The Baptist minister and civil rights leader who applied Gandhian nonviolent resistance to American racial segregation, led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington, and was assassinated in 1968 — leaving behind the most important speech in American political oratory and an unfinished revolution whose legacy is still contested.
King was thirty-four years old when he gave the 'I Have a Dream' speech. He was thirty-nine when he was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis. In between, he organized the most consequential social movement in American history — ending legal segregation, securing the Voting Rights Act, and forcing the country to confront the gap between its stated ideals and its actual practices. He also opposed the Vietnam War, called for economic justice, and was moving toward a radical critique of American capitalism when he died.