As riots erupted and smoke billowed from black neighbourhoods in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Robert F Kennedy met with black activists, politicians, and celebrities in a hotel suite ‘to tamp things down and divine what should come next,’ writes David Margolick in ‘The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F Kennedy’. In this excerpt, Margolick examines Kennedy’s response to the killing — and his belief that he, too, would die by an assassin’s hand.

The daughter of the Reverend Martin Luther King has been chosen as the first woman to head the civil rights organisation that he co-founded.

Federal agents spied on the widow of Martin Luther King for several years after his assassination in 1968, according to newly released documents that reveal the FBI worried about her following in the slain civil rights icon’s footsteps.

The famed civil rights organisation founded by Martin Luther King is threatening to fire his son as president for failing to breathe new life into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.