Historical press accounts of Martin Luther King, Jr. :
King has been on the cover of
Time magazine five times:
Feb 18, 1957 -
THE SOUTH: Attack on the Conscience
"The man whose word they seek is not a judge, or a lawyer, or a political strategist or a flaming orator. He is a scholarly, 28-year-old Negro Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation's remarkable leaders of men."
"Says Baptist Minister William Finlator of Raleigh, N.C.: 'King has been working on the guilt conscience of the South. If he can bring us to contrition, that is our hope.'"
"Personally humble, articulate, and of high educational attainment, Martin Luther King Jr. is, in fact, what many a Negro—and, were it not for his color, many a white—would like to be.'"
[Of his aversion to violence] "Cowardice? If so, it would come as a surprise to Montgomery, where Martin Luther King has unflinchingly faced the possibility of violent death for months."
'"I was ready to resent all the white race," he [King] says. "As I got to see more of white people, my resentment was softened, and a spirit of cooperation took its place...'"
Jan 03, 1964 -
America's Gandhi: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"All this was the Negro revolution. Birmingham was its main battleground, and Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the Negroes in Birmingham, became to millions, black and white, in South and North, the symbol of that revolution—and the Man of the Year.
King is in many ways the unlikely leader of an unlikely organization—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a loose alliance of 100 or so church-oriented groups. King has neither the quiet brilliance nor the sharp administrative capabilities of the N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins. He has none of the sophistication of the National Urban League's Whitney Young Jr., lacks Young's experience in dealing with high echelons of the U.S. business community. He has neither the inventiveness of CORE's James Farmer nor the raw militancy of SNICK's John Lewis nor the bristling wit of Author James Baldwin. He did not make his mark in the entertainment field, where talented Negroes have long been prominent, or in the sciences and professions where Negroes have, almost unnoticed, been coming into their own (see color pages). He earns no more money than some plumbers ($10,000 a year), and possesses little in the way of material things.
He presents an unimposing figure: he is 5 ft. 7 in., weighs a heavy-chested 173 Ibs., dresses with funereal conservatism (five of six suits are black, as are most of his neckties). He has very little sense of humor. He never heard of Y. A. Tittle or George Shearing, but he can, discourse by the hour about Thoreau, Hegel, Kant and Gandhi."\
Mar 19, 1965 - Nation: The Central Points (The struggle for voting rights in Selma, Alabama.)Discussion mainly of the events in Selma, rather than an in-depth story on King, though he is mentioned and quoted frequently.
[Incidentally, WV's Congressman Ken Hechler was the only sitting member of Congress who participated in the Selma March with King. Click the link above to read the article he wrote about it at the time, and the article he wrote 40 years later looking back.] Jan 09, 2006 ("The Secret Agony of Martin Luther King, Jr. An exclusive book excerpt tells the inside story of his troubled final days.") -
"I Have Seen The Promised Land"
Introduction: "The triumphs of the Montgomery bus boycott and the March on Washington with its stirring "I Have a Dream" speech, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize were all behind Martin Luther King Jr. when he began the last and perhaps loneliest year of his life in January 1968. Now black-power militants and even some of his closest advisers were rejecting King's philosophy of nonviolence. Many white supporters of the civil rights movement had redirected their enthusiasm--and their dollars--to opposing the war in Vietnam. Other whites chastised King for speaking out against the war. Constant travel to rally support for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), along with his frequent affairs on the road, strained King's marriage. Premonitions of death stalked him. Meanwhile, the FBI stepped up its harassment with wiretaps and dirty tricks. Determined to revitalize his mission and himself, King hoped he could achieve both by leading a multiracial crusade against poverty. He called it the Poor People's Campaign, and although his staff had deep reservations about the idea, he spent what would be his last months planning a new march on Washington. The turbulence of King's final days comes vividly to life in Time's exclusive excerpts from At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68, the final volume of Pulitzer prizewinner Taylor Branch's three-part history of the civil rights movement and its most charismatic leader. In this portrait of King as a man under siege, his passion and his rhetoric reach new levels of grace."
James Earl Ray, King's assassin, was on the
Jun 20, 1977 cover of Time, following his escape with several other inmates from a maximum security prision. (They were soon recaptured, and he died in prison.)
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