Martin Luther King, Jr., has been widely studied as a preacher, an activist, and an orator, but rarely as an intellectual. This groundbreaking book situates King as one of the most important social and political philosophers of our time, arguing that King's systematic logic of nonviolence is at the same time radically new and deeply rooted in African American intellectual history. Presenting a comprehensive genealogy of King's thought, Moses traces the influence of key African American
thinkers and shows how King's concepts of equality, structure, direct action, love, and justice can be seen as strands of a coherent philosophical whole.