Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America

＂You’ll find hope in these pages. ＂ --Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life

* 2023 Kansas Notable Books

Letters to Martin contains twelve meditations on contemporary political struggles for our oxygen-deprived society.

Evoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s ＂Letter from Birmingham Jail,＂ these meditations, written in the form of letters to King, speak specifically to the many public issues we presently confront in the United States--economic inequality, freedom of assembly, police brutality, ongoing social class conflicts, and geopolitics. Award-winning author Randal Maurice Jelks invites readers to reflect on US history by centering on questions of democracy that we must grapple with as a society.

Hearkening to the era when James Baldwin, Dorothy Day, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Richard Wright used their writing to address the internal and external conflicts that the United States faced, this book is a contemporary revival of the literary tradition of meditative social analysis.

These meditations on democracy provide spiritual oxygen to help readers endure the struggles of rebranding, rebuilding, and reforming our democratic institutions so that we can all breathe.

Randal Maurice Jelks is a professor, documentary producer, and awarding-winning author of African Americans in the Furniture City and Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement. Jelks has most recently written Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali. He was an executive producer of the documentary I, Too, Sing America: Langston Hughes Unfurled. He is currently professor of American Studies, African Studies, and African American Studies at the University of Kansas.