Martin Luther King, Jr.

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• Born: 15 January 1929
• Birthplace: Atlanta, Georgia
• Died: 4 April 1968 (assassination by gunshot)
• Best Known As: The civil rights hero who said "I have a dream"

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an African-American clergyman who advocated social change through non-violent means. A powerful speaker and a man of great spiritual strength, he shaped the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. King was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama from 1954-59. There he led blacks in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, an action inspired by the arrest of Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat on a public bus. Racial segregation on city buses was ruled unconstitutional in 1956; the boycott ended in success, and King had become a national figure. King returned to his home town of Atlanta in 1959 and became co-pastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a position he held until his death. On the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, King organized a march on Washington, D.C. that drew 200,000 people demanding equal rights for minorities. King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming at the time the youngest recipient ever. His writings included Stride Toward Freedom (1958, a history of the Montgomery bus boycott), Why We Can't Wait (1963) and Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community (1967). King was shot to death by James Earl Ray in 1968 while visiting Memphis, Tennessee.

King married Coretta Scott on 18 June 1953. The couple had four children: Yolanda (born 1955), Martin Luther III (b. 1957), Dexter (b. 1961), and Bernice (b. 1963)... He graduated from Morehouse College in 1948, then attended Crozer Theological Seminary (now part of the Colgate Rochester Divinity School) and Boston University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology in 1955.

• Born: January 15, 1929, Atlanta, GA
• Died: April 04, 1968, Memphis, TN
• Active: '50s, '60s
• Genres: Spoken Word
• Instrument: Vocals, Main Performer, Performer
• Representative Albums: "In Search of Freedom," "We Shall Overcome," "We Shall Overcome, Vol. 3"
• Representative Songs: "I Have a Dream," "The American Dream," "We Shall Overcome"

Biography

Civil rights champion Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta, GA, on January 15, 1929; progressing through Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, he grew increasingly influenced by Mahatma Ghandi's non-violent strategies for social change, completing his Ph.D. in systematic theology in 1955. Rejecting a series of academic offers, King instead opted to become pastor of Montgomery, AL's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church; on December 5, 1955 -- just five days after Rosa Parks' landmark refusal to conform to the city's segregationist busing policies -- he was named president of the new Montgomery Improvement Association, setting his public career into motion. Spearheading the local African-American community's boycott of the city's bus system, King rose to national renown, even as his house was firebombed and he faced conviction on charges of conspiracy against the bus company. Still, as 1956 drew to a close, Montgomery's buses became integrated and the United States Supreme Court declared Alabama's segregation laws unconstitutional.

In 1957, King joined with other African-American religious leaders to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; a year later, he published his first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. As the 1960s dawned, he was widely regarded as black America's preeminent spokesman, although his policies of non-violence were often in conflict with younger, more militant factions of the civil rights movement; mass demonstrations in communities throughout the U.S. culminated in the August 28, 1963, march on Washington, D.C., where, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his celebrated "I have a dream" speech to an audience of over 250,000 protesters. That December he was named Time magazine's Man of the Year, and a year later collected the Nobel Peace Prize. However, internal divisions within the black community threatened to undermine his leadership, as emerging voices like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael offered a stark counterpoint to King's peaceful methods.

Of course, King encountered his greatest resistance from white leaders -- FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover waged a bitter war of surveillance and harassment, declaring him "the most dangerous man in America, and a moral degenerate." King also lost the support of many white liberals for his criticism of the United States' involvement in the escalating conflict in Vietnam. Still, he forged on, mounting a 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery march which proved pivotal in the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year. While in Memphis, TN, to speak out on a local sanitation workers' strike, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968; although James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder, the case remains a source of controversy and conjecture even decades after the fact. In the wake of his death, his widow, Coretta Scott King, established the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and in 1986 his birthday was declared a federal holiday. Many of King's most celebrated speeches are available as commercial recordings. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide

We Shall Overcome Buy this CD

Wisdom Of Martin Luther King Jr Buy this CD

Speech at Galilee Buy this CD

Martin Luther King, Jr. Tapes Buy this CD

In Search of Freedom Buy this CD

(b. Atlanta, Georgia, 15 Jan. 1929; d. Memphis, Tennessee, 4 Apr. 1968) US; civil rights leader Martin Luther King's role in the American civil rights movement made him the most celebrated black leader of his generation and an international political figure. The son of a Baptist preacher, King was educated at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, and himself became a Baptist pastor in Montgomery before devoting himself to the nascent civil rights movement.

King first gained political recognition as a result of the successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. In 1957 he became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and developed a campaign of direct but non-violent action against segregation across the south. King's involvement in the sit-ins and marches, although themselves non-violent, elicited a violent reaction from southern officials and he experienced periods of imprisonment as a result of his activities. During one such period in 1960, presidential candidate John Kennedy (advised by Harris Wofford) made a sympathetic telephone call to King's wife. The initiative was widely seen as an important factor swinging the black vote behind the Democrats. By the time of the Selma Freedom March of 1963 King had become the most visible symbol of black Americans' aspirations and a powerful political figure in a country wrestling with racial inequality. The assassination of Kennedy in 1963 produced the climate in which Lyndon Johnson could secure passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legislation which spelled the end of de jure segregation in the south. Thereafter, King broadened his campaign to encompass the morally more complex issues of de facto segregation outside the south, economic injustice, and the increasingly divisive war in Vietnam.

Part of King's power stemmed from his biblically inspired oratory; and his espousal of non-violence (based on the teachings of Christ and Gandhi) gave him a reputation far beyond the United States. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

King's crusades were however at the centre of America's political struggles and he inevitably acquired enemies as well as a devoted following which regarded him as a saint. Despite his record of political achievement and his charismatic personality, some blacks in the 1960s felt that his tactics were too moderate and began to look to the more militant strategies advocated by the Black Power movement. King also faced allegations that his movement had been infiltrated by Communists and he became an object of hatred on the right.

In 1968, while on the balcony of his Memphis motel room he was assassinated by James Earl Ray. The assassination triggered riots across the United States and a battle for the control of the civil rights movement. It also ensured King's pre-eminent position in modern black American history, a position which was later given national endorsement by the creation of a public holiday in his honour.

The African American minister and Nobel Prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), originated the nonviolence strategy within the activist civil rights movement. He was one of the most important black leaders of his era.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Ga. He attended the Atlanta public schools. Following graduation from Morehouse College in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary, having been ordained the previous year into the ministry of the National Baptist Church. He graduated from Crozer in 1951 and received his doctorate in theology from Boston University in 1955.

In Boston, King met Coretta Scott, whom he married on June 18, 1953. Four children were born to them. King became minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., in 1954. He became active with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Alabama Council on Human Relations.

Nonviolence: The Bus Boycott

In December 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black woman, was arrested for violating a segregated seating ordinance on a public bus in Montgomery, black citizens were outraged. King, fellow minister Ralph Abernathy, and Alabama's state chairman of the NAACP called a public meeting. African Americans were urged to boycott the segregated city buses, and the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed. The boycott lasted over a year, until the bus company capitulated. Segregated seating was discontinued, and some African Americans were employed as bus drivers. When the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the bus segregation laws of Montgomery were unconstitutional, the boycott ended in triumph for black dignity.

Overnight, Martin Luther King had become a national hero and an acknowledged leader in the civil rights struggle. The victory had not been easy. Elected president of the MIA, King's life was in constant danger. His home was bombed, and he and other MIA leaders were threatened, harassed, arrested, and jailed.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In January 1957 approximately 60 black ministers assembled in Atlanta to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to continue the civil rights fight. King was elected president. A few months later he met Vice President Richard Nixon at the celebration of Ghanaian independence in Accra. A year later King and three other black civil rights leaders were received by President Dwight Eisenhower. However, neither meeting resulted in any concrete relief for African Americans who, meanwhile, were growing increasingly restive under continued racial discrimination.

In February 1958 the SCLC sponsored 21 mass meetings in key southern cities as part of a "Crusade for Citizenship." The goal was to double the number of black voters in the South. King was traveling constantly now, speaking for "justice" throughout the country. A year later Dr. and Mrs. King visited India at the invitation of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. King had long been interested in Mahatma Gandhi's practice of nonviolence. Yet when they returned to the United States, the civil rights struggle had greatly intensified, and violent resistance by whites to the nonviolent efforts of black demonstrators filled the newspapers with accounts of bloody confrontations.

Increasing demands were being made upon King as an advocate of nonviolent change. He moved his family to Atlanta in 1960 and became associate pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Ralph Abernathy soon followed, and the two men worked in tandem for the remainder of King's career.

"Sit-in" Movement

In February 1960 the "sit-in" movement was begun in Greensboro, N.C., by African American students protesting segregation at lunch counters in city stores. The movement quickly spread throughout North Carolina to South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The black students were frequently joined by white students and other sympathizers. On April 15 the SCLC called a conference of sit-in leaders to coordinate the movement. King urged the young people to continue using nonviolent means. Out of this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) emerged. For a time the SNCC worked closely with the SCLC, though ultimately the two groups went their separate ways.

By August a report issued by the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta stated that the sit-ins had succeeded in ending segregation at lunch counters in 27 southern cities. In October delegates at the SCLC meeting resolved to focus nonviolent campaigns against all segregated public transportation, waiting rooms, and schools. They would increase emphasis on voter registration and would use economic boycotts to gain fair employment and other benefits for African Americans. An important department store in Atlanta, a widely known symbol of segregation, was the first objective. When King and 75 students entered the store and requested lunch-counter service, he and 36 others were arrested. Atlanta's mayor negotiated a truce, however, and charges were dropped, but King was imprisoned for violating his probation on a traffic offense conviction. John F. Kennedy, currently campaigning for the presidency, made a dramatic telephone call to Mrs. King. Political wheels were set in motion, and King was released.

Freedom Riders

In a subsequent move, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), SCLC, and SNCC joined in a coalition. A Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee was formed with King as chairman. The idea was to "put the sit-ins on the road" by having pairs of black and white volunteers board interstate buses traveling through the South to test compliance with a new Federal law forbidding segregated accommodations in bus stations. A great deal of violence resulted, as resisting whites overturned and burned buses, assaulted the Freedom Riders, and attacked newsmen. Many of the arrested riders went to prison rather than pay fines. However, public furor moved the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce nonsegregation laws in buses engaged in interstate transportation and in their servicing terminals.

In December 1961 King and the SCLC were invited by black leaders in Albany, Ga., to lead their civil rights struggle. After 2,000 frustrated African Americans clashed with police, King called for a "day of penitence." King himself was jailed, tried, and given a suspended sentence. In an ambitious voter education program in Albany and the surrounding area, SNCC and SCLC members were harassed by whites. Churches were bombed, and local black citizens were threatened and sometimes attacked. King's nonviolent crusade responded with prayer vigils. It was not until the 1964 Federal Civil Rights Act was passed that public facilities in Albany were desegregated.

In May 1962 King was asked to assist in the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, Ala., and the SCLC made plans to hold its annual convention there. The Birmingham campaign began with a series of workshops on nonviolence. In early 1963 King made a speaking tour, recruiting volunteers and obtaining money for bail bonds for those arrested in the struggle. On April 3 a manifesto was issued by the black community, and the campaign began in earnest with picketings and sit-ins. On the Friday before Easter, Dr. King was jailed; on Easter Sunday, African Americans appeared at white churches asking to join their fellow Christians in worship. When Dr. King's brother was arrested on his way to the Birmingham jail to pray for King, a near riot resulted.

On May 2 some 6,000 school children marched to demonstrate against school segregation; 959 children were arrested. The next day, as volunteers gathered in a church, police barred the exits, and fire hoses and police dogs were turned on the teen-age demonstrators.

The SCLC's campaign continually met harassment from the Birmingham police. Finally, a period of truce was established, and negotiations began with the city power structure. Though an agreement was reached, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the home of King's brother and the motel where SCLC members were headquartered. Enraged black citizens rioted; Alabama state troopers moved in and set up undeclared martial law. King and SCLC personnel continued to urge nonviolence, and tensions seemed to ease for a time. But more violence erupted when white racists refused to comply with Federal school integration laws. The worst came when a bomb thrown into a black church killed four little girls.

Civil Rights Rally in Washington

The year 1963 was eventful in the struggle for civil rights. In June, King and 125,000 persons marched in a "Freedom Walk" in Detroit. On August 27, over 250,000 black and white citizens assembled in Washington, D.C., for a mass civil rights rally, where King delivered his famous "Let Freedom Ring" address. That same year he was featured as Time magazine's "Man of the Year."

The next year King and his followers moved into St. Augustine, Fla., one of America's most thoroughly segregated cities. After weeks of nonviolent demonstrations and violent counterattacks by whites, a biracial committee was set up to move St. Augustine toward desegregation. A few weeks later the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was signed by President Lyndon Johnson.

In September 1964 King and Abernathy went to West Berlin at Mayor Willy Brandt's invitation, where King received an honorary doctorate from the Evangelical Theological College. The two civil rights leaders then went to Rome for an audience with Pope Paul VI. Back in the United States, King endorsed Lyndon Johnson's presidential candidacy. That December, King received the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1965 the SCLC concentrated its efforts in Alabama. The prime target was Selma, where only a handful of black citizens had been permitted to vote. King urged President Johnson to expedite the Voting Rights Bill, and he announced a march from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate the black people's determination to vote. But Governor George Wallace refused to permit the march, and the 500 persons who gathered to march were beaten by state troopers and "possemen." The march continued anyway, and Selma's black citizens were joined by hundreds of blacks and whites from other states, including many notable churchmen. On March 21 over 10,000 persons followed King from Selma toward Montgomery. Only 300 were allowed to make the 4-day march, but they were joined by another 25,000 in Montgomery for the march to the capital to present a petition to Governor Wallace.

New Issues: Vietnam War

In 1965 King made a "people-to-people" tour of northern cities. But the growing militancy of black people in Watts and Harlem, and even in Mississippi and Alabama, caused Dr. King to reassess the nonviolent civil rights movement, which he had fathered. Although he reaffirmed his commitment to nonviolence, he understood the intense frustration experienced by blacks when their own nonviolent tactics left them open to dangerous violence from the opposition. He was troubled, too, about the American involvement in the war in Vietnam and found himself increasingly pushed toward leadership in antiwar groups.

In 1967 King began speaking directly against the Vietnam War, although many civil rights advocates criticized this. While serving a 4-day sentence in Birmingham stemming from the 1963 demonstrations, King and his brother, Abernathy, and Wyatt Tee Walker began planning a "Poor People's March" to bring together the interests of the poor of all races.

The Assassination

In January 1968 Dr. King and other antiwar leaders called for a Washington rally on February 5/6. He also announced that the Poor People's March would converge in Washington on April 22. Following the February rally, King toured key cities to see firsthand the plight of the poor. Meanwhile, in Memphis, Tenn., black sanitation workers were striking to protest unequal pay and poor working conditions. The protest soon became citywide, with grievances ranging from police brutality to intolerable school conditions. In March, King went to lead the Memphis demonstrations. The march ended in a riot when some frustrated young blacks began breaking windows, looting, and burning stores. Police retaliation was swift and bloody. In Memphis on April 3, King addressed a rally; speaking of threats on his life, he urged followers to continue the nonviolent struggle no matter what happened to him.

The next evening, as King stood on an outside balcony at the Lorraine Hotel, he was struck by a rifle bullet. He was pronounced dead at 7:00 P.M. in a Memphis hospital.

King was a prolific writer. Among his most important works are Stride toward Freedom (1958), Strength to Love (1963), Why We Can't Wait (1964), Where Do We Go from Here (1967), and The Trumpet of Conscience (1968). Collections of his writings include A Martin Luther King Treasury (1964) and I Have a Dream (1968).

Further Reading

Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1969), is his wife's account. Other biographies include Lerone Bennett, Jr., What Manner of Man (1964); William Robert Miller, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968); Charles Eric Lincoln, Martin Luther King (1969); and David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (1970), written by a young black historian. An unfavorable view of King and his work is Lionel Lokos, House Divided: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther King (1968).

civil rights leader

Personal Information

Original given name, Michael, changed to Martin; born January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, GA; assassinated April 4, 1968, in Memphis, TN; originally buried in South View Cemetery, Atlanta, reinterred at Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta; son of Martin Luther (a minister) and Alberta Christine (a teacher; maiden name, Williams) King; married Coretta Scott (a concert singer), June 18, 1953; children: Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, Bernice Albertine.
Education: Morehouse College, B.A., 1948; Crozer Theological Seminary, S.D., 1951; Boston University, Ph.D., 1955, D.D., 1959; Chicago Theological Seminary, D.D., 1957; attended classes at University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.
Religion: Baptist.
Memberships: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Alpha Phi Alpha, Sigma Pi Phi, Elks.

Career

Licensed to preach by Ebenezer Baptist Church deacons, 1947; ordained Baptist minister, 1948; Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, pastor, 1954-60; president, Montgomery Improvement Association, 1965-66; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Atlanta, founder, 1957, president and leader of civil rights campaigns, 1957-68; Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, co-pastor with father, 1960-68. Vice-president, National Sunday School and Baptist Teaching Union Congress of National Baptist Convention.

Life's Work

In the years since his assassination on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King, Jr., has evolved from a prominent civil rights leader into the symbol for the civil rights movement in the United States. He is studied by schoolchildren of all backgrounds; his words are quoted by the powerless and the powerful, by anyone who has a dream to make her or his life better, to better the nation, or the world. Monuments have been dedicated in his honor and institutions such as the Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta which bears his name have been established to carry on his work. In 1986, the U.S. Congress made King unique among twentieth-century Americans by designating his birthday a federal holiday.

King was born into a family of Baptist ministers. Martin Luther King, Sr., his father and namesake, was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, a position the elder King had inherited from his wife's father, Adam Daniel Williams. As the son of a pastor growing up among the black middle class, the young King was afforded some opportunities for education and experience not available to children in poorer urban and rural areas. Yet despite his social standing, he was still subjected to the lessons of segregation because of his color. Although his family tradition was intertwined with the church and expectations were high that "M. L." would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, King first resisted the ministry as a vocation, finding it ill-suited to allow him to address the social problems he had experienced in the South. So, after completing high school early, he entered nearby Morehouse College in 1944 with thoughts of becoming a lawyer or doctor. Later, influenced by the teachings of George D. Kelsey, a religion professor, and Dr. Benjamin Mays, the college's president, King came to understand the social and intellectual tradition of the ministry. By graduation in 1948, he had decided to accept it as his vocation.

In 1948 King entered the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where for the next three years he studied theology, philosophy, ethics, the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, and the religious and social views of Reinhold Niebuhr. It was also during this time that King first learned of the nonviolent activism of Mohandas Gandhi. While at Crozer, King earned the respect of his professors as well as his classmates. He was elected student-body president, was valedictorian of his class, won a prize as outstanding student, and earned a fellowship for graduate study. He was accepted for doctoral study at Yale, Boston University, and Edinburgh in Scotland. He chose to attend Boston University, where he studied systematic theology with Edgar Sheffield Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf. Again he impressed his professors with his passion for learning and his intellect. After completing his coursework, King began a dissertation in which he would compare the religious views of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.

Emerging from Boston University, King had a number of avenues available to him--pursuing a career as a professor, returning to Atlanta to join his father at Ebenezer, or becoming the pastor of his own church, in the North or in the South. He decided to accept the pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in the Deep South of Montgomery, Alabama. He installed himself as full-time pastor in September of 1954. During his first year at Dexter, King finished his dissertation and worked to organize his new church, to activate the social and political awareness of his congregation, and to to blend his academic learning with the emotional oratory of the Southern preacher. He had begun to settle into his role as preacher and new father when the events of December, 1955, thrust upon him the mantle of local civil rights leader.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to abide by one of Montgomery's laws requiring segregated seating on city buses. In response to this incident, several groups within the city's black community, long dissatisfied with the treatment of blacks on public transportation, came together to take action. The NAACP, the Women's Political Council, the Baptist Ministers Conference, the city's AME Zionist ministers, and the community at large united to organize a boycott of the buses. After a successful first day of boycotting, the groups formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to oversee the community action and to work with the city and busline officials to bring about fairer treatment of blacks within the existing laws. King was elected the MIA's first president.

For 382 days, King and the black community maintained the boycott while white officials from the city and the busline resisted their modest demands: courtesy toward black riders, a first-come-first-serve approach to segregated seating, and black drivers for some routes. During this period, the MIA convinced black-owned taxis to reduce their fares to enable boycotters to afford a means of transportation. Then, when the city blocked that measure, the group organized carpools. King was arrested, slandered, received hate mail and phone threats, and his house was bombed; but from the outset he preached nonviolence to the black boycotters. After the Montgomery city officials refused to be moved to change by a number of related federal court decisions, the black community finally won more than it had asked for when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal court decision that ruled against segregation in Montgomery. On December 21, 1956, the integration of Montgomery city buses became mandatory.

To continue the momentum gained from the victory in Montgomery and to spread the movement across the South, King and other black leaders gathered in early 1957 to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As president of the SCLC, King spent the next few years consolidating the organization's position as a social force in the region and establishing himself as its leader. King toured the country giving speeches, appearing at rallies, meeting with elected officials and candidates, and writing a book about the Montgomery experience. In 1958 he traveled to Ghana to join in its independence celebration; in 1959 he traveled to India to meet with Nehru and other associates of Gandhi. With demands on his time growing, King decided to resign from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and to accept his father's offer to become co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. This arrangement afforded the younger King the flexibility to devote more time to SCLC activities.

From 1960 to 1962 King and the SCLC renewed their direct action against segregation at the voting booth, at schools, at lunch counters, and at bus stations. King also threw his organization's support behind other groups fighting the same battles. There were black college students, who would later organize as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Montgomery, and Atlanta. There were Freedom Rides initiated by the Council on Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge segregation in interstate bus transportation. These efforts contributed to the eventual desegregation of stores, busses, and bus stations.

Yet, along with these successes, King and the civil rights movement also encountered failures. In December of 1961 the SCLC joined members of the black community of Albany, Georgia, in their effort to end segregation in that city. In the end, the white city government and the law enforcement officials refused to make any substantial concessions and avoided resorting to violence. The black organizations involved, on the other hand, were unable to cooperate among themselves and unable to keep Albany's blacks from turning to violence. With the failure in Albany, King's leadership and philosophy of nonviolence as well as the SCLC's planning came under criticism.

King was able to redeem himself in the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, a city considered by many to be the most segregated in the country. King and the SCLC were invited by local black leaders to help them organize a protest to end segregation in downtown stores, to achieve equal opportunity in employment, and to establish a biracial commission to promote further desegregation. In order to attract attention to their demands and to put pressure on local businesses, the protesters employed the march. Birmingham police moved against the first march with clubs and attack dogs and the state court issued an injunction barring further protests. When King and close associate Ralph Abernathy defied the court order, they were arrested and placed in solitary confinement. During his incarceration, criticism by local white clergymen of the movement and King's actions prompted him to write his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

After being tried for contempt and found guilty, King was released on appeal. He rejoined the protesters. When the adult marchers began to lose their enthusiasm, high school students and younger children joined the march. Around 3,000 marchers were arrested, filling up the jails. Later marches were broken up by police using clubs and dogs and firemen with high-pressure hoses. The police brutality directed toward unarmed black men, women, and children outraged the nation and the Kennedy administration. The growing tide of negative publicity soon convinced Birmingham's white businessmen to seek an agreement with the protesters.

In the aftermath of the agreement, white extremists bombed King's hotel and his brother's home, igniting riots by blacks. However, the black leaders, the white businessmen, and federal troops sent in by the Kennedy administration were successful in their efforts to halt the violence; the agreement was given time to take hold.

With the success of Birmingham still fresh in the minds of blacks and whites in the South and North, King was poised to assert himself as a national and international leader. On August 28, 1963, approximately 250,000 blacks and whites marched on Washington, D.C., to raise the nation's consciousness of civil rights and to encourage the passage of the Civil Rights Bill before Congress at that time. The march was a cooperative effort of several civil rights organizations--including the Negro American Labor Council, the Urban League, the SCLC, NAACP, SNCC, and CORE--and the movement's largest demonstration. King was the last speaker scheduled to address the crowd gathered in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. He began a speech that referred to the lack of progress in securing black rights in the hundred years since Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; by the time he finished, he had deviated from his prepared speech to offer a speech drawn from past sermons and from the inspiration of the moment, his famous "I Have a Dream" address.

King's stature as a leader of national and international prominence was confirmed in 1964. In January of that year he became the first black American to be named Time magazine's "Man of the Year." And, in December of that year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person ever to win the award. The recognition that followed from these and other honors prompted journalists and politicians from around the world to seek King's views on a wide range of the world issues. Even so, King remained focused on the "twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice," as he stated in his Nobel acceptance speech. Earlier in 1964 he had attended the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that had put the federal government firmly behind ending segregation and discrimination in public institutions. But blacks still faced barriers to voting throughout the South, and they faced more subtle economic barriers in other regions.

In 1965 and 1966 King and the SCLC decided to take on these barriers. Civil rights groups stepped up their voter registration drives in the South and King took his strategy of nonviolent confrontation to Selma, Alabama. Marches in Selma and from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery brought publicity to the movement's voting rights demands and gave momentum to congressional efforts to enact legislation to remedy the situation. In August, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed into law. It gave federal authorities the power to end literacy tests and poll taxes and to monitor all elections.

In 1966 King and the SCLC launched a campaign in Chicago, both to expand their influence into the North and to raise awareness of the issues of urban discrimination and poverty as manifested in housing, schooling, and unemployment. The SCLC influenced some changes and put some long-term operations in place such as Operation Breadbasket. However, the campaign was unable to score the kind of success that it had in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Discrimination was more subtle in this northern metropolis than in the segregated South; city officials, including Mayor Richard Daley, were less extreme and more politically astute than their southern counterparts in their response to confrontation; furthermore, Chicago's black population was more divided, with some elements very much prone to violence.

In the last year of his life, King actively expanded the scope of his efforts to include not only civil rights issues but also human rights issues important to people the world over. As the war in Vietnam escalated in the second half of the 1960s, King had grown dissatisfied with the situation. In 1967 he began to speak out consistently against the war. In speeches and rallies around the country, he called for a negotiated settlement. King was recruited by anti-war activists to head an independent ticket for the presidential election of 1968, a position he declined in order to keep his social and moral concerns free from political obligations.

Late in 1967 King directed his organization to begin laying the groundwork for what would be known as the Poor People's Campaign. He wanted to recruit the poor from urban and rural areas--men and women of all races and backgrounds--and lead them in a campaign for economic rights. The recruited poor, trained in nonviolent direct action, would descend on Washington, D.C., and begin a three-month campaign of marches, rallies, sit-ins, and boycotts to pressure the Johnson administration and leading businessmen to put a more human face on American capitalism.

In March of 1968, while touring the U.S. to raise support for this new march on Washington, King accepted an invitation to speak on behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, who were striking in an attempt to improve their poor working conditions. After a march organized by local leaders was postponed because of a heavy snowstorm, King joined the rescheduled event on March 28. Shortly after the march began, young gang members initiated violence igniting a riot that ended with one dead, numerous injuries, and widespread property damage. King vowed to return to personally direct another demonstration in order to reestablish nonviolence in this local dispute.

Again in Memphis to plan this march, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The night before, addressing an audience of 500 at the Mason Temple in downtown Memphis, King had given his last speech, which included these words: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and 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."

Although widely regarded as one of the great social leaders of the twentieth century, King has not been without critics. He was closely scrutinized during his life by his colleagues in the SCLC, by other leaders in the civil rights movement, by those he sought to change, and by state and federal officials affected by his actions; he is still scrutinized today by those trying to get behind the symbol to the man and his place in American history.

In SCLC meetings, King often faced disagreements with his lieutenants and advisors over organization, tactics, and campaigns. He received little initial support for his idea to launch the Poor People's Campaign. Within the civil rights movement of the 1960s, King was not universally accepted as its leader and spokesman. Roy Wilkins, his NAACP, and its strategy of seeking change through legislation and court action were in constant competition with King, his SCLC, and its nonviolent direct confrontation for the support of blacks and white integrationists.

The SNCC criticized King for becoming a symbol and his SCLC adults for interfering with student-initiated grass-roots movements. Later in the movement, the two groups grew farther apart when the SNCC and its leader, Stokely Carmichael, espoused the "black power" ideology of violence and black separatism as the only means to bring about change. Local civil rights organizations were often put off by King's outsiders invading their cities, making headlines, then leaving never to follow through. Furthermore, numerous civil rights leaders and social commentators severely faulted King for his stand against the war in Vietnam. Some felt he was abusing his prominence to step beyond his expertise; others feared that his linking of the civil rights and the anti-war movements would weaken their cause.

King has also received criticism for more personal aspects of his life. During his career as a civil rights leader, his actions and character were repeatedly placed under a microscope through spying and wiretapping ordered by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Information about King's advisors outside SCLC and their links to communism and homosexuality as well as King's own extramarital relationships was gathered for use to discredit the leader and his organization. Most recently, scholars working on a collection of King's papers confirmed November, 1990, press reports that significant parts of King's Ph.D. dissertation had been lifted from the work of Jack Boozer, a fellow student, and the theologian Paul Tillich.

At a time when new generations of Americans more easily see the symbol of the civil rights movement than the man, the gifted yet human activist, many who were close to King fear that his dream for America runs the risk of fading along with the memories of his life. In his biography of King, Bearing the Cross, David J. Garrow quotes one of King's college classmates, educator Charles V. Willie: "By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. By exalting the accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Jr., into a legendary tale that is annually told, we fail to recognize his humanity--his personal and public struggles that are similar to yours and mine. By idolizing those whom we honor, we fail to realize that we could go and do likewise."

Awards

Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, 1957; L.H.D. from Morehouse College, 1957, and Central State College, 1958; LL.D. from Howard University, 1957, and Morgan State College, 1958; Anisfield-Wolf Award, 1958, for Stride Toward Freedom; named Man of the Year, 1963; Nobel Peace Prize, 1964; Judaism and World Peace Award from Synagogue Council of America, 1965; Brotherhood Award, 1967, for Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?; Nehru Award for International Understanding, 1968; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1977; received numerous awards for leadership of Montgomery movement; literary prizes were named in King's honor by the National Book Committee and by Harper & Row.

Further Reading

Sources

• Abernathy, Ralph David, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Harper, 1989. Garrow, David J., Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Morrow, 1986.
• King, Coretta Scott, My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. Holt, 1969.
• King, Martin Luther, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James Melvin Washington, Harper, 1986. Oates, Stephen B., Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., Harper, 1982.
• Playboy Interviews, Playboy Press, 1967.

— Bryan Ryan

For more information on Martin Luther King, Jr., visit Britannica.com.

(1929-1968), civil rights leader. One of the world's best-known advocates of nonviolent social change, King was born in Atlanta. As a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and at Boston University, he deepened his understanding of theological scholarship and of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent strategy for social change. He received a Ph.D. in theology in 1955 and became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

In December 1955, after Montgomery civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to obey the city's policy mandating segregation on buses, black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King as president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association. As the boycott continued during 1956, King gained national prominence for his exceptional oratorical skills and personal courage. His house was bombed, and he and other boycott leaders were convicted on charges of conspiring to interfere with the bus company's operations. But in December 1956 Montgomery's buses were desegregated when the Supreme Court declared Alabama's segregation laws unconstitutional.

In 1957, seeking to build upon the success in Montgomery, King and other black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (sclc). As president, King emphasized the goal of black voting rights when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. He traveled to West Africa to attend the independence celebration of Ghana and toured India, increasing his understanding of Gandhi's ideas. At the end of 1959, he resigned from Dexter and returned to Atlanta where sclc headquarters were located.

Although increasingly portrayed as the preeminent black spokesman, King did not mobilize mass protest activity during sclc's first few years. Then southern black college students launched a wave of sit-in protests in 1960. Although King sympathized with their movement and spoke at the founding meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (sncc) in April 1960, he soon became the target of criticisms from sncc activists. Even King's joining a student sit-in and his subsequent arrest in October 1960 did not allay the tensions. (After the arrest presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's sympathetic telephone call to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, helped attract crucial black support for Kennedy's campaign.) Conflicts between King and the younger militants were also evident when sclc and sncc assisted the Albany (Georgia) movement's campaign of mass protests in 1961-1962.

After achieving few of their objectives in Albany, King and his staff initiated a major campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, where white police officials were notorious for their antiblack attitudes. In 1963, clashes between unarmed black demonstrators and police with attack dogs and fire hoses generated newspaper headlines throughout the world. Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities culminated in a march on August 28, 1963, attracting more than 250,000 protesters to Washington, D.C. Addressing the marchers from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous I Have a Dream oration.

During the year following the march, King's renown as a nonviolent leader grew, and, in 1964, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite the accolades, however, King faced strong challenges to his leadership. Malcolm X's message of self-defense and black nationalism expressed the anger of northern urban blacks more effectively than did King's moderation, and in 1966 King encountered strong criticism from "black power" proponent Stokely Carmichael. Shortly afterward, white counterprotestors in Chicagophysically assaulted King during an unsuccessful effort to transfer nonviolent protest techniques to the North. Nevertheless, King remained committed to nonviolence. Early in 1968, he initiated a "poor people's campaign" to confront economic problems not addressed by civil rights reforms.

King's ability to achieve his objectives was also limited by the increasing resistance he encountered from national political leaders. As urban racial violence escalated, fbi director J. Edgar Hoover intensified his efforts to discredit King, and King's public criticism of American intervention in the Vietnam War soured his relations with the Johnson administration. When he delivered his last speech during a bitter sanitation workers' strike in Memphis, he admitted, "We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop." The following evening, April 4, 1968, he was assassinated by James Earl Ray.

After his death, King remained a controversial symbol of the civil rights struggle, revered by many for his martyrdom on behalf of nonviolence and condemned by others for his insurgent views. In 1986 King's birthday, January 15, became a federal holiday.

Bibliography:

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988); David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986); David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (1970).

Author:

Clayborne Carson

See also Civil Rights Movement; Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929–68, American clergyman and civil-rights leader, b. Atlanta, Ga., grad. Morehouse College (B.A., 1948), Crozer Theological Seminary (B.D., 1951), Boston Univ. (Ph.D., 1955). The son of the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King became (1954) minister of the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. He led the black boycott (1955–56) of segregated city bus lines and in 1956 gained a major victory and prestige as a civil-rights leader when Montgomery buses began to operate on a desegregated basis.

King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which gave him a base to pursue further civil-rights activities, first in the South and later nationwide. His philosophy of nonviolent resistance led to his arrest on numerous occasions in the 1950s and 60s. His campaigns had mixed success, but the protest he led in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 brought him worldwide attention. He spearheaded the Aug., 1963, March on Washington, which brought together more than 200,000 people. The protests he led helped to assure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The following year King and the SCLC led a campaign for African-American voter registration centered on Selma, Ala. A nonviolent march from Selma to Montgomery was attacked by police who beat and teargassed the protestors, but it ultimately succeeded on the third try when the National Guard and federal troops were mobilized. The events in Selma provoked national outrage, and months later aroused public opinion did much to precipitate passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

King's leadership in the civil-rights movement was challenged in the mid-1960s as others grew more militant. His interests, however, widened from civil rights to include criticism of the Vietnam War and a deeper concern over poverty. His plans for a Poor People's March to Washington were interrupted (1968) for a trip to Memphis, Tenn., in support of striking sanitation workers. On Apr. 4, 1968, he was shot and killed as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel (since 1991 a civil-rights museum).

James Earl Ray, a career criminal, pleaded guilty to the murder and was convicted, but he soon recanted, claiming he was duped into his plea. Ray's conviction was subsequently upheld, but he eventually received support from members of King's family, who believed King to have been the victim of a conspiracy. Ray died in prison in 1998. In a jury trial in Memphis in 1999 the King family won a wrongful-death judgment against Loyd Jowers, who claimed (1993) that he had arranged the killing for a Mafia figure. Many experts, however, were unconvinced by the verdict, and in 2000, after an 18-month investigation, the Justice Dept. discredited Jowers and concluded that there was no evidence of an assassination plot.

King wrote Stride toward Freedom (1958), Why We Can't Wait (1964), and Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967). His birthday is a national holiday, celebrated on the third Monday in January. King's wife, Coretta Scott King, carried on various aspects of his work until her death in 2006. She also wrote My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1969, rev. ed. 1993).

Bibliography

See biographies by K. L. Smith and I. G. Zepp, Jr. (1974), S. Oates (1982), and M. Frady (2001); D. J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross (1986); M. E. Dyson, I May Not Get There with You (2000); S. Burns, To the Mountaintop (2004); F. Sunnemark, Ring Out Freedom! (2004); T. Branch, America in the King Years (3 vol., 1988–2006).

(1929-1968)

1958	Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. King's first book is an account of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956 and his philosophy of nonviolent confrontation.
1963	"Letter from the Birmingham Jail." King responds to critics of his confrontational methods in what biographer Stephen Oates has called "a classic in protest literature, the most elegant and learned expression of the goals and philosophy of the nonviolent movement ever written." King would deliver his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on August 28 at the March on Washington.
1964	Why We Can't Wait. In the year that King is named the first African American "Man of the Year" by Time and receives the Nobel Peace Prize, he provides an account of the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963 and the March on Washington.

An African-American clergyman and political leader of the twentieth century; the most prominent member of the civil rights movement. King became famous in the 1950s and 1960s through his promotion of nonviolent methods of opposition to segregation, such as boycotts of segregated city buses, or sit-ins at lunch counters that would not serve black people. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail” defended this kind of direct, nonviolent action as a way of forcing people to take notice of injustice. King helped organize the march on Washington in 1963 that drew hundreds of thousands of supporters of civil rights to Washington, D.C., for a mass rally. At this march, he described a possible future of racial harmony in his most famous speech, which had the refrain “I have a dream.” In 1964, he received the Nobel Prize for peace. King was assassinated by James Earl Ray in 1968.

King was born January 15, 1929. A national holiday each January, Martin Luther King Day, commemorates his life.

Jr.

For thirteen turbulent years, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the inspirational leader and moral arbiter of the U.S. civil rights movement. An advocate of nonviolence, King helped organize well-publicized boycotts, marches, and demonstrations to protest segregation and racial injustice. From 1955 to 1968, he was the impassioned voice of African Americans who sought the abolishment of Jim Crow laws (a series of regulations enacted to keep the races separate) and the guarantee of equal housing, education, voting rights, and employment. Although countless U.S. citizens contributed to the success of the civil rights movement, King is its most enduring symbol. Before his mission was cut short by an assassin's bullet in 1968, he succeeded in permanently raising the social, economic, and political status of all people of color.

King was born January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. At an early age, he demonstrated the intellect and drive that would propel him to national prominence. After skipping his senior year of high school, he enrolled in Atlanta's Morehouse College, at the age of fifteen. He earned a degree in sociology from Morehouse in 1948. Since both his father and grandfather were Baptist preachers, it was not surprising when King entered Crozer Theological Seminary, in suburban Philadelphia, at age nineteen. After graduating from Crozer as class valedictorian, King enrolled in Boston University's renowned School of Theology, where he earned a doctor's degree in 1955. While in Boston, he met and married Coretta Scott, a student at the Boston Conservatory.

The young couple moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954, after King accepted a position as minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was only twenty-six years old and had lived in Montgomery for just eighteen months when an African American bus rider changed the course of his life forever.

On December 1, 1955, seamstress Rosa Parks took a personal stand against the South's Jim Crow laws when she refused to give up her seat to a white person and move to the back of a city bus. In Montgomery, segregated seating on buses was mandated by ordinance. Parks's defiant act galvanized the city's African American community. A bus boycott was organized to support Parks after her arrest and to put an end to segregated public transportation. When the Montgomery Improvement Association was created to direct the protest, a somewhat surprised King was named president. Years later, those involved in the boycott explained that King was selected because of his powerful speaking style, his credibility as a clergyman, and his relatively low profile in Montgomery. Because King was a newcomer, he had not made any enemies within the African American community and had not been corrupted by dishonest white politicians.

With leadership thrust upon him, King took over the boycott. He rose to the challenge, creating peaceful strategies that placed the bus company in an economic squeeze and African Americans on the moral high ground. He was greatly influenced by Mohandas K. ("Mahatma") Gandhi's nonviolence movement in India. King denounced violence throughout the citywide boycott, only to encounter death threats, hate mail, physical attacks, mass arrests, and the bombing of his church and home. The possibility of death was constant, but King used his deep religious faith and inner strength to stare down fear. He told his followers, "Love your enemies; bless them that curse you…. Remember, if I am stopped, this Movement will not stop, because God is with this Movement."

By November 1956, the boycott had taken the intended financial toll on the transit company. Seventy percent of Montgomery's bus riders were African Americans, and they supported the boycott in droves. The campaign was declared a success when the buses were at last desegregated in December 1956 and Montgomery's ordinance was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (Owen v. Browder, 352 U.S. 903, 77 S. Ct. 145, 1 L. Ed. 2d 114 [1956]). More important, King and his fellow African Americans discovered the power of social protest and the virtue of nonviolence.

After Montgomery, King knew that his true calling was social activism. In 1957, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization that would guide the growing civil rights movement. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, King took part in dozens of demonstrations throughout the South and was arrested and jailed for his civil disobedience. The national media and the administrations of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy took notice. King became the torchbearer for the nation's civil rights struggle.

In 1963, King and his fellow activists set out to integrate Birmingham, Alabama, which King called "the most thoroughly segregated city in the country." Unlike Montgomery, where the issue was limited to bus ridership, Birmingham offered a forum for far-reaching objectives. King's goal was to desegregate the entire community—its restaurants, hotels, department stores, rest rooms, and public facilities. As the sit-ins and marches began, the response by some white southerners was ugly. Extremists bombed an African American church, killing four young girls who were attending Sunday School inside. Police commissioner Eugene ("Bull") Connor ordered his officers to use high-pressure water hoses, police dogs, and clubs against the nonviolent demonstrators. Grade school and high school protesters were jailed alongside adults, and at one point, three thousand African Americans were incarcerated in Birmingham. King himself was jailed and as a result wrote his historic 1963 essay Letter from Birmingham City Jail, an eloquent justification of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws. Throughout the saga, television cameras sent searing images of white brutality across the nation. As King hoped, federal intervention was required to handle the situation, and segregation laws were forced off the books.

Perhaps the crowning moment of King's career was the 1963 March on Washington, when 250,000 people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds converged in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Here, King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, which described a world of racial equality and harmony. The speech ended with these stirring words:

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able at last to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

King was successful in pressuring the U.S. Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. §2000a et seq.). The law guaranteed equal access for all U.S. citizens to public accommodations and facilities, employment, and education. In 1965, King's campaign in Selma, Alabama, helped ensure the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C.A. §1973 et seq.), which extended the vote to previously disenfranchised African Americans in the Deep South. The act outlawed the tests, standards, and procedures that were routinely used to disqualify voters on the basis of race.

King received several honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The same year, he was the first African American to be named Time magazine's Man of the Year. Since 1986, the third Monday in January has been observed as a federal holiday in honor of King's birthday.

The last years of King's life were difficult, as he struggled with bouts of depression over personal and professional failures. His hold on

the civil rights movement was clearly weakening. Young African American activists were demanding a more militant approach to achieving social and economic justice. The angrier black power movement appealed to increasing numbers of African Americans who were impatient with the slow pace of King's nonviolent tactics. King's campaigns in northern cities such as Chicago were largely unsuccessful.

On August 11, 1965, just days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the African American Watts area of Los Angeles erupted into a riot that lasted six days. Thirty-four people were killed, and $30 million worth of property was damaged. After the upheaval in Watts, King's message and influence were diminished.

In 1967, King publicly criticized the United States' involvement in Vietnam and earned the enmity of his former liberal ally President Johnson. Critics believed that King's entry into the peace movement diluted his efforts to achieve further gains for African Americans.

In the spring of 1968, King planned to participate in the Poor People's Campaign, in Washington, D.C. Before going to the nation's capital, he traveled to Memphis to support striking garbage workers there. On April 4, while standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, he was assassinated by James Earl Ray, a white man.

According to those who knew him, King did not set out to become a martyr for civil rights. As Ella J. Baker, a longtime activist, said, "The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement." King represents the dignity of the struggle and the sacrifice it required. Despite a tendency to deify King, he should be regarded not as a saint but as an extraordinary individual who used his prodigious talents to change society. When asked to describe his possible legacy, King himself said, "I just want to leave a committed life behind."

CROSS-REFERENCES: Carmichael, Stokely; Cleaver, Eldridge; Davis, Angela Yvonne; Evers, Medgar Wiley; Malcolm X; Marshall, Thurgood; Wilkins, Roy.

Quotes:

"The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important."

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people."

"There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love."

"No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

"Now, I say to you today my friends, 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."

See more famous quotes by King Jr. Martin Luther