What were Martin Luther Kings ideas?

Answer 1

A report on Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King's aim was to get black people the same rights as white people and to show they were all equal.

Martin Luther King had a goal which was for equality and peace between races in the United States. While studying at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, King heard a lecture on Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India. King read several books on the ideas of Gandhi, and eventually became convinced that the same methods could be employed by blacks to obtain civil rights in America. He was particularly struck by Gandhi's words: "Through our pain we will make them see their injustice". King was also influenced by Henry David Thoreau and his theories on how to use nonviolent resistance to achieve social change. After he heard this lecture it made him realize that action needed taking on racial and segregation discrimination.

While at Crozier he first heard of Gandhi's nonviolent movement that had won independence for India, and he began to think of how such methods might be used by the black people in America. It appeared to him that Gandhi 'was probably the first person to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful effective social force on a large scale.'

On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, a forty-year-old seamstress, refused to give up her seat in a bus to a white man as she was ordered to do by the driver. 'I was just plain tired, and my feet hurt,' she explained later. For this she was arrested and charged with disobeying the city's segregation ordinance.

The black community was outraged, and their pastors quickly organized a one-day boycott of the buses in protest. This was so successful that it was decided to continue the boycott until demands to desegregate the buses were met. For leadership the pastors turned to their young colleague of the Dexter Avenue Church, who had already won a reputation among them for his powerful preaching. They felt that he had not been in town long enough to make enemies and could easily relocate to another city if things went wrong. Consequently, Martin Luther King, Jr., became president of the committee to conduct the boycott, which was hopefully called the Montgomery Improvement Association. He was then not quite twenty-seven.

In his first speech, to a mass meeting on 5 December, King announced the nonviolent principles that were to guide the Civil Rights Movement from then on. In the struggle for freedom and justice to which they were called, he said, 'Our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of the Christian faith.' He concluded: 'If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, future historians will say, "There lived a great people - black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization." This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.'

In this spirit the boycott effort persisted, despite bitter efforts to break it through all kinds of harassment, abuse, and persecution. For over a year the black community of Montgomery stayed out of the public buses, walking, car-pooling, and using all possible means of transit, until finally the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregation on the buses was unconstitutional. King was the target for arrests, constant anonymous death threats, and a night-bombing of his home.

Martin Luther King got where he was because he saw how much the black community were being discriminated against, and he did realize that something just had to be done about that. One of the first incidents that led him to do this was the one including Rosa parks, on the white part of the bus. That is why that incident was so significant, even today.

Martin Luther King was indeed a huge threat. Many were not expecting such a high amount of black people in a boycott, and they certainly were not expecting one.

His philosophy was to promote racial equality by non-violent means. He believed that violence only breeded more violence so his followers staged non-violent protests and did not lash out at the racist people who hated them.

Answer 2

Martin Luther King was an eloquent spokesman for the idea of racial equality, which is to say, that people should be judged as individuals and not on the basis of their skin color or ethnicity. He also advocated the use of non-violent methods to achieve social change.