When doctors performed Martin Luther King Jr.'s autopsy, they found the heart of a sixty-year-old man in a thirty-nine-year-old body. The stress of leading the civil rights movement — the bombings, the death threats, the imprisonments, the FBI surveillance, the constant weight of representing an entire people's struggle — had physically destroyed him years before an assassin's bullet did.

This episode traces King from his comfortable Atlanta upbringing through the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Letter from Birmingham Jail, the March on Washington, the Nobel Prize, and the increasingly radical final years that alienated former allies before his assassination in Memphis.

• King's middle-class Atlanta childhood and the theological education that shaped his philosophy
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham campaign, and the "I ...