KING, Martin Luther, Jr. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Inscribed by Martin Luther King, Jr

KING, Martin Luther, Jr. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? New York: Harper & Row. 1967.

8vo. Original black cloth-backed yellow boards, gilt lettering to spine, with illustrated dust-jacket; pp. [8], 209, [1]; dust-jacket slightly dampstained to head of spine; a very good copy; front free endpaper inscribed ‘To John Shirley | With best wishes | Martin Luther King Jr’, loosely inserted 8-pp. order of service for Ebenezer Baptist Church (2 July 1967), 4-pp. order of service for St Paul’s Cathedral, Evensong featuring sermon by Coretta Scott King (16 March 1969), A3 sheet of three photocopied stories in The Times and The Sunday Times from 1968 by John Shirley regarding Martin Luther King Jr., his legacy, and the Civil Rights movement.

First edition of the fourth book by Martin Luther King, Jr (1929–1968), written in isolation with no telephone in a rented house in Jamaica, presented by the author to English journalist John Shirley, who had been sent to interview King in 1967, returning the following year to cover the bus boycotts and King’s assassination.

Where Do We Go From Here is a serious but hopeful book, making plain the differences between King’s nonviolent approach to protest and the militarism of the Black Panthers, which he considered self-destructive. King promotes the idea of a unified, equal society underpinned by a form of guaranteed minimum income, recognising that social division is ultimately rooted in poverty.

John Shirley (1943–2018) was a highly respected journalist who worked on television, notably Granada’s World In Action and LWT’s The London Programme, and in print, at The Times, The Observer, and The Guardian. Apart from his work with the civil rights movement, he won awards for his coverage of the Brixton riots and the Falklands War, and was taken so seriously as an authority on the Northern Irish Troubles that he gave evidence at the internment inquiry of 1971. King and Shirley met in 1967, when the journalist was working as a reporter and researcher on This Week, ITV’s equivalent of Panorama.

In an email to his son (2 June 2017), Shirley later recalled:

‘Godfrey [Hodgson] and I went to the US to make a programme about the civil rights movement, at a time when there was large-scale rioting going in [sic] on in many large cities in the northern United States – Detroit, Newark, Buffalo, NY, etc. Godfrey worked mainly in the north; I went to the South, where the civil rights movement had begun. My brief was to get an interview with Martin Luther King. This was difficult because he was very busy, and his public relations people couldn’t really be bothered with a foreign TV crew. So I decided the best way to contact him directly was to go to his church, the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where he and his father were the ministers. So I pitched up there one Sunday morning and sat through the service, and heard King and his father preach from the pulpit as a couple, shouting and responding to the audience just like you see in the movies. It was incredible; I’m getting goose pimples even now writing this. I was the only white person there, but people were very polite and friendly; this was a church service, remember (not unlike one at the Grace Baptist Church in Warboys, where we went the other week). Anyway, after the service, everyone went into the vestry for tea and cake and a Sunday morning catch-up, and I introduced myself to King and his father. He was totally friendly, quite impressed that I’d got there and invited me back for supper that evening at his home with Coretta and his family. We didn’t have a film crew in Atlanta at the time, so he agreed to do the interview in Cleveland, Ohio, a few days later. And that’s what happened.’

Shirley – who was twenty-three years old at the time – kept the eight-page Order of Service from the Ebenezer Baptist Church (2 July 1967), loosely inserted here. The book, which had only just been published, was presumably presented to Shirley on the same day. In the spring of 1968, he was asked to return to the South to ‘research another documentary about the white backlash against the civil rights movement. So I went to Montgomery, Alabama, partly to talk to the church people there who were involved with King in the bus boycott that started the civil rights movement. That’s when I met Ed Nixon and Rosa Parkes [sic]. I was there when King was assassinated (a long way away in Memphis), which is how I got to cover the assassination story’ (Shirley).

The Times cuttings represent Shirley’s journalistic output during early 1968 in the aftermath of King’s assassination. He was instrumental in spreading the legacy of Martin Luther King to British shores. This gift from Martin Luther King Jr is not only a testament to that great man’s influence and generosity of spirit, but also to the importance of good journalism and John Shirley’s dogged pursuit of his story.

SKU: 2121448