IN the first issue, 42 years ago this month, TIME noted that the 25th annual convention of the Negro National Educational Congress was about to begin in Washington. It is rather a matter of pride with us that since that first story, we have devoted intense effort to studying, reporting on and analyzing the American Negro's struggle for equality. This week's is the 14th cover story on civil rights since 1953, the year when arguments on the historic school integration case came to a close before the Supreme Court.

This series of covers devoted to searching inquiries into the many aspects of the civil rights crisis--as seen from the North, the South and the middle--has included such subjects as Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953), Civil Rights Advocate Thurgood Marshall (1955), U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell (1957), Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus (1957), Alabama Governor John Patterson (1961), Author James Baldwin (1963), The N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins (1963), Alabama Governor George Wallace (1963), Senator Everett Dirksen (1964) and Nobel Prizewinning Novelist William Faulkner (1964).

Martin Luther King was first quoted in TIME in 1956 (March 5), when he was leading the boycott ("This is a struggle between justice and injustice") that eventually ended bus segregation in Montgomery, Ala. This is his third appearance on the cover--the first having been in 1957 (Feb. 18) and the second as our Man of the Year on the first issue of 1964. That choice and story brought us 2,500 letters, more than half of them criticizing our judgment, but all showing the intense interest and involvement TIME readers feel in the issue of race relations.

When the news from Alabama--and from all around the U.S.--made Martin Luther King the cover subject for this issue, the editors called on an artist who was particularly appropriate for the assignment. Ben Shahn* is as famed in his own medium of protest as King is in his. Lately he has been contributing posters and lithographs to various civil rights groups. Working from photographs and his own impressions, he turned out his striking gouache study in just eight hours of work, after many hours of thought. He saw his subject mainly as an orator. "This is King today," he said. "He isn't as placid as he was a year ago. I admire the man immensely. He has moved more people by his oratory than anyone else I can think of."

*This is his sixth cover for TIME. The others: Andre Malraux, Sigmund Freud, Alec Guinness, Adlai Stevenson and Lenin.

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