The best podcasts featuring Martin Luther King

The "Letter from Birmingham Jail", also known as the "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" and "The Negro Is Your Brother", is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King Jr. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an "outsider", King writes: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

The letter, written in response to "A Call for Unity" during the 1963 Birmingham campaign, was widely published, and became an important text for the American Civil Rights Movement. King wrote the first part of the letter on the margins of a newspaper, which was the only paper available to him. He then wrote more on bits and pieces of paper given to him by a trusty, which were given to his lawyers to take back to movement headquarters, where the pastor Wyatt Tee Walker and his secretary Willie Pearl Mackey began compiling and editing the literary jigsaw puzzle. He was eventually able to finish the letter on a pad of paper his lawyers were allowed to leave with him.

The letter was anthologized and reprinted some 50 times in 325 editions of 58 readers published for college-level composition courses between 1964 and 1968. U.S. Senator Doug Jones led an annual bipartisan reading of the letter in the U.S. Senate during his tenure in the United States Senate in 2019 and 2020.

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It’s hard to think of a more celebrated figure of the 20th century than Martin Luther King Jr.

He has a national memorial in Washington, D.C. His birthday is one of just 11 federal holidays. And his words and legacy are routinely evoked by politicians of both major parties.

But the paradox of King’s legacy is that while many revere him, very few actually read him. Most of us can cite a handful of his most famous quotes, but King’s actual teachings span five books, countless speeches and sermons, and years of detailed correspondence.

There’s perhaps no scholar working today who studies Dr. King’s political philosophy as deeply as Brandon Terry. Terry is the John L. Loeb associate professor of social sciences at Harvard, where he specializes in Black political thought. He is the co-editor of “To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” the editor of “Fifty Years Since MLK,” and the author of numerous popular and academic articles on King’s political thought. His work is committed to rescuing the nuances of Dr. King’s philosophies and forcing a confrontation with what King actually said and believed, rather than what he’s come to represent.

In this conversation, we follow the commitment that animates much of Terry’s work: to take King seriously as a philosopher, rather than as purely a political actor. And it turns out that King understood a lot about politics that we’ve lost sight of today. We discuss why a “romantic narrative” of the civil rights era stops us from taking King seriously as a philosopher; the true radicalism of King’s nonviolent philosophy; King’s complex views on the relationship between race and class; how King wrestled with the demands of “respectability politics”; King’s wide-ranging economic views, including the idea that the economy should be subservient to the community (and not the other way around); King’s enthusiasm for tenant unions and welfare rights unions as critical democratic inventions; whether the state should embrace the same nonviolence it often demands of protesters; the roots of King’s opposition to the war in Vietnam; whether we’ve lost the ability to grapple with “virtue” in politics today; and more.

Mentioned:

“Imagining the nonviolent state” by Ezra Klein

“Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” by Martin Luther King Jr.

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton

“Rethinking the Problem of Alliance: Organized Labor and Black Political Life” by Brandon M. Terry and Jason Lee

The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson

Book recommendations:

Where Do We Go From Here by Martin Luther King Jr.

The Trumpet of Conscience by Martin Luther King Jr.

The Sword and the Shield by Peniel E. Joseph

A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis

Dark Ghettos by Tommie Shelby

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-che...

This week, we are back with part two of John Maxwell’s incredible lesson on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. If you missed part one, please go back and listen because there is some great wisdom that you can learn as a transformational leader in that episode. And this week, there is even more! As John finishes his talk on Dr. King’s life and leadership, John shares the final three points on how leaders can create positive change in their world and their community.

During the application portion of this episode, Mark Cole and Traci Morrow dive into a leader’s crucial ability to move others to act. They discuss how leaders have the tendency to either be task-oriented or relationship-oriented, and how a leader needs to balance and leverage both in order to create positive change within their organization and their community.

Our BONUS resource for this series is the “Creating Positive Change Worksheet,” which includes fill-in-the-blank notes from John’s teaching. You can download the worksheet by visiting MaxwellPodcast.com/MLK and clicking “Download the Bonus Resource.”

References:

Watch this episode on YouTube!

The Leader’s Greatest Return by John C. Maxwell

The 21 Laws Online Course

Relevant Episode: Achieving the Legacy You Want to Leave

Relevant Episode: Leader’s Listen with Simon Sinek

The John Maxwell Online Store

On September 13, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at the Berlin Wall.

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Decades after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a vast swathe of the American public still doesn't buy the government's official conclusion. Why? In today's show, the guys sit down with Bill Klaber, the creator and host of The MLK Tapes, to get a deeper understanding of the allegations of conspiracy that continue to surround the life and death of Dr. King.

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