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Weronika Kurasz's review of Larry L. Macon Senior's Doing God’s Will: Martin Luther King Jr. and a Life of Purpose. Saint Paul Press, 2019.

This essay develops an account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s justification for and use of what I will call “democratic propaganda”—truthful propaganda that is aimed at promoting and fostering democratic political action by stirring readers’ emotions. I interpret King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the broader context of his work and argue that it is a piece of democratic propaganda. I give an account of what led King to support the use of democratic propaganda and why he hoped it would help to overcome a central problem in the civil rights movement: the political inaction of the white moderates. King emphasizes shame in the Letter, and I argue that this concept offers us a new way of thinking about the efficacy of democratic propaganda. I close by considering the relevance of King’s approach for today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the innovativeness of King’s use of shame, I suggest it may be time for a new approach to Black politics and activism.

In 1957, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist Christian group, published a comic book entitled Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story. This document has received some attention i...

In Nashville in 1958 Reverend James Lawson and Reverend Kelly Miller Smith (NCLC) started organising „nonviolent workshop”. Lawson began teaching and train local residents in the techniques of the Gandhi philosophy of direct nonviolent protest. On February 14 and 28, 1960, African American students launched their first full-scale sit-ins. Throughout the spring, students conducted numerous sit-ins and boycott. They suffered physical abuse, arrests, but held to the concept of Christian nonviolence. On April 19, after bombing damaged the home of Z. Alexander Looby (defense counsel for the students), thousand of black and some white Americans marched to Nashville’s City Hall. On May 10, 1960, Nashville became the first major city to begin desegregating its public facilities. The Nashville movement had been planned over several months, and served as a model for future demonstrations against segregation.

‘To think seriously about Martin Luther King, Jr as a political philosopher’, Paul Taylor writes in To Shape a New World, ‘is to engage in multiple acts of heresy’ (35). Tommie Shelby and Brandon T...

Inspired by Martin Luther King's “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, President Bill Clinton signed the King Holiday and Service Act of 1994 and transformed the King holiday into a day of service. By linking the holiday to his community service initiatives, Clinton, and Coretta Scott King, encouraged Americans to continue King's work by helping America's poor through racially integrated service activities. Since the inaugural 1986 holiday, scholars have claimed that King Day abets amnesia more than it encourages remembrance; however, this reform illustrates that the holiday is an evolving and dynamic form of history that can be used to continue the work of the civil rights movement.

This article explores the connectedness between Martin Luther King’s, Ernesto Guevara’s and Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas and anti-colonial resistance in Vietnam. By showing how three different local...

In 1965, there were a number of major events occurring in the United States, including the U.S. soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War; the historic march that took place in Selma, Alabama, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the murder of Malcom X in Harlem, New York; and the signing of The Voters Rights Act by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It was a time that Black families were moving in a positive direction in the areas of housing, employment, and education. Since 1965, Black men in the United States have not made the same progress as their White and Hispanic counterparts. This article explores both the absence of Black males in households as well as the nesting syndrome created by mothers rearing Black men and its impact on Black males since 1965.

El artículo ofrece diversos planteamientos elaborados por Heschel, un filósofo rabino del S. XX, asesor de Luther King, quien aludió las características de la decadencia del mundo contemporáneo. A su vez, partiendo de la desesperanza que brota de semejante encrucijada, se ofrecen distintos planteamientos para considerar el valor de la crisis y se muestran los lineamientos filosóficos y místicos que ofrece Heschel para construir una renovada visión de la realidad. De tal modo, la elaboración de significados para la existencia personal surge de la criticidad y de la aceptación del desasosiego que deriva de existir en un mundo caótico.

Ali Mazrui loved not only to write, and write about fairly everything, but he was also good at keeping the written record of what, as he would put it, occurred to his mind, his being. Based mostly on his own writings, both published and unpublished, this chapter describes Mazrui’s interactions with some key individuals, historical figures, and dignitaries, ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Nelson Mandela and from Carl Sagan to Mario Cuomo, and includes what Mazrui had to say about (his interactions with some of) these individuals. This chapter also includes what others have said about him.

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.

This essay asserts freedom as the essence of the prophetic Black Christian tradition that propelled the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strikes, and largely guided the moral compass of the late-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. Sexism, however, is a moral paradox that emerges at the interstices of the prophetic Black Church’s institutional espousal of freedom and its consistently conflicting practices of gender discrimination that bind Black women to politics of silence and invisibility. An exploration of the iconic “I AM a Man” placards worn by strikers during Martin Luther King Jr.’s final campaign in Memphis alongside a contemporary icon of the Black Lives Matter movement illumines how black women continue to be challenged by intracommunal invisibility, even as they are consistently the progenitors, mobilizers, sustainers, and intellectual architects of Black movements for social change.

This article presents a preliminary sketch of a broader investigation into encounters between “engaged Buddhism” and Black liberation theology in the United States from 1965–1968, motivated by the ...

From January 18, 1965 to March 25, 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his civil rights lieutenants conducted a series of marches in Selma, Alabama, which ultimately won African Americans the right t...

How might teachers challenge oversimplified narratives regarding the life and deedsof Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK), in order to support ideals of human rights in education?In this study, we examine ...

Arendt’s work on civil disobedience sets out an optimistic portrayal of the possibilities of such forms of action in re-energising the spirit of American politics in the late twentieth cent...

Across the twentieth century, black South Africans often drew inspiration from African American progress. This transatlantic history informed the global antiapartheid struggle, animated by international human rights norms, of Martin Luther King Jr., his fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner the South African leader Albert Luthuli, and the African American tennis star Arthur Ashe. While tracing the travels of African Americans and Africans “going South,” this article centers Africa and Africans, thereby redressing gaps in black Atlantic and African diaspora scholarship.

The fierce urgency of now (Martin Luther King)This is a short review of a book written by Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Comparative Literature. Since its recent publication, it ha...

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., understood the role of music as an important crowd motivator. Raised in the black church, he experienced jubilee songs and gospel hymns within congregational s...

This piece revisits the street politics of Ms Jacqueline Smith and her two-plus decades of protest outside the former Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated. Now the National Civil Rights Museum, the Motel is part of a growing heritage tourism industry in the American South, where landscapes of civil rights memorialization are often contested publicly and exist alongside other landscapes of racism. More recently, projects like the Museum have become central to urban redevelopment schemes and vehicles of gentrification. This piece introduces Ms Smith’s protest in relation to such themes in cultural geography, followed by the reproduction of a blog post documenting the author’s encounter with Ms Smith in June 2015. It urges cultural geographers to engage with Ms Smith’s street politics in their writings on landscape and their teachings in the classroom.

White America’s apparent decision to withdraw from its role of global leadership – “America First” – may be hastening black America’s retreat from Dr King’s liberal, integrationist, dream. Black America is, materially better off, more confident and increasingly visible across the globe – but no more integrated than in Martin Luther King’s day. There are no black governors in any US states; but there are two Latinos, one Japanese American and a Palestinian American. In Detroit, in Pennsylvania, the African American inner cities are reborn as creative and hi-tech spaces for wealthy whites. Britain is approaching a unique statistical threshold: there will soon be more people of Caribbean descent in the United Kingdom with one white parent than those with two black parents. The lesson for black Americans is that intrinsically, they are, on average, equally capable to whites in most things.

Scholarly and popular accounts of Chicago in 1968 bring to mind images of violence that have overshadowed all forms of social and political activism in the city at that time. During the night of April 4, as news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination spread, the West Side erupted into what had become a usual scene of black desperation. Before the night had ended, burned cars, looted stores, broken bottles, rocks, and street battles between thousands of black residents and overwhelmed polic...

For those who have studied the black freedom struggle, it is a given that King’s legacy has not only been ‘whitewashed’ to neutralize its radical elements but also that this ‘sanitized’ version is used to undermine similar ones in the current movement for racial equality. This article, however, zooms in on the ways in which today’s left-leaning black activists use the existence of this ‘sanitized’ version of King’s legacy to their advantage. Particularly the recent #ReclaimMLK campaigns in the USA and black engagement with King legacy projects in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands reveal how it can be used as a potent tool to justify contemporary protests. This provides valuable insights into the possible trajectory of 21st century black activism as well as the interrelation between the black freedom struggles on both continents.

This paper investigates the graphic memoir trilogy March that U.S. Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis co-authored with Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell. The aim of the article is to describe how justice and injustice are framed in Lewis’ remembrance with regard to Lewis’ slogan of “good trouble.” In particular, it formulates an approach to investigate framing strategies that the work employs within the mediality of comics. Thus, the visual and material frames of the text are examined as techniques to facilitate political framing. Finally, the framing strategies of March will be correlated to the mobilization strategies of the civil rights movement.

Absolutely Bound Conscience and Curageous Non-Conformism: What Connects Martin Luther King and Martin Luther in Spite of All Their Differences. The article looks at the details about how Martin Luther King made reference to Martin Luther. The author considers the story behind the similarity of the name, King’s study of the reformer as a student, his referral to the „Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise“, and to the nailing of the theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. How contemporary Lutherans in the USA reacted to the civil rights movement is described. In a conclusion differences and similarities are summarized.

This article explores the role ofEbonymagazine as a key staging ground for competing political and ideological debates over Martin Luther King Jr's legacy, and the struggle for a national holiday in his name. In doing so, it provides an important case study into the contestations between what Houston Baker has described as “black critical memory” and “black conservative nostalgia.” In response to attempts by Ronald Reagan and other politicians to reimagine King as an advocate for color-blind conservatism,Ebony’s senior editor, Lerone Bennett Jr., sought to situate King's legacy within a radical “living history” of black America. However, the magazine's broader coverage of the King holiday movement betrayed underlying tensions within its discussion of King's legacy, and fed into the magazine's role as an inadvertent frame for color-blind ideologies during the 1980s.

The Civil Rights Movement is deeply intertwined with Lyndon B. Johnson. Throughout his career, Johnson supported the quest of African-Americans for political and civil rights. They found in him an ally whose role was fundamental in fullfilling the goals of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Civil Rights Movement. This paper will examine the role of the Johnson presidency in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964.

“The Miracle of the Golden Arches: Race and Fast Food in Los Angeles” examines the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its advocacy on behalf of the city’s black McDonald’s franchisees. The franchisees believed that McDonald’s limited their ability to franchise restaurants outside of predominately black neighborhoods. Analyzing the rhetoric surrounding these disputes, the article argues that despite their economic prosperity as a group, African American McDonald’s franchisees often found themselves in an uneasy position as models of racial progress and victims of racial discrimination. The article covers the period between two urban uprisings—the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 and the days after police officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King in 1992—to expose the relationship between McDonald’s and black consumers in moments of economic, social, and racial crisis.

Brian Ward has written a riveting account of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final trip across the Atlantic, which was also King’s first and only visit to England’s north-east. Yet Martin Luther King in ...

I am writing this on a significant anniversary in American history, and I would be remiss in not acknowledging it. Fifty-seven years ago, hundreds of thousands of people came together to march on Washington for jobs and freedom. Attendees heard from a number of civil rights activists including Myrlie Evers, Mahalia Jackson, John Lewis, A. Phillip Randolph, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; this is when the latter gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Despite the preponderance of visual stimuli in our world, we use sound and words as the primary mechanism of communication between each other. From the powerful speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln to the pillow talk between lovers, we create sound to carry our hopes, dreams, and desires. Whether we are greeting each other after a long absence (like the elephants) or calling out to our significant other (like the butterflyfish), it is our words that carry information and emotion to each other. Even when we are not talking to each other, we fill our world with songs, videos, and movies that challenge us to think, console us when we are sad, fill us with joy, or even cause us to dance in celebration. In other ways, our words are how we define who we are. With words, our promises create an ethical bond with those to whom we make promises. In marriages, a simple nod in response to vows is not sufficient; the words “I do” must be acknowledged and spoken to create that relationship. For many personal dealings, verbally accepting a deal finally seals the relationship. Thus, sounds, either spoken or sung, are a central and fundamental structure of our society.

New questions about the legacies of 1968 and the 1960s in general are presenting themselves to us, as scholars and as citizens, ever more urgently. This is particularly true of race and racial struggle, as unresolved race matters from the past poignantly intersect with twenty-first century activism aimed at countering the continued devaluation of black lives. This special issue of The European Journal of American Studies focuses on the black freedom struggle to explore how those “unresolved race matters from the past” weigh down on the present in terms of (dis)continuities in political activism, protest cultures, backlash, and memory and to highlight the ways in which the 1960s continue to inform and inspire explanations of and resistance to the racial status quo in the 21st century. This introduction will explain why and categorize how today’s racial landscape has shaped contemporary societal and scholarly interest in the black, and especially radical, activism of 1968.