Patterson, Martin Luther King, Jr., And The Freedom Movement,

Abstract

Martin Luther King, Jr. died more than twenty years ago and it has been more than a quarter of a century since the passage of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since that time, scholarly works on the civil rights movement and King have been published at a rapidly accelerating rate as those turbulent years recede into historical memory. For secondary school and college students, the civil rights years have a fascinating and even romantic quality that generates interest in American history surveys and in specialized courses either on the movement itself, or on the 1960s.