ABSTRACT
Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were purely biographies of Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar 'Montgomery to Memphis' narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955-6 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. King is best understood as an integral and organic part of the civil rights movement and not, as has too often been the case, above or apart from it. The profiles in power series, which does not aim to produce biographies, but instead locates individual historical agents within the broader context of their times, provides the perfect vehicle for doing this. As the title of the series suggests, the central focus is on the theme of power.
