Claybourne Carson has provided people interested in the civil rights movement with another invaluable resource. SNCC played a critical, but underappreciate role in the gains that were made during the 1960s. This collection of SNCC's newspaper provides valuable insights into this organization and the students' thoughts about the civil rights movement.

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King is inspiring and well written. One thing that I thought would be a downfall of the book was that it wasn't as "autobiographical" as the title insinuates with the editor doing 70-80% of the writing. However, as I became engrossed in the text, the editor Clayborne Carson's style captivated me. In fact, it soon came to the point that when MLK's words were used (italicized), they seemed drab and out dated. Through Carson's more modern approach, the book was made more interesting to a young reader like myself. Though you can tell the difference between Carson and King's words even without the italics, Carson did a respectable job in essentially becoming Dr. King. I feel he suceeded in accuratley telling the story through MLK's eyes, though maybe not in his words. Through it all, the book was by far the best on King that I've ever read. This is because of it's depth. Since Carson's words were used so much, letters, speeches and college papers written by Dr. King were used very much throughout the book. I liked this because it gave insight into Kin'g personal life and writing style, which other books I've read on the leader fail to do. In addition, the format of the book (I, us, we) makes you feel like it is a truly personal and accurate account, even though it is the editor talking. In closing, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. was an excellent book that I feel every American should read.

Dr. King has become such an American icon that it's easy to forget what a brilliant, passionate man he was. This "autobiography" will remind you. Clayborne Carson does a masterful job of weaving King's writings and speeches together into what serves as a credible autobiography but more importantly, as a chronicle of King's powerful oratory.

I found the book an endless source of inspiration for me as a pacifist and believer in justice and equality for all.

Here are the unforgettable words, not only of the "I Have A Dream Speech" and "The Letter From a Birmingham Jail" but other speeches and writings as well and the stories behind them. We are constantly reminded that King was both a determined and eloquent leader, who was the focal point of America's most succesful social movement.

This is not only unique as an autobiography because it wasn't really written as such, but because it is such a rich source of wisdom and passion.

It's a book to be read and kept handy. I'll be referring to it often and reading it again.

The autobiography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a triumph. Although not an "autobiography" in a strict sense, this book offers a unique glimpse into the life of one of history's most important activists. Clayborne Carson, through an exhaustive research of Dr. King's writings, speeches, and tapes, has put together a very seamless and elegant compilation that could very well have been an autobiography had Dr. King lived.

The work begins with thoughts about Dr. King's childhood, his description of his family, his years at Boston University, and his first encounter with his wife. Many of his philosophical thoughts, that grew in his formative years and yet radically influenced his peace movement, are described with an eloquent speech and astounding detail. His love for his wife Coretta and the unconditional devotion to her (and vice versa) permeates throughout this book. Dr. King vividly describes his devotion to the principles of nonviolence, his thoughts on Thoreau and Gandhi, the tales of his travels to Africa and India, his views on Kennedy, LBJ, and Malcolm X. Nonviolent resistance, he insists, is not nonresistance to violence, but a much more active and intense undertaking. Many of his famous speeches are included, and yet there are scores of other lines and quotations throughout this work that I read several times over for their simple beauty and power. "Injustice anywhere, Dr. King writes, is a threat to justice everywhere."

This work is a must-read. In a world that is currently so wrapped up in war and hostility, where violence seems to have gained the upper hand in so many areas of the world, Dr. King's love, wisdom, perserverance, and unshakable search for peace still stand out as lessons to us all.

This is a great book to get get a background on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 60's. I read it when I began trying to learn about the CRM and some of the key players.

I think that this book is a valued companion to Taylor Branch's epic work "Parting the Waters". Together, they make an unbeatable pair of study aids for one of America's most turbulent periods.

While P.T.W. is a more dispassionate third person chronicle, E.O.T.P. is more personally driven. It brings to life individuals like Bayard Rustin, Stokley Carmichael, John Lewis and other giants (known and obscure) of the movement. Events from the Till lynching to the Attica riots as seen through the eyes of those on the scene (sometimes, those making the scene).

Fascinating reading.

It is no doubt MLK's speeches are great and did alot
to shape American thinking. Unfortunately, I can only
play the first 2 CDs on my CD player. I have a friend
who has a CD player that can play all of them. Apparently
it has something to do with the index numbering on each
CD. Instead of each CD starting at 1 it starts where the previous CD left off. I wouldn't take a chance that this
product won't play in your CD player. I think it is very
unfortunate that I paid so much for the complete set of speeches
and I can't listen to most of it.
I WOULD WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT VERSION COMES OUT THAT CORRECTS THIS
FLAW.
It would have been also nice to have some text to accompany the
audio CDs.

An outstanding history of the Civil Rights movement through the most famous speeches of MLK. I particularly enjoyed his final speech which we hear words from but was full of inspiration and foresight as to what would become of America and its black citizens and their victory in the struggle for freedom.
A must for every buddding philosopher, peace activist and politician.

Reviewer: Mark Lamendola,... author of over 3500 articles.

Inspiring, informative, and soul-stirring, this tape brings to life the original recordings of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Having grown up in the era of the Vietnam war and civil rights demonstrations, I got this tape thinking it would help me remember some of the key issues of the time and compare them to where we are now.

What I was not expecting was the emotional and spiritual journey this tape took me on--it was a journey at a speed that made me look for my seat belt.

Let me interject a personal note here. I am not an African American. I am not black, but neither am I white. My family name is an "Americanized" version of a Sicilian name. While my family did not emerge from slavery on southern plantations, it did emerge from near slave conditions in Sicily. I would also like to note that Sicily was invaded by the African Moors, as is evident by the curly hair and nose structure of modern Sicilians--and by the fact we get sickle cell anemia (whites do not get this disease).

Italian-Americans, who make up 6% of the USA population also underwent an era of extreme prejudice and discrimination--as did African-Americans, who make up 13% of the American population.

Some people malign Dr. King as "that nigger who riled up all the niggers." Others said he was moving too fast. Others said he was asking for too much. And on and on. What these people fail to realize is Dr. King wasn't riling up anybody. He was not an agitator. He made a call to love. When you listen to his speeches, this all becomes very clear. I am not comparing King the Man to Christ the Lord, but to condemn his call to love does compare him to Christ and does condemn both King the man and Christ the Lord. To my mind, that is hypocritical and presumptuous.

In his speeches, Dr. King presented such concepts as:

*African-American slaves are not rightful property and never were. These people were kidnapped from their homes in the area of the Gold Coast.

*The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared all men (grammatical convention makes the pronoun gender-neutral in this context) equal. Yet, 100 years later, American people of color had actually moved backwards in relation to "white people." King presented incontrovertible evidence of the nullification of the Emancipation Proclamation and the abandonment of law and order that allowed suppression and oppression of an entire race of people.

*The segregation movement was part of a "divide and conquer" strategy to keep poor whites--especially poor Southern whites in their place by creating an even lower class.

*As a unit, African-Americans have more wealth than most countries--including France!

*No violent uprising has ever succeeded, unless it had the support of the general population. African-Americans did not have, and could not possibly have, such support in the USA.

*A violent uprising by African-Americans could never come to any possible good. At the outset, it would increase fear and mistrust. The government would be duty-bound to squash it, and had the power to do so. Violent uprisers would have to defeat the local police, then the county police, then the state police, then the state militia, then the National Guard, then the US Armed Forces--not exactly the recipe for success.
But non-violent action could succeed. This is what Dr. King espoused.

Dr. King said two conditions existed:
1. Power without love--this characterized the white system .
2. Love without power--this characterized the black community.

His goal was to combine power with love--not for black people, but for the brotherhood of mankind. His vision was that people would be judged by their character, not by the color of their skin.

This tape concludes with an incredibly moving speech, given to an audience of 10,000 in Tennessee. ...

It was Dr. King's last speech, given the day before a killer stopped Dr. King's campaign of love and brotherhood by severing Dr. King's spine just below his chin.

In Struggle recounts the progression of the SNCC from its early days of assimilationism and conventional middle class values, through its radical and militant period, its separatist and provocative period, and then back again into conventionalism and low-level activism. Many SNCC members during its radical period, debated whether the victim should become the executioner. Instead, the victim becomes part of the system, such as Marion Barry's accession to the mayor's office in Washington, D.C. And the idealism of the movement went out the window as well, when in the 1990s much more mundane pursuits took over Barry's life, including crack cocaine and prostitutes. One reason for the winding-down of the SNCC may stem from the conditions that spawned it. Under an oppressive system of the Jim Crow South, the SNCC had a common enemy to fight, and clear goals to achieve. Once the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been passed, and subsequent advances were made at the legislative level, the goals and mission became less clear and less defined. Now that so much had been achieved, the SNCC began to fight amongst itself as each faction attempted to secure ever smaller slices of the revolutionary pie. The cautious liberalism of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations proved fatal to the more ambitious fervor of the SNCC; the legislation acted almost as a safety valve, relieving the pressure that had encouraged the formation of the SNCC. SNCC students were, in their heyday, overcompensating for all the resentment they had from being historically marginalized and held down. SNCC members had discovered their voice and used it passionately, but once people started listening to them, SNCC found itself in the position of not knowing what to say.

This book traces the rise and fall of SNCC:the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. At the time Carson wrote it, it was one of the few books on the Civil Rights Movement that didn't focus on Martin Luther King and SCLC, and as such provided a welcome addition, even corrective, to the mainstream narrative of the movement. It is also a brilliant analysis of the dynamics of a reform movement and the tensions between leader centered and group centered styles of leadership. The analysis of Bob Moses and his approach to grass roots empowerment is right on target and provides a whole new way for thinking about Freedom Summer and organizing in Mississippi. This book is not for the fainthearted--its academic prose is dense at times and details can be a little confusing for those unfamiliar with SNCC personnel, hence four stars and not five. Nonetheless, it's worth taking time with, and I assign this book regularly for upper level directed studies and recommend it to students for research papers. Whether or not SNCC's achievements were compromised by the antics of former members in the 80s and 90s, Carson's book is a great analysis of its formation, tactics, and dissolution.

This book is a great account of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which was started in 1960 in regard to Segregation on Americas buses and in the Woolworth dining room. This book leaves out no account, and anyone who had anything to do with the movement and SNCC is mentioned in this book. Carson went all out, and I think this book should be required reading in every Civil Rights History course.

The book was informative however the foward by Spike Lee was out of place. It breaks my heart that so many people profit from the life and death of Malcolm X other than his family. Although this is a good book do your self and Malcolm justice by getting this book from your public library!

Carson is a well-known Black scholar whose most important work has been organizing and opublishing from the Martin Luther King Papers. This book was an effort on his part to expose how the FBI followed Malcolm X from the time he wrote to a radical youth group for information, long before Malcolm X joined the Muslims until his death, a death Malcolm more and more expected would come from the FBI/CIA. Along the way the FBI has preserved speeches and letters and views of Malcolm as they evolved throughout his life. Anyone who treats Malcolm X as some sort of prefabricated god, and not a man whose views developed over time, over experience, and particularly after his exposure to the struggles of the civil rights movement, and the anti-imperialist struggles ongoing in Cuba, Africa, and Vietnam at the time, is in for a rude shock as this book shows how his ideas changed and grew.
I recommend Pathfinder Press's series of books by Malcolm X. Malcolm selected Pathfinder to publish his speeches before he died. The first book Malcolm X speaks was selected while Malcolm was living, though published after he was murdered. Every book has been published in cooperation and with royalties to Malcolm's family. Pathfinder has gone as far as the jungles of Guyana to find every speech or interview available with Malcolm particularly in the last years of his life.