Fifty Years Since Mlk

by Terry, Brandon

• ISBN13: 9781946511065
• ISBN10: 1946511064
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2018-02-02
• Publisher: Boston Review

Summary

Martin Luther King's legacy for today's activists, fifty years after his death.

Since his death on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King's legacy has influenced generations of activism. Edited and with a lead essay by Brandon Terry, this volume explores what this legacy can and cannot do for activism in the present.

King spent the months leading up to his death organizing demonstrations against the Vietnam War and planning the Poor People's Campaign, a “multiracial army of the poor” that would march on Washington in pursuit of economic justice. Thus the spring of 1968 represented a hopeful, albeit chaotic set of possibilities; King, along with countless other activists, offered both ethical and strategic solutions to the multifaceted problems of war, racism, and economic inequality. With a critical eye on both the past and present, this collection of essays explores that moment of promise, and how, in the fifty years since King's death, historical forces have shaped what we claim as a usable past in fighting the injustices of our time.

Contributors
Christian G. Appy, Andrew Douglas, Bernard E. Harcourt, Elizabeth Hinton, Samuel Moyn, Ed Pavlić, Aziz Rana, Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Brandon M. Terry, Jeanne Theoharis, Thad Williamson

Author Biography

Brandon Terry is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University.

Joshua Cohen is Coeditor-in-Chief of Boston Review, member of the faculty of Apple University, and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Law, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Brandon Terry is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University.

Brandon Terry is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University.

Ed Pavlić is the author of Live at the Bitter End; Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener; Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno; and other books. He is Distinguished Research Professor in the English Department and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.