“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able […]
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Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?
In my study of African American history, the Civil War was always something of a sideshow. Just off center stage, it could be heard dimly behind the stories of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., a shadow on the fringe. But three years ago, I picked up James McPherson’s Battle […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Essay Test-Scoring Business
Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: “What are the qualities of a good leader?” One student wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader.” With artfulness far beyond the student’s age, the essay delved into King’s history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his […]
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Playboy Interview: Martin Luther King Jr.
I have a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn’t function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically. I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that […]
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Longreads Topic Du Jour: The Playboy Interview
Longreads Topic Du Jour: The Playboy Interview This morning we posted a classic—Alex Haley’s 1965 Playboy Interview with Martin Luther King Jr. —which served as another reminder of how many great (and, yes, long) interviews Hef’s magazine has published over the years. Here are a few more from the Longreads archive (Jimmy Carter, John & Yoko, Steve […]
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Tales from the Essay Test-Scoring Business
Tales from the Essay Test-Scoring Business Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: “What are the qualities of a good leader?” One student wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader.” With artfulness far beyond the student’s age, the essay delved into King’s history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the […]
Posted inUncategorized
In my study of African American history, the Civil War was always something of a sideshow. Just off center stage, it could be heard dimly behind the stories of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., a shadow on the fringe. But three years ago, I picked up James McPherson’s Battle […]
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Howard Riefs: My Top Longreads of 2011
Howard Riefs is a prolific Longreader and a communications consultant in Chicago. *** It was another strong year for long-form content and journalism. There was no shortage of attention-grabbing longreads in traditional media, online-only outlets, alt-weeklies and literary journals—both in the U.S. and abroad, and written as profiles, personal essays, historical accounts and op-eds. And […]
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Kevin Smokler's Top 5 Deep Interviews of 2011
Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: Rereading Your Favorite Books from High School (Prometheus Books, 2013) and curator of Deep Interviews here on Longreads. *** Here on Longreads, I’m curating Deep Interviews (#deepinterviews)—lengthy interviews with interesting people—a format I’ve grown to love. It’s not quite original reporting but certainly […]
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“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” plus other MLK-related speeches and interviews can be found in the #Longreads archive. Photo via Seattle Times.
