MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

 

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. (1929-1968)

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the twentieth century’s best-known advocates for nonviolent social change.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. Though they undoubtedly tried, King’s parents couldn’t shield him completely from racism. Martin Sr. fought against racial prejudice, not just because his race suffered, but because he considered racism and segregation to be an affront to God's will. He strongly discouraged any sense of class superiority in his children which left a lasting impression on Martin Jr.

Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated.

Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation.  His exceptional oratorical skills and personal courage first attracted national attention in 1955, when he and other civil rights activists were arrested after leading first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. King's skillful rhetoric put new energy into the civil rights struggle in Alabama.  Both King's and Nixon's homes were attacked. He was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Black leader of the first rank.

In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action, he wrote, spoke and organized nonviolent protests and mass demonstrations to draw attention to racial discrimination and to demand civil rights legislation to protect the rights of African-Americans.

In 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, King guided peaceful mass demonstrations that the white police force countered with police dogs and fire hoses, creating a controversy which generated newspaper headlines throughout the world. He planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Black people as voters.

Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities culminated in a march that attracted more than 250,000 protestors to Washington, DC, where King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech in which he envisioned a world where people were no longer divided by race. “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.’

So powerful was the movement he inspired, that Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the same year King himself was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.

On March 9, 1965, a procession of 2,500 marchers, both Black and white, set out once again (first was at 7 March) to cross the Pettus Bridge and confronted barricades and state troopers. Instead of forcing a confrontation, King led his followers to kneel in prayer and they then turned back. On March 21, approximately 2,000 people began a march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capitol. On March 25, the number of marchers, which had grown to an estimated 25,000, gathered in front of the state capitol where King delivered a televised speech. Five months after the historic peaceful protest, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

From late 1965 through 1967, King expanded his civil rights efforts into other larger American cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles. But he met with increasing criticism and public challenges from young Black power leaders. King's patient, non-violent approach and appeal to white middle-class citizens alienated many Black militants who considered his methods too weak, too late and ineffective.

He was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

Posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, King is an icon of the civil rights movement. His life and work symbolize the quest for equality and non-discrimination that lies at the heart of the American - and human - dream.

(https://www.humanrights.com/voices-for-human-rights/martin-luther-king-jr.html; https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/biographical/; https://www.biography.com/activist/martin-luther-king-jr)