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.

The Montgomery bus boycott was a formative moment in twentieth-century history: a harbinger of the African American freedom movement, a springboard for the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., and a crucial step in the struggle to realize the American dream of liberty and equality for all. In Daybreak of Freedom, Stewart Burns presents a groundbreaking documentary history of the boycott. Using an extraordinary array of more than one hundred original documents, he crafts a compelling and comprehensive account of this celebrated year-long protest of racial segregation.

Burns sets the scene for the events of 1963, describing Martin Luther King's development from his debut on the national stage during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956 through the lunch counter sit-ins, the freedom rides, Bayard Rustin's role in the development of King's views on nonviolence, the failures of the Albany movement, James Meredith's effort to enroll at the University of Mississippi, and the machinations and prevarications of the Kennedy White House on civil rights.