• Skip to main content
  • Current
  • Home
  • About
    • About Current
    • Masthead
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
    • The Way of Improvement Leads Home
    • The Arena
  • Reviews
  • 🔎

Martin Luther King Jr.

A very busy Martin Luther King Jr. Day

John Fea   |  January 15, 2024

I can’t remember such a busy–at least in terms of news–January 15th. I’m on a research trip in a southern city that is treating a few inches of snow as if it was some kind of natural disaster, so it […]

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christian apologetics

Daniel K. Williams   |  January 15, 2024

On this MLK Day, it is appropriate to consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christian apologetics–his reasons for believing in God even in the midst of adversity.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”: A short history

John Fea   |  September 26, 2023

Over at Black Perspectives, historian Nico Slate reflects on the history of this famous phrase with a short analysis that spans from Theodore Parker to Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama and beyond. Here is a taste of his […]

Speech of the day

John Fea   |  August 26, 2023

The Author’s Corner with Hajar Yazdiha

Rachel Petroziello   |  July 5, 2023

Hajar Yazdiha is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. This interview is based on her new book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement  (Princeton University Press, […]

Did Martin Luther King Jr. really criticize Malcolm X?

John Fea   |  May 12, 2023

Here is Gillian Brockell at The Washington Post: Jonathan Eig was deep in the Duke University archives researching his new biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he made an alarming discovery: King’s harshest and most famous criticism of Malcolm X, in which […]

The labor rights radical behind the 1963 March on Washington

John Fea   |  August 31, 2022

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place 59 years ago this week (August 28, 1963). Shawn Gude ofJacobin interviews historian William P. Jones about A. Philip Randolph, the Black socialist who spoke at the 1963 event and […]

Tim LaHaye had some choice words for Wheaton College when the evangelical school hosted a memorial service for Martin Luther King Jr.

John Fea   |  January 17, 2022

On April 7, 1968, Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian school in Wheaton, Illiinois, hosted a “community-wide memorial service” for Martin Luther King Jr. in the wake of King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The final paragraph of this […]

Song of the day

John Fea   |  January 17, 2022

Episode 3: “The Audacity to Hope”

John Fea   |  May 4, 2021

Barack Obama’s pastor is known for three sermons. In this episode, we put them in historical context. Episode 3: “The Audacity to Hope” (our fourth episode) dropped last night. Subscribers to Current at the Longshore level and above receive this brand new narrative […]