Publisher, Hachette Audio (December 2009)

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This definitive box set includes all the landmark speeches of the great orator and American leader Martin Luther King, Jr., from his inspirational "I Have a Dream" to his firey "Give Us the Ballot." Comprised of recordings previously included in A Call to Conscience and A Knock at Midnight, THE ESSENTIAL BOX SET is a must-have for any home, library, or school collection.

About Clayborne Carson: During his undergraduate years at UCLA, Dr. Carson was a participant and observer of African-American political movements. Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, he has taught at Stanford University, where he is now professor of history and director of the King Papers Project. Dr. Carson has also been a visiting professor at American University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Emory University and a Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Dr. Carson's scholarly publications have focused on African-American protest movements and political thought of the period after World War II. His writings have appeared in leading historical journals and numerous encyclopedias, as well as in popular periodicals. His first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, a study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was published in 1981. In Struggle won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians. His other publications include Malcolm X: The FBI File (1991). Dr. Carson also served as senior advisor for a fourteen-part, award-winning, public television series on the civil rights movement entitled "Eyes on the Prize" and co-edited the Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (1991). In addition, he served as historical advisor for "Freedom on My Mind," which was nominated for an Oscar in 1995, as well as for "Chicano!" (1996) and "Blacks and Jews" (1997).

Dr. Carson has lectured at many colleges and universities in the United States and abroad on a wide range of topics including King, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Black-Jewish relations, and the need for a multi-cultural curriculum. He has served as a Visiting Scholar for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and as a speaker in the Organization of American Historians Lectureship Program.

In 1985 Coretta Scott King invited Dr. Carson to direct a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This project was initiated by the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and is being conducted in association with Stanford University and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Estate. Under Dr. Carson's direction, the King Papers Project has produced four volumes of a projected fourteen-volume comprehensive edition of King's speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. In addition to these volumes, he has written or co-edited numerous other works based on the papers, including A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998); The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), compiled from the King's autobiographical writings; and A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001). He also wrote "Passages of Martin Luther King," a docudrama that was initially produced by Stanford's Drama Department in 1993 and more recently presented at Dartmouth College, Willamette University, and the University of Washington. More recently, Dr. Carson collaborated with Roma Design Group of San Francisco to create the winning proposal in an international competition to design a national memorial in Washington, D. C., for Dr. King.

Dr. Carson was born in Buffalo, New York. His wife, Susan Ann Carson, is managing editor of the King Papers Project. The Carsons, who live in Palo Alto, have two grown children. Malcolm Carson, a graduate of Howard University and University of California's Boalt Law School, lives in Oakland and is assistant city attorney for the city of San Francisco. Temera Carson-McFadden, a graduate student in social work at San Jose State University, lives with her husband and three children in East Palo Alto, California.

About Peter Holloran: Peter Holloran is coeditor of A Knock at Midnight, a collection of sermons from Martin Luther King, Jr.

He lives in Palo Alto, California.

About Kris Shepard: Kris Shepard is the editor of A Call to Conscience.