| Ninety-four years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia. For most Americans, King’s leadership in the battle for civil rights has rendered him larger than life. For the former New Yorker staff writer and longtime contributor Charlayne Hunter-Gault, he was also a personal hero whom she observed up close. In “When I Met Dr. King,” published in 2018, Hunter-Gault recounts their chance encounter in the summer of 1961, when she was a young reporter for a Black newspaper in Atlanta, and King was coming off a successful campaign to end segregation in the city’s restaurants, shops, and schools. After approaching him on the street, Hunter-Gault began to introduce herself and was caught off guard when King, recognizing her, praised her for her role as one of the first two Black students to enroll at the University of Georgia, earlier that year. The encounter was brief—King was quickly surrounded by other well-wishers. Two years later, Hunter-Gault would watch King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. “He displayed the humility as well as the strength of his convictions that I had seen in Atlanta,” Hunter-Gault writes, this time “before hundreds of thousands of Americans.” | 
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