Author: Martin Luther King Jr

King led the Montgomery bus boycott at twenty-six, wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail on newspaper margins while under arrest, spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 and took the Nobel Peace Prize the following year at thirty-five. The FBI wiretapped him for years and sent him an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself. He turned against the Vietnam war publicly in 1967 and lost allies for it, and was shot in Memphis in April 1968 while supporting a strike by sanitation workers. A Boston University committee found in 1991 that his doctoral dissertation contained substantial plagiarism, and did not revoke the degree. The Autobiography is not a book he wrote: Clayborne Carson assembled it from King's own writings, sermons and recordings after his death.