MERICAN MESSIAH is a screenplay history of the climactic final years of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life (1965-1968), by one of the nation’s preeminent, award-winning King biographers–partly fictionalized to do justice to its deep drama and to make it more authentic.

A messiah, a hoped-for liberator or savior of a captive people, is a king anointed by God or the divine. In the Hebrew Scriptures, David and Solomon were kings of the Israelites appointed by Yahweh. Jews still await a new messiah. The Christian New Testament tells about the perils and promise of a young rabbi whose followers believed had been anointed “king of the Jews,” but who actually saw his mission as transcending secular lordship. Hindus have their messiahs as well, chiefly Krishna, hero of the Baghavad Gita. Muslims revere the prophet Mohammed. All theistic faiths have one or more messiahs to bridge the sacred and profane worlds.

To call Martin Luther King Jr. a messiah, whether of black people, of Americans, or of the global community, is a risky proposition. Many readers both religious and secular will object, even be offended, considering it sacrilege or worse. But that is the claim of this workl.

AMERICAN MESSIAH asserts that while he had picked up the title of prophet during the Montgomery bus boycott, King did not don the mantle of messiah until the final two years of his life. He was then about the age of Jesus at the culmination of his own ministry.

In my King biography, TO THE MOUNTAINTOP (HarperCollins, 2004), on which this screenplay is based, I portray the civil rights leader as both prophet and messiah. I believe that in the early 21st century, film may be the most compelling medium in which to project King’s spiritual, moral, and political significance to a national and global audience that needs his wisdom more than ever. In order to craft a dramatic screenplay, I have had to make careful use of “creative elements” to give the story a coherent flow and a ring of truth, of authenticity. Nonetheless, it is solidly grounded in, and scrupulously faithful to, the historical record—my twenty years of researching his life and leadership.

The story opens in rural Alabama during late summer 1965, after the southern freedom movement had peaked in the Selma voting rights campaign, and just after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act that finally achieved universal suffrage in America.