Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Christian minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A Black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in the United States.
King participated in and led marches for the right to vote,
desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955
Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the
unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of
the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders
of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps
of the Lincoln Memorial, and helped organize two of the three Selma to
Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement. The civil
rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of
1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest
with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which
protests were carried out. There were several dramatic standoffs with
segregationist authorities, who frequently responded violently. King was jailed
several times. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover
considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from
1963 forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, spied on
his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI mailed King a
threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him
commit suicide.
On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for
combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In his final years,
he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam
War. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to
be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in
Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by national mourning, as well as
anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities. King was posthumously awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states
throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the federal holiday was first
observed in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his
honor, and King County in Washington was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther
King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in
2011.
Early life and
education
Birth
King was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, in
Atlanta, Georgia, the second of three children to Michael King Sr. and Alberta
King (née Williams). King had an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a
younger brother, Alfred Daniel "A.
D." King. Alberta's father, Adam Daniel Williams, was a minister in
rural Georgia, moved to Atlanta in 1893, and became pastor of the Ebenezer
Baptist Church in the following year. Williams married Jennie Celeste Parks.
King Sr. was born to sharecroppers James Albert and Delia King of Stockbridge,
Georgia, and was of African-Irish descent. As an adolescent, King Sr. left his
parents' farm and walked to Atlanta, where he attained a high school education,
and enrolled in Morehouse College to study for entry to the ministry. King Sr.
and Alberta began dating in 1920, and married on November 25, 1926. Until
Jennie's death in 1941, they lived together on the second floor of Alberta's
parents' Victorian house, where King was born.
Shortly after marrying Alberta, King Sr. became assistant
pastor of the Ebenezer church. Senior pastor Williams died in the spring of
1931 and, that fall, King Sr. took the role. With support from his wife, he
would raise attendance from six hundred to several thousand. In 1934, the
church sent King Sr. on a multinational trip, including to Berlin for the
Congress of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). He also visited sites in Germany
that were associated with the Reformation leader Martin Luther. In reaction to
the rise of Nazism, the BWA issued a resolution stating, "This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of
God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or
unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward colored people, or toward subject
races in any part of the world." On returning home in August 1934,
King Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King Sr. and his five-year-old son's
name to Martin Luther King Jr.
Early childhood
At his childhood home, King and his two siblings would read
aloud the Bible as instructed by their father. After dinners, King's
grandmother Jennie, whom he affectionately referred to as "Mama", would tell lively stories from the Bible. King's
father would regularly use whippings to discipline his children, sometimes
having them whip each other. King's father later remarked, "[King] was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him. He'd
stand there, and the tears would run down, and he'd never cry." Once,
when King witnessed his brother A.D. emotionally upset his sister Christine, he
took a telephone and knocked out A.D. with it. When he and his brother were
playing at their home, A.D. slid from a banister and hit Jennie, causing her to
fall unresponsive. King, believing her dead, blamed himself and attempted
suicide by jumping from a second-story window, but rose from the ground on
hearing that she was alive.
King became friends with a white boy whose father owned a
business across the street from his home. In September 1935, when the boys were
about six years old, they started school. King had to attend a school for black
children, Yonge Street Elementary School, while his playmate went to a separate
school for white children only. Soon afterwards, the parents of the white boy
stopped allowing King to play with their son, stating to him, "we are white, and you are colored".
When King relayed this to his parents, they discussed with him the history of
slavery and racism in America, which King would later state made him "determined to hate every white
person". His parents instructed him that it was his Christian duty to
love everyone.
King witnessed his father stand up against segregation and
discrimination. Once, when stopped by a police officer who referred to King Sr.
as "boy", King's father
responded sharply that King was a boy but he was a man. When King's father took
him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to
sit in the back. King's father refused, stating "we'll either buy shoes sitting here or we won't buy any shoes at
all", before leaving the store with King. He told King afterward, "I don't care how long I have to live
with this system, I will never accept it." In 1936, King's father led
hundreds of African Americans in a civil rights march to the city hall in
Atlanta, to protest voting rights discrimination. King later remarked that King
Sr. was "a real father" to
him.
King memorized hymns and Bible verses by the time he was
five years old. Over the next year, he began to go to church events with his
mother and sing hymns while she played piano. His favorite hymn was "I Want to Be More and More Like
Jesus"; he moved attendees with his singing. King later became a
member of the junior choir in his church. King enjoyed opera, and played the
piano. King garnered a large vocabulary from reading dictionaries. He got into
physical altercations with boys in his neighborhood, but oftentimes used his
knowledge of words to stymie fights. King showed a lack of interest in grammar
and spelling, a trait that persisted throughout his life. In 1939, King sang as
a member of his church choir in slave costume, for the all-white audience at
the Atlanta premiere of the film Gone with the Wind. In September 1940, at the
age of 11, King was enrolled at the Atlanta University Laboratory School for
the seventh grade. While there, King took violin and piano lessons, and showed
keen interest in history and English classes.
On May 18, 1941, when King had sneaked away from studying at
home to watch a parade, he was informed that something had happened to his
maternal grandmother. Upon returning home, he learned she had a heart attack
and died while being transported to a hospital. He took the death very hard and
believed that his deception of going to see the parade may have been
responsible for God taking her. King jumped out of a second-story window at his
home, but again survived. His father instructed him that King should not blame
himself, and that she had been called home to God as part of God's plan. King struggled
with this. Shortly thereafter, King's father decided to move the family to a
two-story brick home on a hill overlooking downtown Atlanta.
Adolescence
As an adolescent, he initially felt resentment against
whites due to the "racial
humiliation" that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to
endure. In 1942, when King was 13, he became the youngest assistant manager of
a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal. That year, King skipped
the ninth grade and was enrolled in Booker T. Washington High School, where he
maintained a B-plus average. The high school was the only one in the city for
African-American students.
While King was brought up in a Baptist home, as he entered
adolescence he began to question the literalist teachings preached at his
father's church. At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus
during Sunday school. King said that he found himself unable to identify with
the emotional displays from congregants frequent at his church, and doubted if
he would ever attain personal satisfaction from religion. He later stated of
this point in his life, "doubts
began to spring forth unrelentingly."
In high school, King became known for his public-speaking
ability, with a voice that had grown into an orotund baritone. He joined the
school's debate team. King continued to be most drawn to history and English,
and chose English and sociology as his main subjects. King maintained an
abundant vocabulary. However, he relied on his sister Christine to help him
with spelling, while King assisted her with math. King also developed an
interest in fashion, commonly wearing polished patent leather shoes and tweed
suits, which gained him the nickname "Tweed"
or "Tweedie" among his
friends. He liked flirting with girls and dancing. His brother A.D. later
remarked, "He kept flitting from
chick to chick, and I decided I couldn't keep up with him. Especially since he
was crazy about dances, and just about the best jitterbug in town."
On April 13, 1944, in his junior year, King gave his first
public speech during an oratorical contest. In his speech he stated, "Black America still wears chains. The
finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man." King was
selected as the winner of the contest. On the ride home to Atlanta by bus, he
and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so that white passengers
could sit. The driver of the bus called King a "black son-of-a-bitch". King initially refused but
complied after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did
not. As all the seats were occupied, he and his teacher were forced to stand
the rest of the way to Atlanta. Later King wrote of the incident: "That night will never leave my memory.
It was the angriest I have ever been in my life."
Morehouse College
During King's junior year in high school, Morehouse
College—an all-male historically black college that King's father and maternal grandfather
had attended—began accepting high school juniors who passed the entrance
examination. As World War II was underway many black college students had been
enlisted, so the university aimed to increase their enrolment by allowing
juniors to apply. In 1944, aged 15, King passed the examination and was
enrolled at the university that autumn.
In the summer before King started at Morehouse, he boarded a
train with his friend—Emmett "Weasel"
Proctor—and a group of other Morehouse College students to work in Simsbury,
Connecticut, at the tobacco farm of Cullman Brothers Tobacco. This was King's
first trip into the integrated north. In a June 1944 letter to his father King
wrote about the differences that struck him: "On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to
see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white
people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we
want to." The farm had partnered with Morehouse College to allot their
salaries towards the university's tuition, housing, and fees. On weekdays King
and the other students worked in the fields, picking tobacco from 7:00am to at
least 5:00pm, enduring temperatures above 100 °F, to earn roughly USD$4 per
day. On Friday evenings, the students visited downtown Simsbury to get
milkshakes and watch movies, and on Saturdays they would travel to Hartford,
Connecticut, to see theatre performances, shop and eat in restaurants. On
Sundays they attended church services in Hartford, at a church filled with
white congregants. King wrote to his
parents about the lack of segregation, relaying how he was amazed they could go
to "one of the finest restaurants in
Hartford" and that "Negroes
and whites go to the same church".
He played freshman football there. The summer before his
last year at Morehouse, in 1947, the 18-year-old King chose to enter the
ministry. He would later credit the college's president, Baptist minister
Benjamin Mays, with being his "spiritual
mentor". King had concluded that the church offered the most assuring
way to answer "an inner urge to
serve humanity", and he made peace with the Baptist Church, as he
believed he would be a "rational"
minister with sermons that were "a
respectful force for ideas, even social protest." King graduated from
Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology in 1948, aged nineteen.
Religious education
King enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland,
Pennsylvania, and took several courses at the University of Pennsylvania. At
Crozer, King was elected president of the student body. At Penn, King took
courses with William Fontaine, Penn's first African-American professor, and
Elizabeth F. Flower, a professor of philosophy. King's father supported his
decision to continue his education and made arrangements for King to work with
J. Pius Barbour, a family friend and Crozer alumnus who pastored at Calvary
Baptist Church in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania. King became known as one of the
"Sons of Calvary", an honor
he shared with William Augustus Jones Jr. and Samuel D. Proctor, who both went
on to become well-known preachers.
King once reproved another student for keeping beer in his
room, saying they shared responsibility as African Americans to bear "the burdens of the Negro race".
For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbusch's "social gospel". In his third year at Crozer, King became
romantically involved with the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who
worked in the cafeteria. King planned to marry her, but friends, as well as
King's father, advised against it, saying that an interracial marriage would
provoke animosity from both blacks and whites, potentially damaging his chances
of ever pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he
could not endure his mother's pain over the marriage and broke the relationship
off six months later. One friend was quoted as saying, "He never recovered." Other friends, including Harry
Belafonte, said Betty had been "the
love of King's life." King graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity in
1951. He applied to the University of Edinburgh for a doctorate in the School
of Divinity but ultimately chose Boston instead.
In 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology
at Boston University, and worked as an assistant minister at Boston's historic
Twelfth Baptist Church with William Hunter Hester. Hester was an old friend of
King's father and was an important influence on King. In Boston, King
befriended a small cadre of local ministers his age, and sometimes guest
pastored at their churches, including Michael Haynes, associate pastor at
Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury. The young men often held bull sessions in
their apartments, discussing theology, sermon style, and social issues.
At the age of 25 in 1954, King was called as pastor of the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King received his PhD on
June 5, 1955, with a dissertation (initially supervised by Edgar S. Brightman
and, upon the latter's death, by Lotan Harold DeWolf) titled A Comparison of
the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.
An academic inquiry in October 1991 concluded that portions
of his doctoral dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly.
However, "[d]espite its finding, the
committee said that 'no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's
doctoral degree,' an action that the panel said would serve no purpose." The
committee found that the dissertation still "makes
an intelligent contribution to scholarship." A letter is now attached
to the copy of King's dissertation in the university library, noting that
numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and
citations of sources. Significant debate exists on how to interpret King's
plagiarism.
Marriage and family
While studying at Boston University, he asked a friend from
Atlanta named Mary Powell, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music,
if she knew any nice Southern girls. Powell spoke to fellow student Coretta
Scott; Scott was not interested in dating preachers but eventually agreed to
allow King to telephone her based on Powell's description and vouching. On
their first call, King told Scott, "I
am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms," to which she
replied, "You haven't even met
me." King married Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents'
house, in Heiberger, Alabama. They had four children: Yolanda King (1955–2007),
Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (b. 1961), and Bernice King
(b. 1963). King limited Coretta's role in the civil rights movement, expecting
her to be a housewife and mother.
Activism and
organizational leadership
The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was influential in the
Montgomery African-American community. As the church's pastor, King became
known for his oratorical preaching in Montgomery and the surrounding region.
In March 1955, Claudette Colvin—a fifteen-year-old black schoolgirl
in Montgomery—refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in violation of
Jim Crow laws, local laws in the Southern United States that enforced racial
segregation. Nine months later on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for
refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. The two incidents led to the
Montgomery bus boycott, which was urged and planned by Edgar Nixon and led by
King. The other ministers asked him to take a leadership role because his
relative newness to community leadership made it easier for him to speak out.
King was hesitant but decided to do so if no one else wanted it.
The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so
tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested for traveling 30 mph in a
25 mph zone and jailed, which overnight drew the attention of national media,
and greatly increased King's public stature. The controversy ended when the
United States District Court issued a ruling in Browder v. Gayle that
prohibited racial segregation on Montgomery public buses.
King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a
national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.
King first rose to prominence in the civil rights movement
while minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
Southern Christian
Leadership Conference
In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph
Lowery, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral
authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests
in the service of civil rights reform. The group was inspired by the crusades
of evangelist Billy Graham, who befriended King, as well as the national
organizing of the group In Friendship, founded by King allies Stanley Levison
and Ella Baker. King led the SCLC until his death. The SCLC's 1957 Prayer
Pilgrimage for Freedom was the first time King addressed a national audience.
Harry Wachtel joined King's legal advisor Clarence B. Jones
in defending four ministers of the SCLC in the libel case Abernathy et al. v.
Sullivan; the case was litigated about the newspaper advertisement "Heed Their Rising Voices". Wachtel
founded a tax-exempt fund to cover the suit's expenses and assist the
nonviolent civil rights movement through a more effective means of fundraising.
King served as honorary president of this organization, named the "Gandhi Society for Human Rights".
In 1962, King and the Gandhi Society produced a document that called on
President Kennedy to issue an executive order to deliver a blow for civil
rights as a kind of Second Emancipation Proclamation. Kennedy did not execute
the order. The FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy, began tapping King's telephone line in the fall of 1963. Kennedy was
concerned that public allegations of communists in the SCLC would derail the
administration's civil rights initiatives. He warned King to discontinue these
associations and later felt compelled to issue the written directive that
authorized the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders. FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover feared the civil rights movement and investigated the allegations
of communist infiltration. When no evidence emerged to support this, the FBI
used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years, as part of
its COINTELPRO program, in attempts to force King out of his leadership
position.
King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the
system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive
media coverage of the struggle for black equality. Journalistic accounts and
televised footage of the daily indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of
segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights supporters, produced a
wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans
that the civil rights movement was the most important issue in American politics
in the early 1960s.
King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote,
desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights
were successfully enacted into law with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965
Voting Rights Act.
The SCLC used tactics of nonviolent protest with great
success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were
carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist
authorities, who sometimes turned violent.
On September 20, 1958, King was signing copies of his book
Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein's department store in Harlem when Izola
Curry—a mentally ill black woman who thought that King was conspiring against
her with communists—stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener, which nearly
impinged on the aorta. King received first aid by police officers Al Howard and
Philip Romano. King underwent emergency surgery by Aubre de Lambert Maynard,
Emil Naclerio and John W. V. Cordice; he remained hospitalized for several
weeks. Curry was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.
Atlanta sit-ins,
prison sentence, and the 1960 elections
In December 1959, after being based in Montgomery for five
years, King announced his return to Atlanta at the request of the SCLC. In
Atlanta, King served until his death as co-pastor with his father at the
Ebenezer Baptist Church. Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver expressed open
hostility towards King's return. He claimed that "wherever M. L. King Jr., has been there has followed in his wake
a wave of crimes", and vowed to keep King under surveillance. On May
4, 1960, King drove writer Lillian Smith to Emory University when police
stopped them. King was cited for "driving
without a license" because he had not yet been issued a Georgia
license. King's Alabama license was still valid, and Georgia law did not
mandate any time limit for issuing a local license. King paid a fine but was
unaware that his lawyer agreed to a plea deal that included probation.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta Student Movement had been acting to
desegregate businesses and public spaces, organizing the Atlanta sit-ins from
March 1960 onwards. In August the movement asked King to participate in a mass
October sit-in, timed to highlight how 1960's Presidential election campaign
had ignored civil rights. The coordinated day of action took place on October
19. King participated in a sit-in at the restaurant inside Rich's, Atlanta's
largest department store, and was among the many arrested that day. The
authorities released everyone over the next few days, except for King. Invoking
his probationary plea deal, Judge J. Oscar Mitchell sentenced King on October
25 to four months of hard labor. Before dawn the next day, King was transported
to Georgia State Prison.
The arrest and harsh sentence drew nationwide attention.
Many feared for King's safety, as he started a prison sentence with people
convicted of violent crimes, many of them White and hostile to his activism.
Both Presidential candidates were asked to weigh in, at a time when both
parties were courting the support of Southern Whites and their political
leadership including Governor Vandiver. Nixon, with whom King had a closer
relationship before, declined to make a statement despite a personal visit from
Jackie Robinson requesting his intervention. Nixon's opponent John F. Kennedy
called the governor (a Democrat) directly, enlisted his brother Robert to exert
more pressure on state authorities, and, at the personal request of Sargent
Shriver, called King's wife to offer his help. The pressure from Kennedy and
others proved effective, and King was released two days later. King's father
decided to openly endorse Kennedy's candidacy for the November 8 election which
he narrowly won.
After the October 19 sit-ins and following unrest, a 30-day
truce was declared in Atlanta for desegregation negotiations. However, the
negotiations failed and sit-ins and boycotts resumed for several months. On
March 7, 1961, a group of Black elders including King notified student leaders
that a deal had been reached: the city's lunch counters would desegregate in
fall 1961, in conjunction with the court-mandated desegregation of schools.
Many students were disappointed at the compromise. In a large meeting on March
10 at Warren Memorial Methodist Church, the audience was hostile and
frustrated. King then gave an impassioned speech calling participants to resist
the "cancerous disease of
disunity", helping to calm tensions.
Albany Movement, 1961
The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in
Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. In December, King and the SCLC became
involved. The movement mobilized thousands of citizens for a nonviolent attack
on every aspect of segregation in the city and attracted nationwide attention.
When King first visited on December 15, 1961, he "had planned to stay a day or so and return home after giving
counsel." The following day he was swept up in a mass arrest of
peaceful demonstrators, and he declined bail until the city made concessions.
According to King, "that agreement
was dishonored and violated by the city" after he left.
King returned in July 1962 and was given the option of
forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine (equivalent to $1,700 in 2022); he chose
jail. Three days into his sentence, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett discreetly
arranged for King's fine to be paid and ordered his release. "We had witnessed persons being kicked
off lunch counter stools ... ejected from churches ... and thrown into jail ...
But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail." It was
later acknowledged by the King Center that Billy Graham was the one who bailed
King out.
After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible
results, the movement began to deteriorate. King requested a halt to all
demonstrations and a "Day of
Penance" to promote nonviolence and maintain the moral high ground.
Divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government
defeated efforts. Though the Albany effort proved a key lesson in tactics for
King and the national civil rights movement, the national media was highly
critical of King's role in the defeat, and the SCLC's lack of results
contributed to a growing gulf between the organization and the more radical
SNCC. After Albany, King sought to choose engagements for the SCLC in which he
could control the circumstances, rather than entering into pre-existing
situations.
Birmingham campaign,
1963
In April 1963, the SCLC began a campaign against racial
segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used
nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics, developed in part by
Wyatt Tee Walker. Black people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC,
occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that
they considered unjust.
King's intent was to provoke mass arrests and "create a situation so crisis-packed
that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation." The campaign's
early volunteers did not succeed in shutting down the city, or in drawing media
attention to the police's actions. Over the concerns of an uncertain King, SCLC
strategist James Bevel changed the course of the campaign by recruiting
children and young adults to join the demonstrations. Newsweek called this
strategy a Children's Crusade.
The Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, used
high-pressure water jets and police dogs against protesters, including
children. Footage of the police response was broadcast on national television
news, shocking many white Americans and consolidating black Americans behind
the movement. Not all of the demonstrators were peaceful, despite the avowed
intentions of the SCLC. In some cases, bystanders attacked the police, who
responded with force. King and the SCLC were criticized for putting children in
harm's way. But the campaign was a success: Connor lost his job, the "Jim Crow" signs came down,
and public places became more open to blacks. King's reputation improved
immensely.
King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign—his 13th
arrest out of 29. From his cell, he composed the now-famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
that responds to calls to pursue legal channels for social change. The letter
has been described as "one of the
most important historical documents penned by a modern political
prisoner". King argues that the crisis of racism is too urgent, and
the current system too entrenched: "We
know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the
oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." He points out that
the Boston Tea Party, a celebrated act of rebellion in the American colonies,
was illegal civil disobedience, and that, conversely, "everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal'."
Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, arranged for $160,000 to
bail out King and his fellow protestors.
"I have almost
reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in
his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux
Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than
to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a
positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I
agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of
direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable
for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who
constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."—Martin Luther King Jr.
March on Washington,
1963
King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the "Big Six" civil rights
organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The other
leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were Roy Wilkins from the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young,
National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters;
John Lewis, SNCC; and James L. Farmer Jr., Congress of Racial Equality.
Bayard Rustin's open homosexuality, support of socialism,
and former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and
African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin, which
King agreed to do. However, he did collaborate in the 1963 March on Washington,
for which Rustin was the primary organizer. For King, this role was another
which courted controversy, since he was one of the key figures who acceded to
the wishes of President Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. Kennedy
initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would
negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation. However,
the organizers were firm that the march would proceed. With the march going forward, the Kennedys
decided it was important to ensure its success. President Kennedy was concerned
the turnout would be less than 100,000 and enlisted the aid of additional
church leaders and Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers,
to help mobilize demonstrators.
The march originally was planned to dramatize the desperate
condition of blacks in the southern U.S. and place organizers' concerns and
grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital.
Organizers intended to denounce the federal government for its failure to
safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and
blacks. The group acquiesced to presidential pressure, and the event ultimately
took on a far less strident tone.[159] As a result, some civil rights activists
felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X
called it the "Farce on
Washington", and the Nation of Islam forbade its members from
attending.
King gave his most famous speech, "I Have a Dream", before the Lincoln Memorial during the
1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The march made specific demands: an end to racial
segregation in public schools; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a
law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights
workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers (equivalent to
$19 in 2022); and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by
congressional committee. Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success.
More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended,
sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall. At the
time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.'s history.
King delivered a 17-minute speech, later known as "I Have a Dream". In the
speech's most famous passage – in which he departed from his prepared text,
possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted behind him, "Tell them about the dream!" –
King said:
I say to you today, my
friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still
have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
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 that
one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of
former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of
brotherhood.
I have a dream that
one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of
injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an
oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my
four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be
judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that
one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having
his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day
right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join
hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
"I Have a
Dream" came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history
of American oratory. The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil
rights at the top of the agenda of reformers and facilitated passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.
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