Martin Luther King the Story

Martin Luther King

The story of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is the story of America's most important civil rights leader. He was responsible for significantly raising the nation's awareness over civil rights issues and for working to have the federal government pass some comprehensive legislation over them. He dedicated his life to the struggle and did not stop until his untimely death on April 4, 1968. King was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia to parents Martin Luther King Sr., who was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta Williams King.

The time during which King was born was fraught with many injustices committed against African-Americans, particularly in the South. Blacks had to experience racial segregation in almost all public areas, including schools, parks, stores, trains and buses. Many blacks grew up poor and disenchanted with American society. Many were unable to break free of poverty because they experienced racial discrimination while pursuing an education and while trying to take advantage of whatever few job opportunities they had available.

King was an extremely intelligent child while growing up; when he was only 13 he began working at the Atlanta Journal. This made him the company's youngest assistant manager of their delivery station. King attended local primary and secondary schools while growing up, which included Booker T. Washington High School, the first public high school for Blacks in Atlanta. He was an exceptional student, who was able to skip both the 9th and 12th grades. Thus he was only 15 when he entered college; in 1944 he began attending Atlanta's Morehouse College and later graduated in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology.

King had initially not considered pursuing a religious career until he met Dr. Benjamin Mays, who got him interested in the possibility of entering the ministry. So in 1951 King began attending the Crozer Theological Seminary until he received his Bachelor of Divinity award. In 1955 King completed his Ph.D. In Systematic Theology from Boston University. On June 18, 1953 King married Coretta Scott in Marion Alabama at her parent's house. They had four children together whose names were Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice Albertine.

In 1954 King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The year 1955 was when King first became active in the civil rights movement when he participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This boycott was famously started when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. The boycott, which lasted 381 days, led to an increase in racial tensions within the city and even led to King's house being bombed. Despite all this trouble, the boycott eventually resulted in the United States Supreme Court's ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional.

In 1957 King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) along with various other black leaders. The purpose of the organization was to mobilize black churches in the non-violent struggle for civil rights; King was made its president and continued to serve this position until his death. In the meantime, during the year 1960, King became the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church alongside his father.

In 1963 King participated in another mass demonstration, this time in Birmingham, Alabama and this time having to do with the desegregation of department stores and the promotion of nondiscriminatory hiring practices. Many protesters experienced police brutality and King himself was arrested; he wrote "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in order to bring attention to this experience. Later that same year on August 28 King helped to organize and lead the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In conjunction with five other civil rights organizations which included the NAACP, Urban League, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, SNCC, and the Congress of Racial Equity, King's SCLC attempted to bring the plight of African-Americans into the nation's consciousness.

The march succeeded in bringing to light the fact that the country needed some comprehensive civil rights legislation dealing with prohibiting employment discrimination, ending racial segregation in the public school system, and protecting civil rights workers from police brutality, among other things. This march was highly successful in having over a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds participate and it was where King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

This speech was memorable in the fact that it pointed out the various injustices that American blacks continued to experience in the country despite their gaining freedom from slavery after the Civil War. As quoted from the speech King declared that "One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land" ("I Have a Dream," para. 2).

King later declared that the purpose of the march was to "cash a check." As King so aptly stated, "So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"("I Have a Dream" para. 3).

Later on King declares his optimistic attitude towards the way the civil rights struggle will eventually end. He states that "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" para.13)."

On October 14, 1964 King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech he stated that he was receiving this award on behalf of the many participants of the civil rights movement who were endlessly engaged in the struggle. As he himself stated after receiving his prize on December 10, 1964, "I accept this award on behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice"("Nobel Prize "para.1).

Also in his speech King stated that his acceptance of the award would allow the world to recognize the non-violent tactics his movement engaged in. As he himself stated," After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time -- the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression"("Nobel Prize "para.3).

During his lifetime King led and organized various boycotts and demonstrations against racial injustice. Between 1961-1962 King and the SCLC organized the ultimately unsuccessful protest march in Albany. In 1964 he and his organization participated in the St. Augustine, Florida protest march, and in the voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama in conjunction with another organization, the SNCC.

While in Alabama, King and the SCLC attempted to organize a mass protest stretching from Selma to Montgomery on March 25, 1965. The initial march that was supposed to have taken place there on March 7 resulted in Bloody Sunday, in which police brutality abruptly ended the otherwise non-violent march. Extensive media coverage of this and other major events surrounding the civil rights struggle brought nationwide attention and sympathy to the cause. Attention to such issues ultimately resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Besides focusing on domestic issues, King also tried to bring attention to America's foreign policy issues and to issues dealt with by other countries. On March 5, 1958 King attended the Independence Day celebrations of the country Ghana. Dr. King made many interesting statements about the event while there. One such statement includes, "Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it. Freedom is never given to anybody. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance (Carson)."

Another interesting statement made by Dr. King during the event includes the following, "The minute I knew I was going to Ghana I had a very deep emotional feeling. A new nation was being born. It symbolized the fact that a new order was coming into being and an old order was passing away (Carson)." Dr. King described the jubilation of the event in the following way," "About midnight on a dark night in 1957, a new nation came into being.... we noticed all over the polo grounds almost a half million people.... I could hear people shouting all over that vast audience, "Freedom, Freedom!" before I knew it, I started weeping. I was crying for joy.... And I could hear that old Negro spiritual once more crying out: 'Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, I'm free at last (Carson).'" Finally, Dr. King pointed out that," "The thing that impressed me more than anything else that night was when Nkrumah and his other ministers who had been in prison with him walked in. They didn't come in with the crowns and all of the garments of kings. They walked in with prison caps....Often the path to freedom will carry you through prison (Carson)."

Beginning in 1965 King started expressing his doubts over America's war in Vietnam. On April 4, 1967 King vocally expressed his doubts about the war when he stated that the America was trying to turn Vietnam into an American colony and was the leading cause of violence in the world. His position over the Vietnam War, however, was not received well by the U.S. media who up until then had supported him vigorously during his struggle for civil rights.

In 1968 King led and organized the Poor People's Campaign, which was another Washington, DC march devoted towards calling for economic aid to America's poorest communities. This campaign reflected King's later ideological views; he began calling for more fundamental changes to take place within the country's political and economic framework. This meant that King's views on capitalism were slowly changing in favor of those regarding democratic socialism.

King's assassination on April 4, 1968 took place in Memphis, Tennessee at the Lorraine Motel. King had arrived there in order to support the city's predominantly black sanitation workers' strike. King's murder was blamed on James Earl Ray, a white supremacist and segregationist, who later confessed to doing the deed. Nationwide riots occurred shortly after King's death and many attended the funeral.

Many believe a conspiracy was involved in covering up who King's real killers were; such a conspiracy meant that Ray was not alone in plotting to kill the civil rights leader. King's bitter relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's head J. Edgar Hoover had led many to believe the FBI was somehow involved in the assassination. In 1976 a task force was created to find out how the FBI handled Dr. King's security and murder investigation. After an extensive look at the evidence, the task force did not find any proof that either the FBI or the Memphis Police Department was involved in Dr. King's murder.

The task force did find, however, that the FBI's extensive surveillance of Dr. King's activities beginning in 1962 was largely unwarranted. The original intention of the surveillance was to discover whether Dr. King had any affiliation with the Communist Party USA, since it was earlier found that one of his advisors was once a member of that party. The FBI conducted electronic surveillance of King's activities, which included wire tapping his phones and bugging his hotel rooms. However, findings later indicated that the civil rights leader had never openly professed towards supporting the Communist Party.

The task force also found that the FBI engaged in illegal activities in order to harm the reputation of King, his family and friends, and his movement. This included the propagation of damaging information about King and his associates to the public, in order to embarrass them. Such damaging was even conducted after King's death, when the FBI tried to convince Congress that King's legacy was not worthy of being celebrated as a national holiday. The purpose of this damaging was to prevent the civil rights movement from becoming popular and to bring forth a new black leader who would be acquiescent of the government's demands. Such extreme measures by the FBI reveal how much of a struggle King was engaged in during his fight for civil rights.

King was instrumental in bringing civil rights issues to the nation's attention at a time when blacks and other minorities faced insurmountable obstacles in their pursuit of the American Dream. King and the SCLC helped to bring several pressing issues to the fore including, desegregation, fair hiring practices, and the right to vote, among others. Throughout his campaign King advocated the use of non-violence to achieve his goals.

He had been highly influenced by Ghandi's use of non-violence to achieve independence for India. In a speech to the SCLC on August 16, 1967, King stated that, "through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that (Where do we.. para 19) -- .

King continues by stating that, -- I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn't popular to talk about it in some circles today. I'm not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I'm talking about a strong, demanding love (Where do we.. para. 20) -- . Through this affirmation of love, King states that non-violence is the method through which the civil rights movement will gain recognition and sympathy the world over, -- What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement (Where do we.. para. 18)

King's non-violent tactics were almost always put to the severest tests whenever he dealt with violent measures from the opposing side. Such measures included police brutality, bombing of homes, threats to family and friends, and illegal harming of reputation, among other things. Despite all these obstacles King continued to lead the movement until the federal government passed the historic Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.