King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this fast-paced, concise biography, Harvard Sitkoff presents a stunningly relevant and radical Martin Luther King, Jr. whose greatest accomplishments may have been yet to come.
King's murder in April 1968 did far more than cut tragically short the life of one of America's most remarkable civil rights leaders. In commemorating King's achievements at the end of his life and ignoring his defeats, too many Americans quickly relegated the civil rights struggle to the past, halting the progression of the activist’s evolving movement.
King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop honestly assesses his successes along with his failures—as an organizer in Albany, Georgia and St. Augustine, Florida; as a leader of ever more strident activists; and as a husband. Harvard Sitkoff weaves both high and low points together to capture King's lifelong struggle, through disappointment and epiphany, with his own injunction: "Let us be Christian in all our actions."
By telling King's life as one on the verge of reaching its fullest fulfillment, Sitkoff powerfully shows where King's faith and activism were leading him—to a direct confrontation with a president over an immoral war and with an America blind to its complicity in economic injustice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Sitkoff covers the major points in the time line of King's life and the Civil Rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott to the March on Washington, his anti Vietnam War activism and assassination in 1968 but this brief, rudimentary volume will enlighten only the most novice student of Civil Rights history. The author passes through major moments in an informal tone that borders on the flippant ("King the gentle Jesus had bested Connor the sadistic Satan"). Sitkoff (The Enduring Vision, co-editor) attends to the civil rights leader's flaws as well as his accomplishments, noting King's early plagiarism and making frequent reference to his sexual dalliances ("King flitted from one thinker to another at almost the same rate as he wrecked young women"). Though Sitkoff includes excerpts from King's books and speeches (jazzed up with audience responses, e.g., "All right, yessir!"), neophytes are better served by David J. Garrow's Pulitzer Prize winning Bearing the Cross, which Sitkoff acknowledges in his ample and gracious "Bibliographic Essay."
