To the Promised Land

“This is a dangerous book.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams Fifty years ago, a single bullet robbed us of one of the world's most eloquent voices for human rights and justice. To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of Martin Luther King, Jr., as an advocate of racial harmony, to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class and his call for “nonviolent resistance” to all forms of oppression, including the economic injustice that “takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” “Either we go up together or we go down together,” King cautioned, a message just as urgent in America today as then. To the Promised Land challenges us to think about what it would mean to truly fulfill King's legacy and move toward his vision of “the Promised Land” in our own time.

Michael K. Honey, a former Southern civil rights and civil liberties organizer, is an emeritus Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Guggenheim fellow, with multiple fellowships and book awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy social justice award for Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign. He is emeritus professor at the University of Washington writing freedom, labor movement and nonviolence history. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.