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| Martin Luther King Jr. |
“But we come
here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything
less than freedom and justice.” Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther
King Jr. was
born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. King, both a Baptist minister
and civil-rights activist, had a seismic impact on race relations in the United
States, beginning in the mid-1950s. Among many efforts, King headed the SCLC.
Through his activism, he played a pivotal role in ending the legal segregation
of African-American citizens in the South and other areas of the nation, as
well as the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, among several other
honors. King was assassinated in April 1968, and continues to be remembered as
one of the most lauded African-American leaders in history, often referenced by
his 1963 speech, "I Have a Dream."
Early Years
Born as Michael King Jr. on January
15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. was the middle child of Michael King Sr. and
Alberta Williams King. The King and Williams families were rooted in rural
Georgia. Martin Jr.'s grandfather, A.D. Williams, was a rural minister for years
and then moved to Atlanta in 1893. He took over the small, struggling Ebenezer
Baptist church with around 13 members and made it into a forceful congregation.
He married Jennie Celeste Parks and they had one child that survived, Alberta.
Michael King Sr. came from a sharecropper family in a poor farming community.
He married Alberta in 1926 after an eight-year courtship. The newlyweds moved
to A.D. Williams home in Atlanta.
Michael King Sr. stepped in as pastor
of Ebenezer Baptist Church upon the death of his father-in-law in 1931. He too
became a successful minister, and adopted the name Martin Luther King Sr. in
honor of the German Protestant religious leader Martin Luther. In due time,
Michael Jr. would follow his father's lead and adopt the name himself.
Young Martin had an older sister,
Willie Christine, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King. The King
children grew up in a secure and loving environment. Martin Sr. was more the
disciplinarian, while his wife's gentleness easily balanced out the father's
more strict hand. Though they undoubtedly tried, Martin Jr.’s parents couldn’t
shield him completely from racism. Martin Luther King 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.
Growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin
Luther King Jr. entered public school at age 5. In May, 1936 he was baptized,
but the event made little impression on him. In May, 1941, Martin was 12 years
old when is grandmother, Jennie, died of a heart attack. The event was
traumatic for Martin, more so because he was out watching a parade against his
parents' wishes when she died. Distraught at the news, young Martin jumped from
a second story window at the family home, allegedly attempting suicide.
King attended Booker T.
Washington High School, where he was said to be a precocious student. He
skipped both the ninth and eleventh grades, and entered Morehouse College in
Atlanta at age 15, in 1944. He was a popular student, especially with his
female classmates, but an unmotivated student who floated though his first two
years. Although his family was deeply involved in the church and worship, young
Martin questioned religion in general and felt uncomfortable with overly
emotional displays of religious worship. This discomfort continued through much
of his adolescence, initially leading him to decide against entering the
ministry, much to his father's dismay. But in his junior year, Martin took a
Bible class, renewed his faith and began to envision a career in the ministry.
In the fall of his senior year, he told his father of his decision.
Education and Spiritual Growth
In 1948, Martin Luther King Jr. earned
a sociology degree from Morehouse College and attended the liberal Crozer
Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. He thrived in all his studies,
and was valedictorian of his class in 1951, and elected student body president.
He also earned a fellowship for graduate study. But Martin also rebelled
against his father’s more conservative influence by drinking beer and playing
pool while at college. He became involved with a white woman and went through a
difficult time before he could break off the affair.
During his last year in seminary,
Martin Luther King Jr. came under the influence of theologian Reinhold
Niebbuhr, a classmate of his father's at Morehouse College. Niebbuhr became a
mentor to Martin, challenging his liberal views of theology. Niebuhr was
probably the single most important influence in Martin's intellectual and
spiritual development. After being accepted at several colleges for his
doctoral study including Yale and Edinburgh in Scotland, King enrolled in
Boston University.
During the work on this doctorate,
Martin Luther King Jr. met Coretta Scott, an aspiring singer and musician, at
the New England Conservatory school in Boston. They were married in June 1953
and had four children, Yolanda, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott and
Bernice. In 1954, while still working on his dissertation, King became pastor
of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama. He completed his
Ph.D. and was award his degree in 1955. King was only 25 years old.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
On March 2, 1955, a 15-year-old girl
refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus in
violation of local law. Claudette Colvin
was arrested and taken to jail. At first, the local chapter of the NAACP felt
they had an excellent test case to challenge Montgomery's segregated bus
policy. But then it was revealed that she was pregnant and civil rights leaders
feared this would scandalize the deeply religious black community and make
Colvin (and, thus the group's efforts) less credible in the eyes of sympathetic
whites.
On December 1, 1955, they got another
chance to make their case. That evening, 42-year-old Rosa Parks
boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus to go home from an exhausting day at work.
She sat in the first row of the
"colored" section in the middle of the bus. As the bus traveled its
route, all the seats it the white section filled up, then several more white
passengers boarded the bus. The bus driver noted that there were several white
men standing and demanded that Parks and several other African Americans give
up their seats. Three other African American passengers reluctantly gave up
their places, but Parks remained seated. The driver asked her again to give up
her seat and again she refused. Parks was arrested and booked for violating the
Montgomery City Code. At her trial a week later, in a 30-minute hearing, Parks
was found guilty and fined $10 and assessed $4 court fee.
On the night that Rosa Parks was
arrested, E.D.
Nixon, head of the local NAACP chapter met with Martin Luther King Jr. and
other local civil rights leaders to plan a citywide bus boycott. King was
elected to lead the boycott because he was young, well-trained with solid
family connections and had professional standing. But he was also new to the
community and had few enemies, so it was felt he would have strong credibility
with the black community.
In his first speech as the group's
president, King declared, "We have no alternative but to protest. For many
years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white
brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come
here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything
less than freedom and justice."
Martin Luther King Jr.'s fresh and
skillful rhetoric put a new energy into the civil rights struggle in Alabama.
The bus boycott would be 382 days of walking to work, harassment, violence and
intimidation for the Montgomery's African-American community. Both King's and
E.D. Nixon's homes were attacked. But the African-American community also took
legal action against the city ordinance arguing that it was unconstitutional
based on the Supreme Court's "separate is never equal" decision in Brown
v. Board of Education. After being defeated in several lower court rulings and
suffering large financial losses, the city of Montgomery lifted the law
mandating segregated public transportation.
The Southern Christian
Leadership Conference
Flush with victory, African-American
civil rights leaders recognized the need for a national organization to help
coordinate their efforts. In January 1957, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph
Abernathy, and 60 ministers and civil rights activists founded the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference to harness the moral authority and organizing
power of black churches. They would help conduct non-violent protests to
promote civil rights reform. King's participation in the organization gave him
a base of operation throughout the South, as well as a national platform. The
organization felt the best place to start to give African Americans a voice was
to enfranchise them in the voting process. In February 1958, the SCLC sponsored
more than 20 mass meetings in key southern cities to register black voters in
the South.
King met with religious and civil
rights leaders and lectured all over the country on race-related issues.
In 1959, with the help of the American
Friends Service Committee, and inspired by Gandhi's success with non-violent
activism, Martin Luther King visited Gandhi's birthplace in India. The trip
affected him in a deeply profound way, increasing his commitment to America's
civil rights struggle. African-American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin,
who had studied Gandhi's teachings, became one of King's associates and
counseled him to dedicate himself to the principles of non-violence. Rustin
served as King's mentor and advisor throughout his early activism and was the
main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. But Rustin was also a
controversial figure at the time, being a homosexual with alleged ties to the
Communist Party, USA. Though his counsel was invaluable to King, many of his
other supporters urged him to distance himself from Rustin.
In February 1960, a group of
African-American students began what became known as the "sit-in"
movement in Greensboro, North Carolina. The students would sit at racially
segregated lunch counters in the city's stores. When asked to leave or sit in
the colored section, they just remained seated, subjecting themselves to verbal
and sometimes physical abuse. The movement quickly gained traction in several
other cities. In April 1960, the SCLC held a conference at Shaw University in
Raleigh, North Carolina with local sit-in leaders. Martin Luther King Jr.
encouraged students to continue to use nonviolent methods during their
protests. Out of this meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
formed and for a time, worked closely with the SCLC. By August of 1960, the
sit-ins had been successful in ending segregation at lunch counters in 27
southern cities.
By 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was
gaining national notoriety. He returned to Atlanta to become co-pastor with his
father at Ebenezer Baptist Church, but also continued his civil rights efforts.
On October 19, 1960, King and 75 students entered a local department store and
requested lunch-counter service but were denied. When they refused to leave the
counter area, King and 36 others were arrested. Realizing the incident would
hurt the city's reputation, Atlanta's mayor negotiated a truce and charges were
eventually dropped. But soon after, King was imprisoned for violating his
probation on a traffic conviction. The news of his imprisonment entered the 1960
presidential campaign, when candidate John F. Kennedy
made a phone call to Coretta Scott
King. Kennedy expressed his concern for King's harsh treatment for the
traffic ticket and political pressure was quickly set in motion. King was soon
released.
'I Have a Dream'
In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther
King Jr. organized a demonstration in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. Entire
families attended. City police turned dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators.
Martin Luther King was jailed along with large numbers of his supporters, but
the event drew nationwide attention.
However, King was personally
criticized by black and white clergy alike for taking risks and endangering the
children who attended the demonstration. From the jail in Birmingham, King
eloquently spelled out his theory of non-violence: "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."
By the end of the Birmingham campaign,
Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters were making plans for a massive
demonstration on the nation's capital composed of multiple organizations, all
asking for peaceful change. On August 28, 1963, the historic March on
Washington drew more than 200,000 people in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial.
It was here that King made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, emphasizing
his belief that someday all men could be brothers.
The rising tide of civil rights
agitation produced a strong effect on public opinion. Many people in cities not
experiencing racial tension began to question the nation's Jim Crow laws and
the near century second class treatment of African-American citizens. This
resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorizing the federal
government to enforce desegregation of public accommodations and outlawing
discrimination in publicly owned facilities. This also led to Martin Luther
King receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964.
King's struggle continued throughout
the 1960s. Often, it seemed as though the pattern of progress was two steps
forward and one step back. On March 7, 1965, a civil rights march, planned from
Selma to Alabama's capital in Montgomery, turned violent as police with
nightsticks and tear gas met the demonstrators as they tried to cross the
Edmond Pettus Bridge. King was not in the march, however the attack was
televised showing horrifying images of marchers being bloodied and severely
injured. Seventeen demonstrators were hospitalized leading to the naming the
event "Bloody Sunday." A second march was cancelled due to a
restraining order to prevent the march from taking place. A third march was
planned and this time King made sure he was on it. Not wanting to alienate
southern judges by violating the restraining order, a different tact was taken.
On March 9, 1965, a procession of 2,500 marchers, both black and white, set out
once again 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. The event caused King the loss of support
among some younger African-American leaders, but it nonetheless aroused support
for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
From late 1965 through 1967, Martin
Luther King Jr. expanded his Civil Rights Movement 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 and too late.
In the eyes of the sharp-tongued, blue
jean young urban black, King's manner was irresponsibly passive and deemed
non-effective. To address this criticism King began making a link between
discrimination and poverty. He expanded his civil rights efforts to the Vietnam
War. He felt that America's involvement in Vietnam was politically untenable
and the government's conduct of the war discriminatory to the poor. He sought
to broaden his base by forming a multi-race coalition to address economic and
unemployment problems of all disadvantaged people.
Assassination and Legacy
By 1968, the years of demonstrations
and confrontations were beginning to wear on Martin Luther King Jr. He had
grown tired of marches, going to jail, and living under the constant threat of
death. He was becoming discouraged at the slow progress civil rights in America
and the increasing criticism from other African-American leaders. Plans were in
the works for another march on Washington to revive his movement and bring
attention to a widening range of issues. In the spring of 1968, a labor strike
by Memphis sanitation workers drew King to one last crusade. On April 3, in
what proved to be an eerily prophetic speech, he told supporters, "I've
seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know
tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land." The next
day, while standing on a balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel, Martin
Luther King Jr. was struck by a sniper's bullet. The shooter, a malcontent
drifter and former convict named James Earl Ray,
was eventually apprehended after a two-month, international manhunt. The
killing sparked riots and demonstrations in more than 100 cities across the
country. In 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to assassinating King and was sentenced to
99 years in prison. He died in prison on April 23, 1998.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s life had a
seismic impact on race relations in the United States. Years after his death,
he is the most widely known African-American leader of his era. His life and
work have been honored with a national holiday, schools and public buildings
named after him, and a memorial on Independence Mall in Washington, D.C. But
his life remains controversial as well. In the 1970s, FBI files, released under
the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that he was under government
surveillance, and suggested his involvement in adulterous relationships and
communist influences. Over the years, extensive archival studies have led to a
more balanced and comprehensive assessment of his life, portraying him as a
complex figure: flawed, fallible and limited in his control over the mass
movements with which he was associated, yet a visionary leader who was deeply
committed to achieving social justice through nonviolent means.
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