The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and the founding president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1957 until his assassination in 1968. In that role, he became the leading public strategist of the American Civil Rights movement, helping coordinate nonviolent campaigns that secured major political, legal, and social victories.
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This podcast traces Dr. King’s path into the Civil Rights movement and the buildup to the 1963 March on Washington, unpacking how his speech became a defining moment in US history.
Dr. King defined nonviolence as a discipline: resistance to injustice, love over hate, redemptive suffering, and faith in justice—drawing moral guidance from the Christian Gospel and strategic methods from Mahatma Gandhi.
Though largely scripted, Martin Luther King Jr. shifted off text mid-speech after gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” prompting the improvised passage that became the most iconic moment of his public legacy.
This podcast from The Atlantic revisits the seven days after Dr. King was killed in 1968, when widespread violent unrest swept the country and reshaped the direction and legacy of the Civil Rights movement.
Delivered at the 1963 March on Washington, Dr. King’s speech tied civil rights demands to America’s founding ideals. It helped shape public memory of the movement before a crowd of more than 250,000 and millions watching nationwide.
This video features stories from people who attended the 1963 March on Washington—the largest demonstration in US history at the time—capturing what it felt like to witness a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement as it unfolded.
Polling shows that public opinion of Dr. King shifted dramatically after his death: viewed unfavorably by most Americans in the mid-1960s, more than 80% of the public now believes he had a positive impact on our country, according to data from Pew and Gallup.
Organized in 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott mobilized tens of thousands of Black bus riders to boycott city buses for 381 days, crippling the system and ultimately leading to desegregation through a Supreme Court ruling. A 26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. was an organizer.
In the late 1960s, Dr. King increasingly emphasized economic inequality, labor rights, and poverty, culminating in the Poor People’s Campaign, which argued that civil rights gains were incomplete without financial security.
Delivered in Memphis the night before his assassination, Dr. King’s 'Mountaintop' speech reflected on mortality, reaffirmed nonviolence, and framed the Civil Rights struggle as part of a longer moral struggle beyond his own life.
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