It has been nearly fifty years since Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Appraisals of King's contributions began almost immediately and continues to this day.

The author explores an astonishing number of King's chief ideas and social-ethical practice: his concept of a moral universe; his doctrine of human dignity; his belief that not all suffering is redemptive; his brand of personalism; his contribution to the development of social ethics; the inclusion of young people in the movement; sexism as a contradiction to his personalism; the problem of black-on-black violence, and others. Burrows' essays reveal both the strengths and the limitations in King's theological socio-ethical project, and shows him to have relentlessly applied personalist ideas to organized nonviolent resistance campaigns in order to change the world.