8th week -Martin Luther King-

Title: Martin Luther King

Author: Alan C. McLean

Publisher (level): Oxford Bookworms Factfiles (3.2)

Summary:

Martin Luther King was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. When Martin started school, he couldn’t find his friend. After school, he knew that his friend went to school for whites, and that he couldn’t play with his friend anymore, because he was black and his friend was white.

This segregation is based on slavery in sixteenth century. Men and women were taken from their homes in Africa and brought to the North and South America to work on farms. Many slaves fought against the slave-owners. Britain made buying and selling slaves against the law in 1807 and a year later America did the same. But slave owners in the South of the United States of America refused to free their slaves.

Martin thought non-violent protest is the best way to fight to segregation because he heard of a talk about Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian leader, who thought that love was more powerful than hate. He followed this thought whenever he took any action. When more than 200,000 people marched on Washington D.C. to ask for equal rights for black Americans, he stood in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln and made the most famous speech of his life.

A few years later he was shot and died. He was thirty-nine years old. The last words of his most famous speech were written on the stone above his grave.

Evaluation: 5 stars

This is only after reading this book that I know why Martin Luther King referred Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana in his speech. There were terrible segregations for black people. I could gain my knowledge about racism and how to overcome it by reading this book.

In order to prevent from making more tragedy of segregations, this book should be more familiar to people all over the world.