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Summary
Summary
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is as relevant today as he was when he led civil rights campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. He was an agent and a prophet of political change in this country, and the election of President Barack Obama is his direct legacy.
Now from one of Britain's most experienced political observers comes a new, accessible biography of the man and his works. The story of King is dramatic, and Godfrey Hodgson presents it with verve, clarity, and acute insight based in part on his own reporting on-scene at the time. He interviewed King half a dozen times or more; heard his speech at the March on Washington; was in Birmingham, Selma and Chicago; and met many of the characters in King's life story. Martin Luther King combines the best of his own reporting, plus the work of other biographers and researchers, to trace the iconic civil rights leader's career from his birth in Atlanta in 1929, through the campaigns that made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to his assassination in Memphis in 1968. Hodgson sheds light on every aspect of an extraordinary life: the Black Baptist culture in which King grew up, his theology and political philosophy, his physical and moral courage, his insistence on the injustice of inequality, his campaigning energy, his repeated sexual infidelities.
Hodgson describes the political minefield in which King operated; follows how he gradually persuaded President Kennedy that he could not stand by and allow the civil rights movement to be frustrated; and describes how, on the verge of success, his career was threatened by President Johnson's anger at King's principled decision to come out against the Vietnam War. He also puts King's career into the context of American history in the crisis of the 1960s. In his life, King was frustrated; but in death, he has been triumphant.
Martin Luther King allows the charisma and power of King's personality to shine through, showing in gripping narrative style exactly how one man helped America to progress toward its truest ideals. Hodgson's extensive research and detail help paint an accurate, complex portrait of one of America's most important leaders.
Godfrey Hodgson has worked in Britain and America as a newspaper and magazine journalist; as a television reporter, documentary maker and anchor; as a university teacher and lecturer; and as the author of a dozen well-received books about U.S. politics and recent history, including America in Our Time , a history of the United States in the 1960s; More Equal than Others , on politics and society in twentieth-century America; and most recently, a biography of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Gentleman from New York . Hodgson met King on a number of occasions between 1956 and 1967. He recently retired as director of the Reuters Foundation Programme at Oxford University and is a visiting journalism professor at City University in London.
PRAISE FOR America in Our Time
"A critique so stimulating and compelling that I can only say read it."
---Richard Lingeman, The New York Times
"It simply gets right, without great fuss, the detail and proportion of things like the civil rights movement, student unrest, the stages of our Vietnam engagement."
---Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books
PRAISE FOR More Equal than Others
"The most thoughtful, thorough and sorrowful book imaginable on what has happened in these years."
---Bernard Crick, The Independent
Author Notes
Godfrey Hodgson has worked in Britain and America as a newspaper and magazine journalist; as a television reporter, documentary maker and anchor; as a university teacher and lecturer; and as the author of a dozen well-received books about U.S. politics and recent history, including America in Our Time , a history of the United States in the 1960s; More Equal than Others , on politics and society in twentieth-century America; and most recently, a biography of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Gentleman from New York . Hodgson met King on a number of occasions between 1956 and 1967. He recently retired as director of the Reuters Foundation Programme at Oxford University and is a visiting journalism professor at City University in London.
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
British journalist and author Hodgson recounts the life of Martin Luther King Jr. from his birth in 1929 to his assassination in 1968, touching on the major high and low points of King's activism and personal life. Hodgson, who has written several books on American politics, examines the racial landscape of the U.S. and how King coped with, challenged, and eventually changed it. Hodgson explores King's transformation from a Southern Baptist preacher to a national civil rights leader and international peace and human-rights activist. He recounts King's relationships with other civil rights figures, including Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and leftist Stanley Levison. He chronicles the successful and failed strategies, the tensions between King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the more assertive Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as younger generations challenged the slow pace of change, as well as the stress of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI surveillance. Hodgson offers no new insights or deep analysis, but his viewpoint as a British journalist who interviewed King on several occasions from 1956 to 1967 adds an interesting perspective.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Martin Luther King has been the subject of many lengthy and richly detailed accounts, such as Taylor Branch's three-volume "America in the King Years" series and David Garrow's Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Christian Leadership Conference. Hodgson (The Myth of American Exceptionalism), one of Great Britain's keenest observers of American politics, here offers a most welcome brief account of King and his times. Hodgson is best at describing King's adult life as a series of struggles: leading the Civil Rights Movement from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott through the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike; confronting turmoil within the Civil Rights Movement among King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the more conservative NAACP and Urban League; and fearing assassination as a daily threat, battling Presidents Kennedy and Johnson over legislation, and his philandering that could have destroyed the nonviolent movement. Verdict This excellent, short biography is ideal for high school and college students and for general readers who want a concise overview of King's life and legacy.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.