Traces the career of Martin Luther King, Jr., through the Rosa parks incident, sit-ins, freedom riders, King's numerous arrests, the 1963 march on Washington, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, and other events and people that marked the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. Focuses on King's beliefs in nonviolence, the path of leadership that led him to "active refusal to cooperate," and his final days before his assassination in 1968.