Michael King Sr. rises from poverty to become associate pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church and starts a family.

Martin Luther King Jr. grows up on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, shaped by his father's sermons and the Black church community.

King attends Crozer Theological Seminary, where he first learns about nonviolent resistance as a force for social change.

King meets Coretta Scott in Boston and pursues her for marriage despite her initial reluctance to become a pastor's wife.

King accepts the position of pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the original capital of the Confederacy.

Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery city bus.

King is appointed head of the Montgomery Improvement Association and delivers an electrifying speech to thousands at Holt Street church.

King's home is bombed during the boycott, and he urges the angry crowd gathered outside to love their enemies.

The Montgomery bus boycott ends in victory after more than a year, and King boards a desegregated city bus.

King and fellow ministers found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate nonviolent challenges to segregation across the South.

King delivers the 'I Have a Dream' speech to roughly a quarter million people at the March on Washington.

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning segregation in public accommodations and workplace discrimination.

King accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, vowing to expand his movement to combat poverty and war alongside racism.

After the Selma-to-Montgomery marches conclude, President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law.

King is shot and killed by a sniper while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

King: A Life follows Martin Luther King Jr. from his roots in Atlanta's Black church community to his emergence as the defining leader of the civil rights movement. After Rosa Parks's arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, King became the nation's most prominent activist and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate nonviolent resistance across the South. He reached his most celebrated peak with the 'I Have a Dream' speech at the March on Washington, and then worked with President Johnson to secure the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In his final years, King sought to expand his mission northward and to challenge poverty and the Vietnam War, but found the political coalition that had powered his earlier victories increasingly fractured. He was cut down by an assassin in Memphis while preparing a new phase of protest, leaving his broadest ambitions unrealized.

The headline arc of King's rise, victories, and assassination.

A white mob attacks Michael King Sr.'s family in Stockbridge, Georgia, forcing them to flee their home and lose stability.

Young Martin Luther King works on a tobacco farm in Connecticut and experiences integrated public life for the first time.

King delivers his first sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church at age 18, blending biblical language with concern for social justice.

King and Coretta marry and spend their wedding night at a funeral parlor because no hotel will accept a Black couple.

King earns his doctorate from Boston University and receives multiple offers from churches and academic institutions.

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi and his mother insists on an open-casket funeral, shocking the world.

King is arrested for the first time during the bus boycott, ostensibly for speeding, boosting his public profile further.

Civil rights veteran Bayard Rustin arrives in Montgomery to help nationalize the boycott and deepen its commitment to Gandhian tactics.

King is stabbed in Harlem by a woman with a letter opener while signing copies of his first book.

King and Coretta make a six-week trip to India to study Gandhi's methods of nonviolent resistance firsthand.

Student activists form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at a meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, launching a new generation of leadership.

President Kennedy federalizes the Alabama National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama and then calls for a federal civil rights bill.

NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is assassinated by a sniper in his driveway in front of his family in Jackson, Mississippi.

FBI director Hoover publicly calls King the country's 'most notorious liar,' provoking a direct and bitter public confrontation between the two.

Violence erupts during a King-led march in Memphis, and the press portrays it as proof he can no longer control nonviolent demonstrations.

Beneath the headline events of King's life runs a quieter story of personal formation, strategic setbacks, and institutional conflict. King's story begins in the racial violence of the rural Jim Crow South and gains momentum through formative encounters in the North, his marriage to Coretta, and the shattering murder of Emmett Till that sharpened the nation's focus on racial brutality. As King's movement grew, he endured a stabbing in Harlem, a revelatory pilgrimage to India, and the founding of new activist organizations that both supported and challenged his leadership. The FBI's escalating campaign against him, culminating in Hoover's public denunciations, added a new front of opposition that drained his energy and credibility. The book traces how these secondary events — each significant in its own right — quietly shaped the pressures and possibilities that defined King's more famous campaigns.

The supporting moments and secondary events behind King's public story.

Martin Luther King Sr. changes his family's name to Martin Luther King after connecting with the legacy of the Protestant reformer.

Young Martin is forced to give up his bus seat and stand the entire ride home after winning a speech contest, calling it the angriest moment of his life.

As a Morehouse senior, King vows to a friend he will not repeat his father's pattern of infidelity, though she is skeptical he will follow through.

During the boycott, in a moment of profound doubt, King hears God speak to him and resolves to die rather than turn back.

King is indicted on conspiracy charges for his role in the boycott and his arrest mugshot significantly boosts his national celebrity.

King delivers an address before the Lincoln Memorial demanding equal voting rights, confirming his status as the nation's preeminent civil rights leader.

King writes the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' on newspaper margins and napkins, excoriating fellow clergymen for prioritizing order over justice.

Over a thousand schoolchildren join the Birmingham campaign and face police dogs and fire hoses, making front-page headlines across the country.

King has his first and only meeting with Malcolm X in a Capitol corridor, just as Malcolm X has broken with the Nation of Islam.

The FBI sends an anonymous letter to King's office exposing his extramarital affairs and strongly implying he should commit suicide.

Malcolm X is assassinated by Nation of Islam gunmen in New York City, and King's attitude toward his longtime rival visibly softens.

Six hundred marchers led by John Lewis are brutally beaten by police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday.

Stokely Carmichael introduces the 'Black Power' slogan during the Meredith march, openly rejecting nonviolence and fracturing the civil rights coalition.

King delivers his 'Beyond Vietnam' speech at Riverside Church in New York, drawing near-unanimous condemnation from allies and major newspapers.

King delivers his 'Mountaintop' speech in Memphis, comparing himself to Moses who led his people toward a Promised Land he could not enter.

King's life was punctuated by moments of crisis and revelation that fundamentally altered his direction and resolve. From a childhood humiliation on a segregated bus to a spiritual experience during the boycott that steeled his commitment to nonviolence, these turning points reveal the inner life of a man under extraordinary pressure. The 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' redefined the moral stakes of the civil rights movement, while the FBI's anonymous letter threatening suicide and the assassination of Malcolm X exposed the dangers closing in from multiple directions. As the movement fractured in his later years, King navigated Bloody Sunday, the rise of 'Black Power,' and the firestorm over his Vietnam speech, each demanding a painful reckoning with the limits of his strategy. His final 'Mountaintop' speech stands as both a turning point and a farewell, suggesting he sensed the end was near even as he refused to stop.