Martin Luther King Jr.

The minister who fused the Black church, Gandhi's method, and the American founding promise into the moral argument of the civil rights movement. The Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in the margins of a newspaper, answers the charge that his protest was untimely with the distinction between just and unjust law that anchors the whole tradition of conscientious resistance. He was killed at thirty-nine. The argument he made has only grown harder to answer.