When considering how much Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, we can easily forget that he died at 39. Looking at his short, historic life, not as a civil rights leader with a global reach in the infancy of globalization, not as a Baptist minister leading a devoted congregation, not as a husband and father of four children, but simply as a writer, even accomplished writers feel humbled. King completed nearly all his writings in the last decade of his life while relentlessly travelling the world, organizing boycotts, leading marches, and doing time in various prisons in America's South for speaking up and acting out for equality.
A Testament of Hope is a must-own book for anyone interested in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, indeed of the American scene during this period in United States history. The book collects 58 of King's most notable essays, speeches, sermons, and interviews, including his nearly 7,000-word "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," dated April 16, 1963, an extraordinary reflection blending philosophy, theology, and politics in response to for clergymen who voiced concerns about King's engaging in civil disobedience. Also included is his nearly 1,700-word "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered to 250,000 people from the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963. This metaphor-abundant address perennially appears at the top of lists ranking the greatest speeches in American history, at once a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation centennial, a tribute to the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution, a sermon on social justice deeply rooted in Scripture and Black spirituals, and much more. These two documents alone serve as singular synthesis of not only King's times but of American history and the human imperative to strive for the common good. Readers will learn a lot by comparing King's works created for the listener, rich with repetition and soaring imagery intended to induce action, and for the reader, replete with rhetorical devices reserved for prolonged contemplation.
A Testament of Hope has much more than these two masterpieces. Read in it his brief but powerfully unifying 1958 "Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools," delivered to 10,000 students, and his 1967 "A Time to Break the Silence," delivered at Riverside Church in New York as a moral protest against the Vietnam War. Regard the intellectual and moral challenge King lays down merely by titling a 1961 speech "Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience." Worth the price of the book are just the final prophetic words of King's "I See the Promised Land," his April 3, 1968, speech in Memphis hours before his death: "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
