Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service: A Virtual Display
In 1994, Congress designated the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday as a national day of service and charged the Corporation for National and Community Service with leading this effort. Taking place each year on the third Monday in January, the MLK Day of Service is the only federal holiday observed as a national day of service – a "day on, not a day off."
The MLK Day of Service is a way to transform Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and teachings into community action that helps solve social problems. That service may meet a tangible need, or it may meet a need of the spirit. On this day, Americans of every age and background celebrate Dr. King through service projects that strengthen communities, empower individuals, bridge barriers, and create solutions.
Source: https://www.nationalservice.gov/special-initiatives/days-service/mlkdaygov/martin-luther-king-jr-day-service-resources/about-dr-0
Websites
- The King Center Established in 1968 by Mrs. Coretta Scott King, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (“The King Center”) has been a global destination, resource center and community institution for over a quarter century. Nearly a million people each year make pilgrimage to the National Historic Site to learn, be inspired and pay their respects to Dr. King’s legacy. The website also features an extensive library of digitized documents related to Dr. King's life and work.
- MLK Day of Service Provides links to volunteer opportunities, lesson plans, webinars, social media plans and other resources.
Accessing e-books & online videos
Using ProQuest Ebook Central e-books:
- Youtube videos - most are 4 minutes or less
Using Alexander Street Press videos:
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E-books available through NIU University Libraries
April 4 1968 by
On April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m., while he was standing on a balcony at a Memphis hotel, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and fatally wounded. Only hours earlier King ended his final speech with the words, "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." Acclaimed public intellectual and best-selling author Michael Eric Dyson examines how King fought, and faced, his own death, and how America can draw on his legacy in the twenty-first century. April 4, 1968 celebrates the leadership of Dr. King, and challenges America to renew its commitment to his vision.
ISBN: 9780465012558Publication Date: 2009-01-06
The Chicago Freedom Movement by
Six months after the Selma to Montgomery marches and just weeks after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a group from Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff arrived in Chicago, eager to apply his nonviolent approach to social change in a northern city. Once there, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined the locally based Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) to form the Chicago Freedom Movement. The open housing demonstrations they organized eventually resulted in a controversial agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley and other city leaders, the fallout of which has historically led some to conclude that the movement was largely ineffective. In this important volume, an eminent team of scholars and activists offer an alternative assessment of the Chicago Freedom Movement's impact on race relations and social justice, both in the city and across the nation. Building upon recent works, the contributors reexamine the movement and illuminate its lasting contributions in order to challenge conventional perceptions that have underestimated its impressive legacy.
ISBN: 9780813166520Publication Date: 2016-03-18
The House by the Side of the Road by
On Sunday, March 7, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and six hundred followers set out on foot from Selma, Alabama, bound for Montgomery to demand greater voting rights for African Americans. As they crossed the city' s Edmund Pettus Bridge, state and local policemen savagely set on the marchers with tear gas and billy clubs, an event now known as " Bloody Sunday" that would become one of the most iconic in American history. King' s informal headquarters in Selma was the home of Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson and their young daughter, Jawana. The House by the Side of the Road is Richie Jean' s firsthand account of the private meetings King and his lieutenants, including Ralph David Abernathy and John Lewis, held in the haven of the Jackson home. Sullivan Jackson was an African American dentist in Selma and a prominent supporter of the civil rights movement. Richie Jean was a close childhood friend of King' s wife, Coretta Scott King, a native of nearby Marion, Alabama. Richie Jean' s fascinating account narrates how, in the fraught months of 1965 that preceded the Voting Rights March, King and his inner circle held planning sessions and met with Assistant Attorney General John Doar to negotiate strategies for the event. Just eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson made a televised addressed to a joint session of Congress on Monday, March 15. Jackson relates the intimate scene of King and his lieutenants watching as Johnson called the nation to dedicate itself to equal rights for all and ending his address with the words: " We shall overcome." Five months later, Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act on August 6. The major motion picture Selma now commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In it, Niecy Nash and Kent Faulcon star as Sullivan and Richie Jean Jackson among a cast including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Wilkinson, and Cuba Gooding Jr. A gripping primary source, The House by the Side of the Road illuminates the private story whose public outcomes electrified the world and changed the course of American history.
ISBN: 9780817383268Publication Date: 2011-03-01
If It Takes All Summer by
This memoir recounts the struggle against segregation in St. Augustine, Florida, in the early and mid-1960s. In the summer of 1964 the nation's oldest city became the center of the civil rights movement as Martin Luther King Jr., encouraged by President Johnson, a southerner, who made the civil rights bill the center piece of his domestic policy, chose this tourism-driven community as an ideal location to demonstrate the injustice of discrimination and the complicity of southern leaders in its enforcement. St. Augustine was planning an elaborate celebration of its founding, and expected generous federal and state support. But when the kick-off dinner was announced only whites were invited, and local black leaders protested. The affair alerted the national civil rights leadership to the St. Augustine situation as well as fueling local black resentment. Ferment in the city grew, convincing King to bring his influence to the leadership of the local struggle. As King and his allies fought for the right to demonstrate, a locally powerful Ku Klux Klan counter-demonstrated. Conflict ensued between civil rights activists, local and from out-of-town, and segregationists, also home-grown and imported. The escalating violence of the Klan led Florida's Governor to appoint State Attorney Dan Warren as his personal representative in St. Augustine. Warren's crack down on the Klan and his innovative use of the Grand Jury to appoint a bi-racial committee against the intransigence of the Mayor and other officials, is a fascinating story of moral courage. This is an insider view of a sympathetic middleman in the difficult position of attempting to bring reason and dialog into a volatile situation.
ISBN: 9780817380663Publication Date: 2008-10-01
King's Dream by
Includes the entire text of "I Have A Dream" “I have a dream”—no words are more widely recognized, or more often repeated, than those called out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. King’s speech, elegantly structured and commanding in tone, has become shorthand not only for his own life but for the entire civil rights movement. In this new exploration of the “I have a dream” speech, Eric J. Sundquist places it in the history of American debates about racial justice—debates as old as the nation itself—and demonstrates how the speech, an exultant blend of grand poetry and powerful elocution, perfectly expressed the story of African American freedom. This book is the first to set King’s speech within the cultural and rhetorical traditions on which the civil rights leader drew in crafting his oratory, as well as its essential historical contexts, from the early days of the republic through present-day Supreme Court rulings. At a time when the meaning of the speech has been obscured by its appropriation for every conceivable cause, Sundquist clarifies the transformative power of King’s “Second Emancipation Proclamation” and its continuing relevance for contemporary arguments about equality.
ISBN: 9780300142440
King : A Biography by
Acclaimed by leading historians and critics when it appeared shortly after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this foundational biography wends through the corridors in which King held court, posing the right questions and providing a keen measure of the man whose career and mission enthrall scholars and general readers to this day. Updated with a new preface and more than a dozen photographs of King and his contemporaries, this edition presents the unforgettable story of King's life and death for a new generation.
ISBN: 9780252094781Publication Date: 2012
Misremembering Dr. King by
We all know the name. Martin Luther King Jr., the great American civil rights leader. But most people today know relatively little about King, the campaigner against militarism, materialism, and racism--what he called the "giant triplets." Jennifer J. Yanco takes steps to redress this imbalance. "My objective is to highlight the important aspects of Dr. King's work which have all but disappeared from popular memory, so that more of us can really 'see' King." After briefly telling the familiar story of King's civil rights campaigns and accomplishments, she considers the lesser-known concerns that are an essential part of his legacy. Yanco reminds us that King was a strong critic of militarism who argued that the United States should take the lead in promoting peaceful solutions rather than imposing its will through military might; that growing materialism and an ethos of greed was damaging the moral and spiritual health of the country; and that in a nation where racism continues unabated, white Americans need to educate themselves about racism and its history and take their part in the weighty task of dismantling it.
ISBN: 9780253014245Publication Date: 2014-02-27
Room 306 by
A tragic landmark in the civil rights movement, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis is best known for what occurred there on April 4, 1968. As he stood on the balcony of Room 306, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, ending a golden age of nonviolent resistance, and sparking riots in more than one hundred cities. Formerly a seedy, segregated motel, and prior to that a brothel, the motel quickly achieved the status of national shrine. The motel attracts a variety of pilgrims--white politicians seeking photo ops, aging civil rights leaders, New Age musicians, and visitors to its current incarnation, the National Civil Rights Museum. A moving and emotional account that comprises a panorama of voices, Room 306 is an important oral history unlike any other.
ISBN: 9781609173432Publication Date: 2012-03-15
Stride Toward Freedom by
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolence resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as "the chronicle of fifty thousand Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.'' It traces the phenomenal journey of a community, and shows how the twenty-eight-year-old Dr. King, with his conviction for equality and nonviolence, helped transformed the nation-and the world.
ISBN: 9780807000694Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Where Do We Go from Here by
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.
ISBN: 9780807000670Publication Date: 2010-01-01
From Civil Rights to Human Rights by
Martin Luther King, Jr., is widely celebrated as an American civil rights hero. Yet King's nonviolent opposition to racism, militarism, and economic injustice had deeper roots and more radical implications than is commonly appreciated, Thomas F. Jackson argues in this searching reinterpretation of King's public ministry. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, King was influenced by and in turn reshaped the political cultures of the black freedom movement and democratic left. His vision of unfettered human rights drew on the diverse tenets of the African American social gospel, socialism, left-New Deal liberalism, Gandhian philosophy, and Popular Front internationalism. King's early leadership reached beyond southern desegregation and voting rights. As the freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s confronted poverty and economic reprisals, King championed trade union rights, equal job opportunities, metropolitan integration, and full employment. When the civil rights and antipoverty policies of the Johnson administration failed to deliver on the movement's goals of economic freedom for all, King demanded that the federal government guarantee jobs, income, and local power for poor people. When the Vietnam war stalled domestic liberalism, King called on the nation to abandon imperialism and become a global force for multiracial democracy and economic justice. Drawing widely on published and unpublished archival sources, Jackson explains the contexts and meanings of King's increasingly open call for "a radical redistribution of political and economic power" in American cities, the nation, and the world. The mid-1960s ghetto uprisings were in fact revolts against unemployment, powerlessness, police violence, and institutionalized racism, King argued. His final dream, a Poor People's March on Washington, aimed to mobilize Americans across racial and class lines to reverse a national cycle of urban conflict, political backlash, and policy retrenchment. King's vision of economic democracy and international human rights remains a powerful inspiration for those committed to ending racism and poverty in our time.
ISBN: 9780812200003Publication Date: 2013-07-17
Ring Out Freedom! by
Martin Luther King, Jr. was more than the civil rights movement's most visible figure, he was its voice. This book describes what went into the creation of that voice. It explores how King used words to define a movement. From a place situated between two cultures of American society, King shaped the language that gave the movement its identity and meaning. Fredrik Sunnemark shows how materialistic, idealistic, and religious ways of explaining the world coexisted in King's speeches and writings. He points out the roles of God, Jesus, the church, and "the Beloved Community" in King's rhetoric. Sunnemark examines King's use of allusions, his strategy of employing different meanings of key ideas to speak to different members of his audience, and the way he put into play international ideas and events to achieve certain rhetorical goals. The book concludes with an analysis of King's development after 1965, examining the roots, content, and consequences of his so-called radicalization.
ISBN: 9780253110817Publication Date: 2003-11-20
Streaming Audio & Video
- Audio and Video Segments and Programs About Dr. King From the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB)This selection is limited to only items that can be streamed online.
- Videos Featuring or About Dr. King From the C-SPAN Video LibraryIncludes video of March on Washington and Dr. King’s Meet the Press appearance on March 28, 1965.
Videos available through NIU University Libraries
- Martin Luther King, Jr. This video, produced by World Wide Entertainment, is about the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. [5 mins.]
- Martin Luther King, Jr. : "Mountaintop" speech (partial) his video features Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'Mountaintop' speech from 1968. [19 mins.]
- A 'dream' remembered (August 28, 2003) This video, produced by MacNeil-Lehrer Productions/PBS NewsHour, is about obtaining perspective on Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech, then and now. [14 mins.]
- Taylor Branch - 'At Canaan's edge' (MLK legacy) (Jan. 16, 2006) This video, produced by MacNeil-Lehrer productions (PBS NewsHour), is an interview with historian Taylor Branch about the latest book in his series focusing on the Civil Rights era. [10 mins.]
- Taylor Branch - 'Pillar of fire: America in the King years, 1963-1965' (Feb. 2, 1998) David Gergen, Editor-at-Large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Taylor Branch, author of Pillar of Fire: America in the King years, 1963-1965 in a discussion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s spiritual and political legacy. [10 mins.]
- Promised land This program sets out to portray the current tensions and frustrations, hopes and fears, of this divided city that was at the center of the civil rights struggle in the '50's and '60's. Here is where it all started in 1955 with the famous bus boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ten years later, Montgomery was the symbolic goal of the march from Selma to protest restrictions on black voters, when many marchers were beaten by police. Images of those years are interwoven with the experiences of Montgomery's black citizens today. Vanzetta, a lawyer, recounts how the whites fled when she moved into their middle-class neighborhood. Harold and Lloyd are brothers who own a hairdressing shop. Theirs is one of the few black businesses to survive in this racially divided city. Paget took her employers at a fast food shop to court after she was fired because white customers complained that there were too many black employees. "It's important to make a stand on something," she says. Rev. Ralph Abernathy voices the suspicion that King's involvement in the poor people's campaign was the cause of King's death. He believes it was too radical a movement to be tolerated by the American power structure. [1 hr. 14 mins.]
- Reflections of Martin Luther King, Jr. In commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr., this program highlights Dr. King’s contributions through archival footage and interviews with some of his closest associates. [26 min.]
- Tony Brown's essay on Martin Luther King Jr. In an innovative program celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy, Tony Brown shares his historic experience as the coordinator of the “Walk To Freedom” civil rights march in Detroit on June 23, 1963. Brown’s essay is a story of truth, vision, courage and transformation. [25 min.]
- Tony Brown's journal: Did the dream survive? This interview, directed by Bob Morris, features a discussion regarding Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream and its survival to modern day. [27 mins.]
- Tony Brown's journal: Last evening of Martin Luther King Jr. This documentary, produced by Tony Brown Productions, features conflicting opinions about the last night of Martin Luther King, Jr. [27 mins.]
