Martin Luther King Jr. read the existentialists.

Evidence

38 King: ‘Martin Luther King Jr. Traces His Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’, in Arthur and Lila Weinburg (eds), Instead of Violence (New York: Grossman, 1963), 71. He read Sartre, Jaspers, Heidegger and others, as well as Paul Tillich, American existentialist theologian. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1156

Categorization

• XREF: Connects existentialism to the US civil-rights movement, a concrete uptake story worth noting beyond the European canon. — connects to: Existentialism framed oppression through the most-suffering perspective and reached Martin Luther King Jr. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 70