See also the resource pages on books by and about MLK, and on King’s speeches, sermons, and short writings.

Lauren K. Alleyne: Martin Luther King Jr. Mourns Trayvon Martin: A poem.

Brandon Ambrosino: How Martin Luther King Jr.’s faith drove his activism.

Marc Andrus: “I Have Always Felt His Support”: A look into the friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr., two brothers working to build a Beloved Community.

Raymond Arsenault: The Tragedy of 1968: What Might Have Been if King and Kennedy Had Lived.

Jabari Asim, on Drew D. Hansen’s The Dream.  

James Baldwin: Malcolm and Martin: By the time each met his death, there was practically no difference between them.

Simon Balto:

• What Was Missing From Memphis on the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination.
• Commemorations in Memphis Show That How We Remember Martin Luther King Jr. Is Changing.
• Concerning David Garrow’s allegations against Dr. King: No reason to trust latest King tape ‘reveal’ nor historian’s interpretation on a matter best settled by black women.

William Barber: A New Poor People’s Campaign.

Stephen Battaglio: He risked his career to interview Martin Luther King. It’s now streaming for the first time.

Jane Berger: Martin Luther King Jr. and Workers’ Rights in Baltimore.

Matt Berman: The Forgotten Martin Luther King: A Radical Anti-War Leftist. The great leader is not the safe-for-all-political stripes hero he is sometimes portrayed as — and it’s hard to imagine even President Obama fully embracing him.

David Bernstein: The Longest March: In August 1966, the Chicago Freedom Movement, Martin Luther King’s campaign to break the grip of segregation, reached its violent culmination. Fifty years on, the struggle continues.

DeNeen L. Brown: Martin Luther King Jr. met Malcolm X just once. The photo still haunts us with what was lost.

DeNeen L. Brown: Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed by a deranged woman. At 29, he almost died. He described the attack a decade later in his last sermon, which he delivered the night before his assassination.

DeNeen L. Brown: The story of how Michael King Jr. became Martin Luther King Jr.

Paul Von Blum: review of King and the Other America: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality.

Lynn Burnett:

• An Incomparable Loss: The Mourning of Martin Luther King’s Friends and Family.
• Why White Supremacists Support MLK’s Holiday.  
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• The 1968 Memphis Strike, Part One: The Garbage Workers.
• Martin Luther King: the Assassination and the FBI.
• Black Americans Make Contact With Gandhi.

Jane Caffrey: Letters MLK Sent as a Teenager Show How Time in CT Influenced the Civil Rights Leader: Martin Luther King Jr. spent two summers working on a farm in Simsbury and wrote five letters home to his parents in Georgia.

Jonathan Capehart: The day Martin Luther King Jr. died.  

David Chappell: The radicalism of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent resistance: His most brilliant innovation was a tactic that managed to be forceful — and nonviolent.

Clayborne Carson (interview).  Understanding the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.     

Gregory Clay: Bernard Lafayette Jr. was with King in Memphis just hours before he was killed: The two men met at the Lorraine Motel to discuss the start of the Poor People’s Campaign.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Martin Luther King Makes the Case for Reparations: A rare clip of the famed civil-rights leader toward the end of his life.

Jelani Cobb: Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s History Lessons: King understood the nation’s challenges as part of a continuous narrative. Today, a narrow view of America’s past could imperil its future.

Peter Cole: Martin Luther King Jr., Labor Activist.

Arica L. Coleman: What Martin Luther King Overlooked About Gandhi.    

Joshua Clark Davis: Twitter thread on GOP opposition to MLK.

Drew Dellinger: The Last March of Martin Luther King Jr.: In the months leading up to his assassination, King’s greatest focus was on poverty and economic injustice.

Drew Dellinger: The Ecological King: A Vision For Our Times.

Matthew Desmond: Where Have All the Rioters Gone? Good jobs in black communities have disappeared, evictions are the norm, and extreme poverty is rising. Cities should be exploding—but they aren’t.

Martin Dobrow: How the FBI Tried to Block Martin Luther King’s Commencement Speech: The untold story of a government plot, a maverick college president, and the most important figure of the civil rights era.

Geoff Edgers: Why no major Martin Luther King Jr. artifacts will be at the new African American museum.

Peter Eisenstadt: Did a Mediocre Letter of Recommendation for Martin Luther King, Jr. Change the Course of History?  [On MLK and Howard Thurman.]

Peter Eisenstadt: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Pilgrimage to Israel.   

Michael Eric Dyson: We Forgot What Dr. King Believed In.           

Eve L. Ewing: King Wanted More Than Just Desegregation: The civil-rights activist’s vision for education was far grander than integration alone. How disappointed he would be.

Ashley Farmer: “Dr. Martin Luther King’s Mother is Slain” and Lessons from Gendered History.

Abdallah Fayyad: The Unfulfilled Promise of Fair Housing: Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an integrated America was about creating a more equal society, but to many white homeowners, it was a threat.

Lena Felton: Rewriting My Grandfather’s MLK Story: In excavating the story of King’s visit to Harlem Hospital, I uncovered my grandfather’s own fight for civil rights—and realized I’d misunderstood his legacy as a black doctor all along.

Mary Lou Finley: The Chicago Freedom Movement and the fight for fair lending.

Daniel Fleming: The strategy for selling Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream: The civil rights icon’s words are available publicly — for a price.

Jeffrey Frank: When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.      

Garance Franke-Ruta: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Amazing 1964 Interview With Robert Penn Warren.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Geography of Oppression: Shooting from a helicopter, the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier documented how King’s assassination affected the physical structures of cities.

Nishani Frazier: David Garrow, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Politics of History.

Beverly Gage: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals. (History of the “suicide letter” the FBI sent to King.)

David Garrow:

• When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam.
• The FBI and Martin Luther King: Martin Luther King was never himself a Communist—far from it. But the FBI’s wiretapping of King was precipitated by his association with Stanley Levison, a man with reported ties to the Communist Party. Newly available documents reveal what the FBI actually knew—the vast extent of Levison’s Party activities.

Jacqui Germain: These Black Women Shaped MLK’s Ideas About Poverty. The National Welfare Rights Organization Wanted Economic Justice for Black Americans: In the 1950s and 1960s, Black single mothers founded the welfare rights movement and ignited a push for true economic justice.

Rosie Gillies: MLK’s Conservative Canonization: An MLK Day reading list on how his radicalism was erased.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The Chasm Between Racial Optimism and Reality: Five decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., equality, for many, remains a distant dream.

Justin Gomer & Christopher Petrella: Reagan Used MLK Day to Undermine Racial Justice.

Robert Greene II:

• Martin Luther King, Jr. and 1619.  
• The International MLK.

Paul Harvey: This Theologian Helped MLK See the Value of Nonviolence: Minister, theologian and mystic Howard Thurman had a profound influence on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Maurice J. Hobson: The King of Atlanta: Martin Luther King Jr. and Public Memory.                   

Michael Honey:

• “The Uplift of All” Through Nonviolent Direct Action.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Memphis Strike(Interview).
• Martin Luther King Jr.: 50 Years Later: Activists today are taking up Dr. King’s mantle and reviving the Poor People’s Campaign.
• The Second Emancipation: Until his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr led an unheralded struggle for economic justice.
• ‘All Labor Has Dignity’: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Fight for Economic Justice.

Tera W. Hunter: Who Needs To Be Taught the Dignity of Work?

Vincent Intondi: Martin Luther King on Non-Violence and Disarmament.

Elahe Izadi: Why ‘Star Trek’ was so important to Martin Luther King Jr.

Ashawnta Jackson: Why MLK Believed Jazz Was the Perfect Soundtrack for Civil Rights: Jazz, King declared, was the ability to take the ‘hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.’

Jesse Jackson: Jesse Jackson on Martin Luther King’s assassination: ‘It redefined America’.

C.L.R. James:  Letter on meeting Martin Luther King: After a lunch with the civil rights leader, CLR James wrote about how the Montgomery Bus Boycott compared to a recent mass action in Ghana.

Clarence B. Jones:

• A Guiding Hand Behind ‘I Have A Dream’.
• The true story behind MLK’s iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.         
• How MLK’s famous letter was smuggled out of jail.

Peniel E. Joseph: Why Martin Luther King Jr.’s sharpest question remains unanswered.

Peniel Joseph (audio interview.) Black Power Scholar Illustrates How MLK And Malcolm X Influenced Each Other.

Ibram X. Kendi: The 1967 MLK and the Politics of Transcendence.

Randall Kennedy: Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy: a fraught relationship.

Bernice A. King: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Daughter Embraces His Hope for the Future: During another polarizing period in America’s history, Bernice A. King lays out three actions that she thinks her father would offer today.

Priyanka Kumar: What King Learned from Gandhi.

Patrick Lacroix: Martin Luther King’s activism points to a way forward for the left — but not how we might imagine: Liberals need to find religion again.

Sylvie Laurent: MLK’s Radical Alternative to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Eli Lee: Martin Luther King Jr. Changed a Nation in Only 13 Years: A Timeline

Kyle Longley: What LBJ Did When He Heard that MLK Had Been Killed.   

Emily Lordi: Nikki Giovanni: ‘Martin Had Faith in the People’: The day after King’s death, the writer-activist wrote a poem about what his loss meant to a movement. Fifty years later, she discusses how his model of leadership lives on.

Ralph Luker: On Martin Luther King’s Plagiarism.           

Alexis C. Madrigal: When the Revolution Was Televised: Martin Luther King Jr. was a master television producer, but the networks had a narrow view of what the black struggle for equality could look like.

Phillip Martin: Coretta Scott King quietly blazed trails of her own before meeting her future husband in Boston.

Dara T. Mathis: King’s Message of Nonviolence Has Been Distorted: In order to evaluate what Martin Luther King Jr.’s stance of nonviolence has contributed to our current view of protest, it bears noting that the concept of his nonviolence has been flattened.

Benjamin Mays: ‘Martin Luther King Jr.’s Unfinished Work on Earth Must Truly Be Our Own’: Five days after King was assassinated, his “spiritual mentor” Benjamin Mays delivered a eulogy for his former student.

Charles W. McKinney: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Grassroots Struggle in Memphis.

Marya McQuirter: Memorializing Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, DC.       

Roberto Mighty (audio interview.) Boston Brought Them Together: Documentary Explores The Early Days Of MLK And Coretta Scott.

Donna Murch: Five myths about Martin Luther King.

Vann R. Newkirk II:

• How Martin Luther King Jr. Recruited John Lewis: The Georgia congressman on what it was like to know the iconic activist.
• King’s Death Gave Birth to Hip-Hop: The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. led directly to hip-hop, an era of black American culture, politics, and art that is often contrasted with his legacy.
• The Whitewashing of King’s Assassination: The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.
• The Consequences of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Canonization: The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

New York Times: Obituary of Martin Luther King.

Elizabeth M. Nix: The myth about the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination: The uprisings were the consequence of urban decline, not the cause of it.

David B. Oppenheimer: Dr. King’s Dream of Affirmative Action.       

Patrick Parr:

• ‘We Were Madly, Madly in Love’: The Untold Story of MLK’s White Girlfriend.
• Dr. King as a Young Athlete.
• Martin Luther King Jr.’s L.A. Bomb Scare.
• The Young Man Who Became a Civil-Rights Icon: Before he led the Montgomery bus boycott or marched on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. was a chain-smoking, pool-playing student at Crozer Theological College just discovering his passion for social justice.
• When a Nazi punched Dr. King: A story about radicalism, violence and helping unify America.
• Japan still has much to learn from Martin Luther King’s nonviolent struggle.
• How Coretta Scott King brought her husband’s message to Japan.
• MLK, Hiroshima, and the Fear of Nuclear Destruction.  
• MLK’s Japanese Friend, Makoto Sakurabayashi.  

Tyler Parry: Critical Race Theory and the Misappropriating of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ben Railton: Considering History: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Legacies of Critical Patriotism.

Barbara Ransby: A Black Feminist’s Response to Attacks on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy.

Victor Ray: The White moderates MLK warned us about.

Jay Reeves: Historic Coretta Scott home where she wed MLK is now forgotten.

Russell Rickford: It’s time to reclaim the true Martin Luther King: King was not celebrating American exceptionalism — he was challenging it.

Justin Rose: Martin Luther King Jr. on Making America Great Again.

Joseph Rosenbloom:

• How Memphis police leaders failed Martin Luther King Jr.: King’s fear for his safety in Memphis was well founded. Threats had poured in, and he was left vulnerable.
• Grace Under Pressure: Martin Luther King, 1968.    

Bayard Rustin:

• Martin Luther King’s Views on Gay People.           
• The King to Come: The holiday and the future racial agenda.

Patrick J. Sauer: This Black Woman Inspired King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech: For women’s history month, we honor Prathia Hall, the SNCC preacher who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr’s exalted remarks at the March on Washington.

Betsy Schlabach: “Our Emancipation Day”: Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago.

Pete Seeger (interview): “That Was the First Time I Met Reverend King…”

Tommie Shelby (interviewed).  The Philosopher King.

Anthony Siracusa: MLK’s Global Vision of Justice.

Tavis Smiley (interview): MLK’s Final Year.

Clint Smith: Martin Luther King Jr. Was Bailed Out by a Millionaire: Incarcerated people today aren’t so lucky.

Mychal Denzel Smith: Is King All That We Are Allowed to Become?  Americans both black and white often use the civil-rights leader’s memory more to chide black youth than to inspire them.

Jason Sokol:

• James Baldwin: ‘I Did Not Want to Weep for Martin, Tears Seemed Futile.’  In Memory of Martin Luther King Jr, a Look Back on His Funeral.
• Martin Luther King’s death tore America apart. We still can’t reckon with African American demands for justice.
• America Passed Gun Control in 1968. Can It Happen Again?

Mark Speltz: Martin Luther King Jr. and Milwaukee: 200 Nights and a Tragedy.

David Stein: The King who carried on the fight for economic justice: After her husband’s murder, Coretta Scott King carried forward the fight for economic equality.

David Stein: Coretta Scott King, The Archive, and Black Feminist Methods.  

Timothy Stewart-Winter: Martin Luther King’s Thoughts on a Future Black President.  

Thomas J. Sugrue: Restoring King: There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr.

Alan Taylor: The Riots That Followed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Alan Taylor: Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. in Photos.         

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Martin Luther King’s Radical Anticapitalism.

Brandon M. Terry: MLK Now.  With responses from:

• Barbara Ransby: King in Context: We Must Not Sanitize King.
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: The Pivot to Class: King Articulated an Anti-Capitalist Analysis of the U.S.
• Andrew Douglas: Diagnosing Racial Capitalism: King Called for a Restructuring of the Whole of American Society.
• Jeanne Theoharis: A National Problem: King Challenged Injustice in the North, As Well.
• Elizabeth Hinton: Violence and Nonviolent Protests Were Intertwined Forces.
• Brandon M. Terry: (In response to the responses.)  A Revolution in Values: King Showed Respect Through Disagreement.

Brandon M. Terry:

• The Cost of Canonizing MLK.
• Was Martin Luther King a Socialist?
• The Casualties of War: Taking Up King’s Fight against Militarism.

Brandon M. Terry & Tommie Shelby (interview): The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Matthew Teutsch: MLK And Lillian Smith.

Kanishk Tharoor: The Debt MLK Owed to India’s Anti-Colonial Fight: The campaign against Jim Crow was always embedded in a larger global battle against white supremacy.

Jeanne Theoharis:

• What King Said About Northern Liberalism:  “The white moderate” was more of an obstacle than “the Ku Klux Klanner.”
• MLK Would Never Shut Down a Freeway, and 6 Other Myths About the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter.
• 10 ways to be like Martin Luther King after Ferguson.
• We remember how Martin Luther King Jr. revolutionized the South. But we can’t forget his struggles in the North. Fifty years after King’s death, we still like an easy story of Northern good guys and Southern bad guys. But that’s not the reality he encountered.
• Comey Says FBI’s Surveillance of MLK Was “Shameful” — but Comey’s FBI Targeted Black Activists and Muslim Communities Anyway.
• Coretta Scott King and the Civil-Rights Movement’s Hidden Women.
• What Coretta Scott King Can Teach Democrats About A Jobs Guarantee.
• Don’t Forget That Martin Luther King Jr. Was Once Denounced as an Extremist.
• Martin Luther King and the ‘polite’ racism of white liberals.
• Martin Luther King Jr.’s Challenge to his Liberal Allies.
• Martin Luther King Knew That Fighting Racism Meant Fighting Police Brutality: Critics of Black Lives Matter have held up King as a foil to the movement’s criticisms of law enforcement, but those are views that King himself shared.
• Five ways to actually BE like Martin Luther King on what would have been his 94th birthday.

J. Phillip Thompson: Unfinished Revolution: Dr. King’s goal was full employment and universal health care.

J. Samuel Walker: We haven’t addressed the causes of the 1968 D.C. riots — which means they could happen again: The situation in our cities is still combustible. 

Linn Washington: It’s been 70 years since a lecture in Philadelphia inspired Dr. King’s civil rights journey.

Simon Waxman: Americans Love King Because They Don’t Understand Him.      

Jordan Weissmann: Martin Luther King’s Economic Dream: A Guaranteed Income for All Americans.  The civil rights leader laid out his vision for fighting poverty in his final book. 

Cornel West: The radical King we don’t know: Does America have the capacity to heed the radical Martin Luther King Jr., or must America sanitize King in order to evade and avoid his challenge?

Cornel West: Brother Martin Was a Blues Man.     

Michael Wilson: Before ‘I Have a Dream,’ Martin Luther King Almost Died. This Man Saved Him. The untold story of the patrolman who took charge when the civil rights leader was stabbed in Harlem.

Victoria W. Wolcott: The public has underestimated the radicalism of Martin Luther King Jr.’s early work: From the beginning of the 1950s, King embraced a utopian socialist vision of full equality.

Dagmawi Woubshet: Revisiting One of King’s Final and Most Haunting Sermons: Delivered two months before he died, “The Drum Major Instinct” saw the preacher give his own eulogy.

Andrew Young: ‘You’re going to heaven and leaving us in hell’: Every moment of April 4, 1968, stays fresh in the mind of the former top lieutenant for King.

Julian Zelizer: Dissent from the left can be patriotic. Martin Luther King Jr. proved it. The right charges that criticisms of the United States from the left are unpatriotic — but history says they’re wrong.