Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - Softcover

Garrow, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060566922 ISBN 13: 9780060566920

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2004

Synopsis

Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, this is the most comprehensive book ever written about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on more than seven hundred interviews with all of King's surviving associates, as well as with those who opposed him, and enhanced by the author's access to King's personal papers and tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents, this is a towering portrait of a man's metamorphosis into a legend.

About this title

Review:

In this 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner, David J. Garrow, through extensive interviews, and access to F.B.I. transcripts, delves deeply into both Dr. Martin Luther King’s leadership role and his private life. He attributes King's moral and physical courage to his religious faith: King believed that he had literally been called to do the Lord's work. But from 1965, when the F.B.I. taped King in sexual encounters and sent the tape to S.C.L.L. headquarters, his associates noted a "spiritual depression", even a "death wish." Fear that exposure would ruin his public work dogged him until his assassination in 1968. While documenting the F.B.I.'s dirty tricks, Garrow never loses sight of King's achievement and vision, nor of the poignancy of King's belief that "the cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on."

From the Inside Flap:

e Pulitzer Prize. Based on more than 700 recorded conversations, including interviews with all of King's closest surviving associates, this is a powerful portrait of King and the movement for which he dedicated himself.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0060566922
• ISBN 13: 9780060566920
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 800