Martin Luther King, Jr.
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I |
INTRODUCTION |
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
emerged as a leader of the American civil rights movement after organizing the
famous 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Throughout his career he
pressed for equal treatment and improved circumstances for blacks, organizing
nonviolent protests and delivering powerful speeches on the necessity of
eradicating institutional racial inequalities. In 1963 King led a peaceful
march between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, where he
delivered his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream.”
Courtesy of Gordon Skene
Sound Collection. All rights reserved./UPI/THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE
Martin Luther King,
Jr. (1929-1968), American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of
the principal leaders of the American civil rights movement and a prominent
advocate of nonviolent protest. King’s challenges to segregation and racial
discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s helped convince many white Americans to
support the cause of civil rights in the United States. After his assassination
in 1968, King became a symbol of protest in the struggle for racial justice.
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II |
EDUCATION AND EARLY LIFE |
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Site
This Victorian home, the
birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., is part of the Martin Luther King, Jr.,
National Historic Site in Atlanta, Georgia.
Bob Krist/Corbis
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a
Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. His father served as pastor of a
large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which had been founded by Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s, maternal grandfather. King, Jr., was ordained as a Baptist
minister at age 18.
King attended local segregated
public schools, where he excelled. He entered nearby Morehouse College at age
15 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1948. After
graduating with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in
1951, he went to Boston University where he earned a doctoral degree in
systematic theology in 1955.
King’s public-speaking
abilities—which would become renowned as his stature grew in the civil rights
movement—developed slowly during his collegiate years. He won a second-place
prize in a speech contest while an undergraduate at Morehouse, but received Cs
in two public-speaking courses in his first year at Crozer. By the end of his
third year at Crozer, however, professors were praising King for the powerful
impression he made in public speeches and discussions.
Throughout his education,
King was exposed to influences that related Christian theology to the struggles
of oppressed peoples. At Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University, he studied
the teachings on nonviolent protest of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. King also
read and heard the sermons of white Protestant ministers who preached against
American racism. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse and a leader in the
national community of racially liberal clergymen, was especially important in shaping
King’s theological development.
While in Boston, King
met Coretta Scott, a music student and native of Alabama. They were married in
1953 and would have four children. In 1954 King accepted his first pastorate at
the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a church with a
well-educated congregation that had recently been led by a minister who had
protested against segregation.
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III |
THE MONTGOMERY BUS
BOYCOTT |
King Speaks about
Nonviolence
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
speaks about nonviolent resistance, a tactic that he advocated during the civil
rights movement of the 1960s. King and his followers used nonviolence to
protest against racial discrimination and inequality.
Archive Films
Montgomery’s black community
had long-standing grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on city buses.
Many white bus drivers treated blacks rudely, often cursing them and
humiliating them by enforcing the city’s segregation laws, which forced black
riders to sit in the back of buses and give up their seats to white passengers
on crowded buses. By the early 1950s Montgomery’s blacks had discussed
boycotting the buses in an effort to gain better treatment—but not necessarily
to end segregation.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa
Parks, a leading member of the local branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was ordered by a bus driver to give up
her seat to a white passenger. When she refused, she was arrested and taken to
jail. Local leaders of the NAACP, especially Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that
the arrest of the popular and highly respected Parks was the event that could
rally local blacks to a bus protest.
Nixon also believed that
a citywide protest should be led by someone who could unify the community.
Unlike Nixon and other leaders in Montgomery’s black community, the recently
arrived King had no enemies. Furthermore, Nixon saw King’s public-speaking
gifts as great assets in the battle for black civil rights in Montgomery. King
was soon chosen as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA),
the organization that directed the bus boycott.
The Montgomery bus boycott
lasted for more than a year, demonstrating a new spirit of protest among
Southern blacks. King’s serious demeanor and consistent appeal to Christian
brotherhood and American idealism made a positive impression on whites outside
the South. Incidents of violence against black protesters, including the
bombing of King’s home, focused media attention on Montgomery. In February 1956
an attorney for the MIA filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction
against Montgomery’s segregated seating practices. The federal court ruled in
favor of the MIA, ordering the city’s buses to be desegregated, but the city
government appealed the ruling to the United States Supreme Court. By the time
the Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision in November 1956, King was a
national figure. His memoir of the bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom
(1958), provided a thoughtful account of that experience and further extended
King’s national influence.
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IV |
CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERSHIP |
War on Poverty Meeting
President Lyndon Johnson
met with prominent black leaders on January 18, 1964, to discuss his war on
poverty. From left to right are: Roy Wilkins, Executive Director of the NAACP;
James Farmer, National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality; Martin
Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Whitney
Young of the Urban League; and Johnson.
UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN
In 1957 King helped found
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black
churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As SCLC’s
president, King became the organization’s dominant personality and its primary
intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the organization’s
fund-raising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with preaching
engagements in Northern churches.
SCLC sought to complement
the NAACP’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation through the courts, with
King and other SCLC leaders encouraging the use of nonviolent direct action to
protest discrimination. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and
boycotts. The violent responses that direct action provoked from some whites
eventually forced the federal government to confront the issues of injustice
and racism in the South.
King at Medgar Evers’s
Funeral
American civil rights
leader Martin Luther King, Jr., foreground, attended the 1963 funeral
procession of Medgar Evers, a civil rights organizer murdered by the Ku Klux
Klan. In the face of often violent opposition, King challenged his supporters
to maintain a policy of peaceful resistance to injustice.
Express
Newspapers/Archive Photos
King made strategic alliances
with Northern whites that later bolstered his success at influencing public
opinion in the United States. Through Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights and
peace activist, King forged connections to older radical activists, many of
them Jewish, who provided money and advice about strategy. King’s closest
adviser at times was Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist and former member of
the American Communist Party. King also developed strong ties to leading white
Protestant ministers in the North, with whom he shared theological and moral
views.
In 1959 King visited India
and worked out more clearly his understanding of Gandhi's principle of
nonviolent persuasion, called satyagraha, which King had determined to use as
his main instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate
in Montgomery to become copastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta.
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V |
SCLC PROTEST CAMPAIGNS |
King in a Quiet Moment
American civil rights
leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the greatest orators in the history
of the United States. From his early leadership of the 1955 bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama, King’s words and thoughts caused millions of Americans to
reevaluate their attitude toward race relations in the United States.
Hulton Deutsch/Corbis
In the early 1960s King
led SCLC in a series of protest campaigns that gained national attention. The
first was in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, where SCLC joined local demonstrations
against segregated restaurants, hotels, transit, and housing. SCLC increased
the size of the demonstrations in an effort to create so much dissent and
disorder that local white officials would be forced to end segregation to
restore normal business relations. The strategy did not work in Albany. During
months of protests, Albany’s police chief jailed hundreds of demonstrators
without visible police violence. Eventually the protesters’ energy, and the
money to bail out protesters, ran out.
The strategy did work,
however, in Birmingham, Alabama, when SCLC joined a local protest during the
spring of 1963. The protest was led by SCLC member Fred Shuttlesworth, one of
the ministers who had worked with King in 1957 in organizing SCLC.
Shuttlesworth believed that the Birmingham police commissioner, Eugene “Bull”
Connor, would meet protesters with violence. In May 1963 King and his SCLC
staff escalated antisegregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagers
and school children to join. Hundreds of singing children filled the streets of
downtown Birmingham, angering Connor, who sent police officers with attack dogs
and firefighters with high-pressure water hoses against the marchers. Scenes of
young protesters being attacked by dogs and pinned against buildings by
torrents of water from fire hoses were shown in newspapers and on televisions
around the world.
During the demonstrations,
King was arrested and sent to jail. He wrote a letter from his jail cell to
local clergymen who had criticized him for creating disorder in the city. His
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which argued that individuals had the moral
right and responsibility to disobey unjust laws, was widely read at the time
and added to King’s standing as a moral leader.
National reaction to the
Birmingham violence built support for the struggle for black civil rights. The
demonstrations forced white leaders to negotiate an end to some forms of
segregation in Birmingham. Even more important, the protests encouraged many
Americans to support national legislation against segregation.
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VI |
“I HAVE A DREAM” |
King and other black leaders
organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive protest in Washington, D.C.,
for jobs and civil rights. On August 28, 1963, King delivered a stirring
address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. His “I
Have a Dream” speech expressed the hopes of the civil rights movement in
oratory as moving as any in American history: “I have a dream that one day this
nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream
that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not
be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The speech and the march
built on the Birmingham demonstrations to create the political momentum that
resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in
public accommodations, as well as discrimination in education and employment.
As a result of King’s effectiveness as a leader of the American civil rights
movement and his highly visible moral stance he was awarded the 1964 Nobel
Prize for peace.
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VII |
SELMA MARCHES |
In 1965 SCLC joined a
voting-rights protest march that was planned to go from Selma, Alabama, to the
state capital of Montgomery, more than 80 km (50 mi) away. The goal of the
march was to draw national attention to the struggle for black voting rights in
the state. Police beat and tear-gassed the marchers just outside of Selma, and
televised scenes of the violence, on a day that came to be known as Bloody
Sunday, resulted in an outpouring of support to continue the march. SCLC petitioned
for and received a federal court order barring police from interfering with a
renewed march to Montgomery. Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, more than 3,000
people, including a core of 300 marchers who would make the entire trip, set
out toward Montgomery. They arrived in Montgomery five days later, where King
addressed a rally of more than 20,000 people in front of the capitol building.
The march created support
for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into
law in August. The act suspended (and amendments to the act later banned) the
use of literacy tests and other voter qualification tests that often had been
used to prevent blacks from registering to vote.
After the Selma protests,
King had fewer dramatic successes in his struggle for black civil rights. Many
white Americans who had supported his work believed that the job was done. In
many ways, the nation’s appetite for civil rights progress had been filled.
King also lost support among white Americans when he joined the growing number
of antiwar activists in 1965 and began to criticize publicly American foreign
policy in Vietnam. King’s outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War (1959-1975)
also angered President Johnson. On the other hand, some of King’s white
supporters agreed with his criticisms of United States involvement in Vietnam
so strongly that they shifted their activism from civil rights to the antiwar
movement.
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VIII |
BLACK POWER |
By the mid-1960s King’s
role as the unchallenged leader of the civil rights movement was questioned by
many younger blacks. Activists such as Stokely Carmichael of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) argued that King’s nonviolent protest
strategies and appeals to moral idealism were useless in the face of sustained
violence by whites. Some also rejected the leadership of ministers. In
addition, many SNCC organizers resented King, feeling that often they had put
in the hard work of planning and organizing protests, only to have the
charismatic King arrive later and receive much of the credit. In 1966 the Black
Power movement, advocated most forcefully by Carmichael, captured the nation’s
attention and suggested that King’s influence among blacks was waning. Black
Power advocates looked more to the beliefs of the recently assassinated black
Muslim leader, Malcolm X, whose insistence on black self-reliance and the right
of blacks to defend themselves against violent attacks had been embraced by many
African Americans.
With internal divisions
beginning to divide the civil rights movement, King shifted his focus to racial
injustice in the North. Realizing that the economic difficulties of blacks in
Northern cities had largely been ignored, SCLC broadened its civil rights
agenda by focusing on issues related to black poverty. King established a
headquarters in a Chicago apartment in 1966, using that as a base to organize
protests against housing and employment discrimination in the city. Black
Baptist ministers who disagreed with many of SCLC’s tactics, especially the
confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods,
publicly opposed King’s efforts. The protests did not lead to significant gains
and were often met with violent counterdemonstrations by whites, including
neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret terrorist organization that
was opposed to integration.
Throughout 1966 and 1967
King increasingly turned the focus of his civil rights activism throughout the
country to economic issues. He began to argue for redistribution of the
nation’s economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty. In 1967 he began
planning a Poor People’s Campaign to pressure national lawmakers to address the
issue of economic justice.
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IX |
ASSASSINATION |
King’s Gravesite
The inscription on the
tombstone of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., reads, “Free
at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty I’m free at last.” The quote is from
a spiritual, or religious folk song, which King often used to close his speeches.
King was killed in 1968, but his words and philosophy continue to inspire many
in the United States and around the world.
Globe Photos, Inc.
This emphasis on economic
rights took King to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black garbage
workers in the spring of 1968. He was assassinated in Memphis by a sniper on
April 4. News of the assassination resulted in an outpouring of shock and anger
throughout the nation and the world, prompting riots in more than 100 United
States cities in the days following King’s death. In 1969 James Earl Ray, an
escaped white convict, pleaded guilty to the murder of King and was sentenced
to 99 years in prison. Ray later recanted his confession. Although over the
years many investigators have suspected that Ray did not act alone, no
accomplices have ever been identified. In 1999 a jury in a Memphis civil trial
brought by King’s family found that a widespread conspiracy not involving Ray
led to King’s assassination. However, most investigators continued to believe
that Ray was the killer.
After King’s death, historians
researching his life and career discovered that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) often tapped King’s phone line and reported on his private
life to the president and other government officials. The FBI’s reason for
invading his privacy was that King associated with Communists and other
“radicals.”
After his death, King
came to represent black courage and achievement, high moral leadership, and the
ability of Americans to address and overcome racial divisions. Recollections of
his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and poverty faded, and his soaring
rhetoric calling for racial justice and an integrated society became almost as
familiar to subsequent generations of Americans as the Declaration of
Independence.
King’s historical importance was memorialized at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, a research institute in Atlanta where his tomb is located. The King Center is located at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, which includes King’s birthplace and the Ebenezer Church. Perhaps the most important memorial is the national holiday in King’s honor, designated by the Congress of the United States in 1983 and observed on the third Monday in January, a day that falls on or near King’s birthday of January 15.