Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was a Baptist minister from Atlanta, the son and grandson of preachers, who earned a doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University. As pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church he led the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956, and he went on to found and lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He directed campaigns in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave this address on 28 August 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, near the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march, led by A. Philip Randolph and organized chiefly by Bayard Rustin, drew roughly a quarter of a million people to the Mall to press for civil rights legislation then before Congress and for economic opportunity.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail brings together Martin Luther King Jr.'s public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech.
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