Booker T. Washington's rose from slavery to a position of power and influence that no black leader had ever before achieved in American history. He took his own personal quest for freedom and acceptance in a harsh, racist climate and turned it into a strategy that he believed would work for millions of freedpeople. He was accused of being an Uncle Tom and a lacky of powerful white politicians and industrialists, but sifting the evidence, Mr. Smock...

In this new biography, distinguished historian Paul Harvey examines Martin Luther King's life through his complex, emerging religious lives. Harvey introduces many readers, perhaps for the first or only time, to the King of diverse religious and intellectual influences, of an increasingly radical cast of thought, and of a m̌lange of intellectual influences that he aligned in becoming the spokesperson for the most important social movement of twentieth-century...