The Reading Warehouse

This definitive box set includes all the landmark speeches of the great orator and American leader Martin Luther King Jr., from his inspirational I Have a Dream to his fiery Give Us the Ballot. Comprised of recordings previously included in A Call to Conscience and A Knock at Midnight, The Essential Box Set is a must-have for any library collection.

Clayborne Carson, PhD, was a participant and observer of African American political movements during his undergraduate years at UCLA. Since receiving his doctorate in 1975, he has taught at Stanford University, where he is now professor of history and director of the King Papers Project. He has also been a visiting professor at American University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Emory University and a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His scholarly publications have focused on African American protest movements and the political thought of the period after World War II. His writings have appeared in leading historical journals and numerous encyclopedias, as well as in popular periodicals. His first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians. Dr. Carson has lectured at many colleges and universities in the United States and abroad on a wide range of topics, including King, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Black-Jewish relations, and the need for a multi-cultural curriculum.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and grandson of pastors. He graduated from Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary, becoming the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama at age twenty-five. He subsequently earned his PhD from Boston University. In 1957, he and other civil rights leaders founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization he led until his death. A proponent of Gandhian principles of nonviolence, he led many protests and demonstrations for civil rights, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 29, 1963, where he delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech. Winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he continued to fight for civil rights, the eradication of poverty, and the end of the Vietnam War. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

Jay Gregory is a veteran New York actor of stage, film, and television. He can be heard in a number of informational narrations on the Discovery Channel, TLC, and PBS and has a wide range of audiobooks to his credit.