In this intimate history of the civil rights movement and its greatest leader, historian Stewart Burns weaves the political and spiritual dimensions of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and of the movement into a single whole in which each illuminates the other. Told with a vivid narrative, using unmined sources, To the Mountaintopdelves into the crucial last years of King’s life to show how his Christian faith and his sense of himself as a chosen but unworthy messiah became the guiding forces in his life and leadership.