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Primary sourceBook1958

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Martin Luther King Jr. · 1958

King's 1958 book telling the story of the Montgomery bus boycott and his developing philosophy of nonviolence.

King's own first-person account of the Montgomery bus boycott and the roots of his nonviolent philosophy.

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Book cover of Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King, Jr., with introduction by Clayborne Carson. Navy background, gold band reading The King Legacy, and a black-and-white crowd photo of smiling men in suits and hats waving, with a man in a dark suit shaking hands.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King Jr., 1958.

About this source

What it is

Stride Toward Freedom is a book written by Martin Luther King Jr., published in 1958. It gives his own account of the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott and describes conditions for African Americans in Alabama at the time.

Why it matters

This was King's first book and his personal record of events he lived through. A key chapter, 'Pilgrimage to Nonviolence', explains his early thinking about nonviolent resistance, which became central to his later work.

Look closer

  • Why might King have chosen to write about the boycott so soon after it happened?
  • What does it mean that others helped shape or write parts of the text?
  • What might King have wanted readers outside Montgomery to understand?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Martin Luther King Jr. on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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