Martin Luther King, Jr.

On March 7, 1965, marchers from Selma, Ala., attempted to cross a bridge to demonstrate in support of voting rights. Selma director Ava DuVernay, John Lewis and J.L. Chestnut reflect on that day.

Clarence Jones helped draft Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and was a close personal adviser and lawyer to the civil rights leader. But he almost turned down the chance to work with King. He explains what changed his mind in his memoir, Behind the Dream.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. For the next two months, the man who shot him, James Earl Ray, was able to evade the FBI during a massive worldwide manhunt. Writer Hampton Sides traces the movements of both King and Ray in his new book, Hellhound on His Trail.

Ta-Nehisi Coates grew up in the post-civil rights era, son of a publisher and former Black Panther; he's a contributing editor and blogger for The Atlantic magazine and author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, 2 Sons, and An Unlikely Road to Manhood.

Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) became part of the civil-rights movement while he was a teenager. From 1963 to 1966, he chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And he became a close associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis has been a congressman since 1987.

In his new book, Going Down Jericho Road, historian Michael Honey chronicles the campaign which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was working on at the time of his death. Honey is a former civil liberties organizer and a professor of ethics, gender and labor studies and American history at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

Terry Gross talks with author Taylor Branch, who has written the third in a trilogy of biographies on Martin Luther King Jr. The book is called At Canaan's Edge.

As a child, she had a crush on the 19-year-old preacher in her church. He was known as M-L, but later he became Martin Luther King, Jr.

Clayborne Carson of the Founding Director of the King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Michael Eric Dyson Is the author of the new book "I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr." (The Free Press). In It, Dyson argues that Martin Luther King Jr, the human being, with flaws and gifts serves us better than the romanticized and Idealized King. Dyson is also the author of "Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X," and other books. Dyson Is an ordained Baptist minister and a Professor at DePaul University.