Publisher Description
April 16th. The year is 1963. Birmingham, Alabama has had a spring of non-violent protests known as the Birmingham Campaign, seeking to draw attention to the segregation against blacks by the city government and downtown retailers. The organizers longed to create a non-violent tension so severe that the powers that be would be forced to address the rampant racism head on. Recently arrested was Martin Luther King, Jr.. It is there in that jail cell that he writes this letter; on the margins of a newspaper he pens this defense of non-violence against segregation. His accusers, though many, in this case were not the white racist leaders or retailers he protested against, but 8 black men who saw him as “other” and as too extreme. To them and to the world he defended the notion that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.
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About Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Jr. (1929–1968) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and grandson of
pastors. He graduated from Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary,
becoming the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama
at age twenty-five. He subsequently earned his PhD from Boston University. In
1957, he and other civil rights leaders founded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, an organization he led until his death. A proponent of
Gandhian principles of nonviolence, he led many protests and demonstrations for
civil rights, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August
29, 1963, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Winner of the
1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he continued to fight for civil rights, the eradication
of poverty, and the end of the Vietnam War. He was assassinated on April 4,
1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
About Dion Graham
Dion Graham is an award-winning narrator named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine. He has been a recipient of the prestigious Audie Award numerous times, as well as Earphones Awards, the Publishers Weekly Listen Up Awards, IBPA Ben Franklin Awards, and the ALA Odyssey Award. He was nominated in 2015 for a Voice Arts Award for Outstanding Narration. He is also a critically acclaimed actor who has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series. He is a graduate of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, with an MFA degree in acting.