The authoritative rhetorical analysis of the Holt Street Address is by Kirt Wilson: “Interpreting the Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Holt Street Address.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 #2 (Summer 2005): 299-326.
King’s own detailed account is recorded in Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper and Row, 1958).
Video background is available in the Eyes on the Prize documentary, episode 1.
For additional background, see:
–Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
–Clayborne Carson, “The Walk in Dignity: The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” OAH Magazine of History 19 (2005): 13-15.
–Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, “‘Dress Modestly, Neatly . . . As If You Were Going to Church’: Respectability, Class, and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” In Gender in the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Peter Ling and Sharon Monteith (New York: Garland, 1999): 86-89.
–U. J. Fields, “Minutes of the Montgomery Improvement Association Founding Meeting,” December 5, 1955. In Clayborne Carson, ed., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. volume 3 (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1997): 70.
–David Garrow, Bearing the Cross (New York: Morrow: 1986).
–David Garrow, ed., The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1989).
–Keith Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 1992).
–Rosa Parks and Gregory Reed, Quiet Strength (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994).
–Jo Ann Robinson, The Memoir of Jo Ann Robinson. In David Garrow, ed. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. Knoxville: U of Tennessee Press, 1987).
–John White, “Nixon Was the One: Edgar Daniel Nixon, the MIA, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” In Brian Ward and Tony Badger, eds., The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: NYU Press, 1996): 45-63.