Not Dreaming: Martin Luther King Jr's Critique of America seeks to deepen the American public's understanding of its most famous African American protest leader. While Americans venerate MLK as a great orator who dreamed of a world free of racism, most are unfamiliar with King's penetrating and radical social criticism. Not Dreaming reveals that MLK spoke and wrote extensively about what he termed the "triple evils" afflicting the United States: racism, militarism, and the extreme materialism that yielded vast economic inequality. These flaws that plagued America in MLK's lifetime persist in twenty-first-century America, giving a striking contemporary relevance to King's social criticism. His democratic vision of an America that embraced nonviolence, valued people over profits, abolished poverty, rejected war, and broke with its white supremacist past is one our nation badly needs to reconsider. Not Dreaming offers us MLK not merely as a historical figure but as a critic whose ideas can help twenty-first-century America become a more just, humane, and democratic society.

ROBERT COHEN is a historian of social protest, African American history, and student politics who has written extensively on 1960s America. His most recent book, Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and the University of Georgia in the Twentieth Century, won the Lillian Smith Book Award. His other works on racism and antiracist protest in the South include Howard Zinn's Southern Diary: Civil Rights, Sit-ins, and Black Women's Student Activism and Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s, coedited by David J. Snyder. He lives and writes in New York.