  Certainly, Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the most prolific and profoundly influential, even historic, figures of African descent whose articulations continue to compel widespread, intensive study as especially rich instances of religious, moral, theological, and socio-political philosophizing. Still, King’s articulations, as well as the sacrificial life he lived and gave in leadership service, firmly and uncompromisingly grounded in especially thoughtful commitments to Gandhi-inspired nonviolence (“Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” 1957; “The Power of Nonviolence,” 1958) and Jesus-inspired agape love (“Love, Law, and Civil Disobediance,” 1961; “A Gift of Love,” 1966) await full and widespread appreciation as the truly phenomenal gifts of inspiration, commitment, and guidance to a social movement that they were. They were gifts that, infused in and channeled by the Movement, changed the legal and social structures, the culture of race relations, and thereby the history of the United States. These gifts also inspired others in their struggles for similar changes elsewhere in the world. The consequences of the Movement that embodied these gifts confirmed, once again, that the combination of love and nonviolent struggle could, indeed, succeed. And, as has been the case throughout the history of the presence of persons of African descent in this country, these particular philosophical gifts were neither forged and developed in, nor mediated to others from, the contexts of academic Philosophy, but were, indeed, philosophizings born of struggles, gifts that changed a country for the better that, it is feared, has yet to recognize and embrace fully the confirmed lessons the gifts embody…