The MLK History Forgot During his last three years on Earth, Martin Luther King went through hell

In January 1966, Martin Luther King Jr.—founding president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Nobel laureate and the nation’s most prominent civil rights activist—moved his family into a squalid tenement apartment in one of Chicago’s economically barren ghetto neighborhoods. A fixture in American political life since December 1955, when he assumed leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association—a coalition of churches and organizations that banded together to coordinate a boycott of city buses following Rosa Parks’ arrest just weeks before Christmas—King subsequently appeared to be everywhere the civil rights movement took root. Albany, Georgia; Birmingham; Selma; Atlanta. Even when he wasn’t at the forefront of events, as was the case with the wave of lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides that shook the South in 1960 and 1961, civil rights activists at the grassroots level looked to him for guidance and inspiration. Please click to read the entire piece that was published on politico.com