“I have a dream that my four young children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged on the color of their skin but on the content of their character.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
March on Washington Speech, August 1963
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of the leading leaders of the American civil rights movement and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest was born on January 15, 1929, the second of three children. . His father was a Baptist minister and served as pastor of a large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which had been founded by Martin Luther King’s maternal grandfather, Jr. Martin was ordained a Baptist minister at age 18.
He attended public elementary and high schools, as well as the University of Atlanta Private Laboratory High School. King entered Morehouse College at age 15 in September 1944 as a special student. He received a BA in sociology in 1948. In the fall of that year, King enrolled at Crozier Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, and received his BA in Divinity three years later. King’s public speaking skills, which would become famous as his stature grew in the civil rights movement, developed slowly during his college years. He won a second prize in a speech contest while studying at Morehouse, but received Cs in two speech courses in his freshman year at Crozer. Yet by the end of his third year at Crozer, the teachers praised King for the powerful impression he made in public speeches and debates. King received a doctorate from Boston University in 1955. Throughout his education, King was exposed to influences that linked Christian theology to the struggles of oppressed peoples. At Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University, he studied teachings on nonviolent protest from Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. King also read and listened to sermons by white Protestant ministers who preached against American racism. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse and leader of the national racially liberal clergy community, 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 on June 18, 1953 and would have four children. In 1954, King accepted his first pastorate at 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 segregation.
She had resided in Montgomery for less than a year when Rosa Parks challenged the ordinance regulating separate seating on municipal transportation. King was soon elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that led the bus boycott. King’s serious demeanor and his constant 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 unbundling of city buses, but the city government appealed the ruling to the United States Supreme Court. For 12 months, makeshift carpooling replaced public transportation. At first, the bus company mocked the black protest, but as the economic effects of the boycott were felt, the company sought a settlement. Meanwhile, legal action ended the bus segregation policy. On June 5, 1956, a federal district court ruled that the bus segregation policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from denying equal rights to any citizen. The boycott ended and unveiled a person who clearly possessed charismatic leadership, Martin Luther King, Jr.
When the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision in November 1956, King was a national figure. His memoirs of the bus boycott, Step to freedom (1958), provided a thoughtful account of that experience and further expanded King’s national influence.
King, urged by prominent Black Baptist ministers in the South to take a greater role in the fight for black civil rights following the successful boycott, accepted the chairmanship of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a organization of black churches and ministers. which aimed to challenge racial segregation. As president of SCLC, King became the organization’s dominant personality and its main intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the organization’s fundraising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with preaching engagements in northern churches.
In January 1960, he resigned his pastorate in Montgomery and moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where the SCLC was based. 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 non-violent direct action to protest discrimination. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts. The violent responses provoked by direct action by some whites finally forced the federal government to confront the problems of injustice and racism in the South. King’s challenges to segregation and racial profiling in the 1950s and 1960s helped convince many white Americans to support the cause of civil rights in America.
In 1963 he wrote ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, arguing that it was his moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws, every year he had delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to civil rights protesters at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. In 1964, King became the first black American to be honored as Time magazine’s Man of the Year and also won the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway; Accepting the award on behalf of the civil rights movement, Dr. King said: “Sooner or later, all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm. of brotherhood. ” King’s efforts were not limited to guaranteeing civil rights; He also spoke out against poverty and the Vietnam War; Throughout 1966 and 1967, King increasingly focused his civil rights activism across the country on economic issues.
He began advocating for the redistribution of the nation’s economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty. In 1967 he began planning a Campaign of the Poor to pressure national legislators to address the issue of economic justice. After his murder on April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee by a later realized sniper named James Earl Ray and sentenced to 99 years in prison. The FBI believed that King had been associating with communists and other radicals, but King became a symbol of protest in the fight for racial justice; and finally President Ronald Reagan signs legislation designating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday in 1983 (the third Monday of every new year).
King’s non-violent doctrine was strongly influenced by the teachings of the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. Unlike the vast majority of civil rights activists who have viewed nonviolence as a convenient tactic. King followed Gandhi’s pacifist principles. In King’s view, civil rights protesters, who were beaten and imprisoned by hostile targets, educated and transformed their oppressors through the redemptive character of their undeserved suffering.
The SCLC helped the students organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), at a meeting held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to coordinate the protests. As a direct result of the sit-ins, lunch counters throughout the South began serving blacks and other public facilities were desegregated.
An important action and response interaction developed between the government and civil rights defenders. And it was this interaction that did so much to accelerate the pace of social change.
The most critical direct action demonstration began in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 3, 1963, under the leadership of Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The protesters demanded fair job opportunities, the desegregation of public facilities and the creation of a committee to plan the desegregation. King was arrested and, while incarcerated, wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to other clergy who criticized his civilian tactics. King was arrested more than seven times during his many civil rights campaigns throughout the South.
On August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 Americans of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds gathered in Washington, staging the largest demonstration in the nation’s capital’s history. The orderly procession moved from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where King electrified the protesters with an eloquent articulation of the American dream (I Have a Dream) and his hope that it will be fully realized. In one of the most famous passages of the speech, King stated:
“When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every village, from every state and every city, we can accelerate that day when all the children of God, black and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics , they will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old black spiritual ‘Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, at last we are free.’