Brooding Giant

For those of us who didn’t live in the time that the moral giant Martin Luther King, Jr., walked the earth, we have only the pictures—the young, fiery preacher, the protest leader sitting in a Birmingham jail, the seas of people listening to the “I Have a Dream” speech, and, finally, the flock of arms and hands rising towards the source of the assassin’s bullet that left him in a pool of his own blood. On this day honoring Dr. King’s memory, I offer a different image—John Woodrow Wilson’s 1981 mammoth charcoal portrait, Martin Luther King, Jr. (pictured). Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Brooding Giant."

[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with the image of John Woodrow Wilson’s 1981 charcoal portrait Martin Luther King, Jr. Art © John Wilson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.]