Episode Details

Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael King, renamed after his father returned from a 1934 Baptist congress in Berlin inspired by the reformer Martin Luther. This episode moves past the sanitized statue to explore the boy who carried that heavy name, including the childhood guilt after his grandmother's death, and the brilliant strategic mind it helped forge.

We examine the logistics of the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, and Ella Baker, and the deliberate strategy of forced exposure through nonviolence. We also follow his global influence in South Africa and Northern Ireland, the Chicago housing campaign, the Fair Housing Act, and Jane Elliott's classroom experiment.

• Why Michael King Sr. changed both his and his son's names after visiting Germany
• How the SCLC used Black church networks for fundraising and carpool dispatch
• Nonviolence as engineered visibility for television news audiences
• How John Hume and anti-apartheid leaders adapted King's blueprint
• The link between King's Chicago campaign and the 1968 Fair Housing Act