King Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop

In this fast-paced biography, Harvard Sitkoff presents a stunningly relevant and radical King. Honestly assessing his successes alongside his failures, King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop weaves together high and low points to capture King's lifelong struggle, through disappointment and epiphany, with his own injunction: "Let us be Christian in all our actions." By telling King's life as one on the verge of reaching its fulfillment, Sitkoff powerfully shows where King's faith and activism were leading himto a direct confrontation with a president over an immoral war and with an America blind to its complicity in economic injustice.

Harvard Sitkoff is a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire and the author or editor of more than eight books, including The Struggle for Black Equality (Hill and Wang, 2008), A New Deal for Blacks, and A History of Our Time.

“Sitkoff provides a vivid portrait that deserves to be widely read, not only as the standard short King biography but also as an incisive essay on his significance today.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “Written with skill and imagination . . . King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop is clearly the best short biography we have of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Harvard Sitkoff wants to remind us of his subject’s subversive agenda, and to banish the ‘airbrushed’ portrait of a ‘moderate, respectable ally of presidents’ . . . Sitkoff argues that the more militant King is the more relevant King. And he’s right.” —The New York Observer “Persuasive . . . Sitkoff’s skillful choice of material, his organization of the text and his fine writing style (especially compared with most academic historians) raise the biography to the top rank of books about King.” —The News and Observer (Raleigh) “King is a perfect combination of author and subject: one of the deans of civil rights history tracing the life of the movement’s towering figure. Harvard Sitkoff has performed a remarkable feat, giving us a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., that is simultaneously concise and complex, judicious and deeply moving.” —Kevin Boyle, author of the National Book Award–winning Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age