hitting back, and aim to win over the opponent, not defeat him.

Montgomery: a leader at 26

In 1954 King becomes pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In December 1955, Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Local leaders call a one-day boycott of the buses and form the Montgomery Improvement Association. They elect King, then 26, as its president, partly because he is new in town and has no enemies.

The boycott lasts more than a year. Black residents walk, share rides and organize car pools. King is arrested, threatened and attacked. The city charges him and dozens of other leaders under an old state law against boycotts, and a judge convicts and fines him. One night in January 1956, after a threatening phone call, he sits at his kitchen table, unable to sleep. He prays and feels a calm, inner assurance that he must keep going. Days later his house is bombed while his wife and baby daughter are inside. They are unhurt. An angry crowd gathers, and King asks them to go home and answer hate with love. In late 1956 the Supreme Court rules that bus segregation is unconstitutional, and the buses integrate.

The victory makes King a national figure. In 1957 he helps found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to spread nonviolent protest across the South. In 1958, while signing books in Harlem, he is stabbed in the chest by a mentally ill woman and nearly dies. In 1959 he travels to India to learn more about Gandhi's movement.

Albany and Birmingham

In 1960 King moves back to Atlanta to work full time on the movement. He is jailed after a sit-in at an Atlanta department store. A judge then sends him to a state prison on an old traffic charge. The presidential candidate John F. Kennedy calls Coretta to express concern, and King is released soon after. King describes how this call helped turn Black voters toward Kennedy.

In Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962, the movement fails. King writes that the protests attacked segregation in general instead of one clear target, and the local police chief avoided the kind of brutality that would draw national outrage. King learns from the defeat.

In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, the SCLC targets downtown stores and lunch counters. King is arrested. In jail he writes the Letter from Birmingham Jail, an answer to white clergymen who called the protests "unwise and untimely." He argues that people have a moral duty to disobey unjust laws, that waiting for justice usually means never getting it, and that the greatest obstacle is not the open racist but the white moderate who prefers order to justice. When young people join the marches, police use dogs and fire hoses on them. The images shock the nation, and the city's business leaders agree to desegregate.

The dream and the cost

In August 1963 King gives the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington, before a crowd of about 250,000 people. The first part of the speech is less famous. In it, King says America has given its Black citizens a bad check, a promise of freedom marked "insufficient funds." Only then does he turn to his dream of a nation where his children are judged by their character. Weeks later, a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham kills four girls. In November, President Kennedy is assassinated. King writes that these events showed him how deep the violence in American life runs.

In 1964 Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, and King wins the Nobel Peace Prize. He gives the prize money to the movement. In 1965 he joins the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama. On March 7, a day later called Bloody Sunday, state troopers beat marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Two weeks later, under federal protection, the march to Montgomery goes ahead. That August, the Voting Rights Act becomes law. King writes that the right to vote is the foundation for every other gain, because it lets Black citizens elect officials who answer to them. King also reflects on Malcolm X, whom he met only briefly, and on the different path Malcolm took.

The North, Black Power and Vietnam

After Selma, King turns to the problems that civil rights laws do not solve: poverty, housing and jobs. After the Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965, he warns that poverty and despair fuel unrest. He later calls a riot "the language of the unheard." In 1966 he moves into a Chicago apartment to campaign against slum housing and segregated neighborhoods. White crowds attack the marchers. King says he has seen more hatred in Chicago than in the Deep South.

The same year, younger activists raise the slogan Black Power. King understands their anger and agrees that Black people need political and economic power. But he rejects the slogan's hints of separatism and violence.

In April 1967, in a speech at Riverside Church in New York, he publicly opposes the Vietnam War. He links war, racism and poverty as connected evils and says the money spent on war is money taken from the poor. Many allies, the press and the White House turn against him. He refuses to separate the struggle for civil rights from the struggle for peace.

Memphis

In his last months King plans the Poor People's Campaign, a mass protest in Washington for jobs and income for poor people of every race. He goes to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking sanitation workers. On April 3, 1968, he gives the speech now called "I've Been to the Mountaintop." He says he would like to live a long life but is not worried about it now, because he has seen the promised land. The next day, April 4, he is shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

What the critics say

Reviewers welcomed a single, readable volume of King's words. Some note the limits of the method. Because Carson uses mostly King's public writing, the book shows King as he presented himself. It says little about his private doubts, his family life, his conflicts inside the movement or the FBI's campaign against him. For those, readers turn to biographies such as David Garrow's Bearing the Cross or Taylor Branch's trilogy.

Who should read it

Read it if you want King's life and ideas in his own voice, in one volume, with the key speeches in context. Pair it with a critical biography if you want the full picture of the man and the movement.