I | INTRODUCTION |
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.
II | EDUCATION AND EARLY LIFE |
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.
III | THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT |
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.
IV | CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERSHIP |
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 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.
V | SCLC PROTEST CAMPAIGNS |
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.
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.
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.
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.
IX | ASSASSINATION |
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.
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