marchers arrived in Montgomery. As a result of
their effort, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed
the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in August, which
suspended and later banned literacy and other
voter qualification tests.
Near the end of his life King sought to cast a
wider political net with his public criticism of
American foreign policy in the Vietnam conflict,
his concern with broader economic issues through
the Poor People’s Campaign on Washington, and
his support for striking black garbage workers in
Memphis, Tennessee, during the spring of 1968,
where he delivered his last speech, “I’ve Been to the
Mountaintop,” at Mason Temple the night before
he was assassinated, on April 4, 1968, while stand-
ing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. James
Earl Ray, an escaped white convict, pleaded guilty
to the shooting in 1969 and spent the rest of his life
in prison, where he died in 1998. King is entombed
at the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic
Site in Atlanta, Georgia.
The son and grandson of black preachers, King
exemplified the power of black orality, represented
best in the black sermon as literary art form, tak-
ing the style of the black preacher to its high-
est dramatic and oratorical forms. This was not
surprising, given that, by his third year at Crozer
Theological Seminary, King, who was ordained
a Baptist minister at age 18, was recognized as a
powerful speaker. He not only employed but mas-
tered the rhythms and antiphonal (call-response)
patterns of the African-American oral tradition.
The black church and its music provided the hot-
bed of King’s spiritual fervor, his organizational
structure, and his base of operation for the Civil
Rights movement.
King, who grew out of strong family roots,
demonstrated great courage, practiced high moral
leadership, and, gave his life for the cause of jus-
tice and righteousness. Guided by his wife, Coretta
Scott King, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for
Social Justice was developed in 1969 and is part
of the National Historic Site of his birthplace and
the Ebenezer Baptist Church. In 1983, Congress set
aside the third Monday in January as a legal public
holiday in honor of King’s birthday.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the
King Years 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1988.
Carson, Clayborne, and Peter Halloran, eds. A Knock
at Midnight. New York: Warner Books, 1998.
Garrow, David. “King the March the Man the Dream.”
American History 38 (August 2003): 26.
Erskine, Noel Leo. King among the Theologians. Cleve-
land: Pilgrim Press, 1994.
Mays, Benjamin E. Born to Rebel. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1987.
France A. DavisKnight, Etheridge (1931–1991)
In “The Idea of Ancestry” in which he catalogues
his family tree, Knight writes that his only uncle
had disappeared when he was 15: “just took / off
and caught a freight (they say)... he causes uneas-
iness in / the clan, he is an empty space.” Ironically,
Knight could have written this about himself, for
although he knew family, and in fact attended fam-
ily reunions from which his uncle, “whereabout
unknown,” was physically absent, Knight, though
physically present at such clan gatherings, could
not find total contentment—could, given his drug
addiction, only “almost” catch up with himself.
Knight was born in the brown hills and red
gullies of the still-segregated society of Corinth,
Mississippi, in 1931, where he soon found him-
self snared by racism and oppression. A school
dropout by age 14, he would use the underworld
of juke joints, pool halls, and poker games as his
classrooms before joining the army from 1947 to- He served in Korea, returning to the United
States with shrapnel wounds and a drug addiction
for medals. He would later write: “I died in Korea
from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected
me” (Rowell, 973). Turning to robbery to support
his heroin addiction, Knight was arrested while
meandering across the United States and sentenced
to eight years in the Indiana State Prison.
In prison, as he explained, “poetry brought me
back to life.” Poems from Prison (1968), Knight’s
Knight, Etheridge 305