Right now, I'm listening to the audiobook "
King: A Life," the recent released and definitive biography of MLK by Jonathan Eig. Really good (the narrator is truly excellent). While I superficially knew all the important events in the civil rights struggle covered in the book, I didn't fully grasp how they all fit together. Highly recommended.
His formative years in the struggle in Montgomery and Birmingham were quite something. Bombings, violence, imprisonment and indignities galore, but he kept on keepin' on. A remarkable man.
To this day, it's impossible to stand on the top step of the Lincoln Memorial (which I do with some frequency) without thinking of his "I Have a Dream Speech." He first touched on the theme (and used the memorable words) of this speech a few months earlier in Detroit and didn't have them included in the original draft of the speech that he prepared late the night before. The most memorable passages came at the end of the speech after a long pause and were not planned, but ad-libbed and yet became among the most memorable pieces of oratory in American history.