Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, this is the most comprehensive book ever written about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. David J. Garrow had unrestricted access to Martin Luther King's personal papers, to thousands of pages of newly released FBI documents, and to more than seven hundred interviews with King's closest friends and enemies.

Garrow traces King's transformation from the young pastor of a modest church into the foremost spokesperson of the civil rights movement. The book's unifying theme is King's growing awareness of the symbolic meaning of the cross, as his sense of personal mission deepened into an acceptance of a life that would demand the ultimate sacrifice. This is a powerful portrait of a man at the epicenter of one of the most dramatic periods in our history—and of his metamorphosis into a legend.