In 1963, Martin Luther King led 250,000 followers to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and began to tell the assembled mass of all races and creeds of his vision of the future, 'I have a dream...'. The following year the Civil Rights Act became law, and then the Voting Rights Act, but as the effectiveness of peaceful demonstration was called into question by activists demanding more militant action, he turned to a wider front, attacking the Vietnam war, and the conditions of the poor generally. Increasingly controversial and criticized by some for his milder tactics, in April 1968 he was assassinated by James Earl Ray.

This short biography traces the life of King from his birth in Atlanta, through his ministry in Alabama, his involvement with the Montgomery Improvement Association, and his leading role in the civil rights movement to the death which made him its martyr.