Martin Luther King Jr.’s final birthday didn’t look like history. It looked like love. On January 15, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. turned 39 in Atlanta. No stage. No crowds. No speeches for the cameras. Instead, staff at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference quietly planned a surprise to lift his spirits. King had just returned from Dallas with Andrew Young, weighed down by the backlash from his anti–Vietnam War stance and the enormous pressure of the Poor People’s Campaign. What he thoug