Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a hero of the Civil Rights Movement. He was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta Georgia. When he was six years old, one of his white friends told King that he was not aloud to play with King any more because they were going to segregated schools. His grandmother was very important to him, and when she died, when he was twelve, he tried to commit suicide by leaping out of a second-story window. Fortunately, he survived. The year before he went to college he worked on a farm in Connecticut that grew tobacco. He was amazed that the North wasn’t as segregated as the South was. “Negros and whites go [to] the same church,” he wrote in a letter to his parents. In the South everything from busses and restaurants to schools was segregated because of Jim Crow laws (segregation laws). He went to Morehouse College and decided to become a minister like his father and his grandfather. While at the Crozer Theological Seminary he heard about Mahatma Ghandi’s work with nonviolence which later inspired his work with non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement. After graduating from the Crozer Theological Seminary he went to Boston University.

He married Coretta Scott, whom he had met in Boston, in 1953. King then became a minister in Montgomery, Alabama. On December 1, 1955, an African- American woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person and because of this was arrested A group of people founded the Montgomery Improvement Association and King was elected as their leader. The organization organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. From December 5, 1955 to December 21, 1956, African-Americans in Montgomery refused to ride the busses. As a result of this, on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated busses were unconstitutional. After this he organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which fought for the rights of African-Americans in the South.

In 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama King was arrested for demonstrating against segregation at lunch counters. From the jail he wrote a letter about non-violence. “You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” he wrote in his letter. Later on, on August 28, 1963 there was the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous I Have a Dream Speech in which he spoke about his dream of desegregation. In the year of 1964 King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent work in the Civil Rights Movement. Then in 1968 King began to organize the Poor People’s March. While he was in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was trying to help striking sanitation workers, he was assassinated by James Earl Ray. Today on the third Monday of January we honor his memory by commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Martin Luther King Jr.

http://bert.lib.indiana.edu:2542/eb/art-12356?articleTypeId=1

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-bio.html

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Other People who participated in the Civil Rights Movement

Why do we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day?