Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights MovementBy David Fisher, Dan AbramsNarrated by Fred D. Gray, Korey Jackson
Length12h 25m
About this audiobook
The forgotten story of a criminal trial that brought national attention to a young defendant named Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as told by Fred D. Gray, Dr. King’s lawyer and friend, along with New York Times bestselling authors Dan Abrams and David Fisher. The audiobook concludes with an exclusive conversation between Fred Gray and Dan Abrams.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. After years of mistreatment on public buses, the African American community organized a bus boycott. Eighty-nine people were indicted for violating the city’s anti-boycott statute. But rather than putting each of them on trial, the prosecutors chose to make an example of just one: twenty-seven-year-old minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This became the moment that transformed Dr. King into a national leader.
Fred D. Gray, then twenty-four years old and one of only two Black lawyers in Montgomery, had prepared with Rosa Parks for the bus moment and now became Dr. King’s first defense lawyer. The stakes were huge. This was not just a trial about a state statute; this was an attempt to launch a movement in the face of an often violent effort by a Southern city fighting to preserve segregation. And it would set Gray on a path that would lead him to making an impassioned argument to the Supreme Court against segregation in Montgomery’s public transit.
On the eve of the trial, Dr. King commented, “When the history books are written in the future generations, the historians will pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a Black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’”
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
GenreBiography and Memoir, History, Politics and Government
Length12 hrs 25 mins
Narrated byFred D. Gray, Korey Jackson
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateMay 24, 2022
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
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About the author
David Fisher, Dan Abrams
David Fisher is the author of more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. He lives in New York with his wife, Laura.View all by David Fisher, Dan Abrams