Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
by David J. Garrow
Buy on AmazonWinner of the Pulitzer Prize and the 7th annual Robert Kennedy Book Award, this biography of Martin Luther King, first published in 1986, portrays the struggles and conflicts within the man who became the incarnation of the civil rights movement in America. It is based on more than 700 interviews with King's associates and with the Southern law men who worked against him, and on the author's access to King's personal papers and thousands of pages of newly-released FBI documents relating to the most radical uprising in American history.
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"This book is a Pulitzer Prize winner. It became a standard narrative of King’s life and the life of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It’s an amazing book. David Garrow spent years researching and writing it. It is a long book, but you can still cut it up into chunks so the students can read about the career of Martin Luther King from the Montgomery bus boycott , to Albany , to what happens in St. Augustine in Florida and Birmingham . The entire career of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is in the book, and it gives students a solid grasp of the role of faith; Martin Luther King’s faith, how faith influenced him, how it shaped his activism, and how that activism mobilized communities for campaigns for justice and freedom. It’s an excellent text."
The Civil Rights Era · fivebooks.com