Martin Luther King

King's Letter from Birmingham Jail

America'slibrary.gov While King was in jail, he wrote a letter to the newspaper explaining why he had broken the law. "I am here because injustice is here," he wrote. "I would agree with Saint Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all."

Education

Biography.com As a child, Martin went to Atlantic Public School, then to Washington High School. In 1948, Martin received a sociology degree from Atlanta Morehouse College and attended liberal Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Martins slowing down and last speech

Biography.com By 1968, Martin had grown tired of marches, going to jail, and living under the constant threat of death. Martin was becoming discouraging to the Civil rights movement. Plans were starting to come together when Martin planed a march in Washington to revive his movement to the African American people and to bring attention to a wider range of issues. On April 3rd, Martin gave his last speech and told supporters that he has seen he promise land and might not get there with them.

Expansion

Biography.com From late 1965 through 1967, Martin expanded his Civil Rights movement into other larger American cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. Martin faced many more problems in this area. To address the criticism, King began to make a connection between discrimination and poverty. King also expanded his civil right efforts to the Vietnam War. He felt that since America was involved with the Vietnam, that the governments conductivity with the war was a discriminatory to the poor.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Biography.com In January 1957, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and 60 ministers found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was made to allow the power of black churches to come through. These people would help make protests to encourage the the civil rights reform.

The Albany Movement

Biography.com In the summer of 1961, King was a supporter of the Freedom Rides which is a campaign of bus trips from north to south, intending to open lunch stations and bus counters for the use of them. Riders were very hated. Some people slashed or burned their buses or the bus drivers were being attacked. But, King did decline from participating one of the Freedom Rides and people started to question his devotion to the rides again.

Inspiration

Biography.com King got his inspiration from both his Christian faith and the peaceful teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King led nonviolent movement in the late 1950's and '60s to achieve legal equality for African-Americans in the United States. King used the power of words and acts of nonviolent resistance such as, protests, marches, and civil disobedience.

Memphis

Biography.com King interrupted some plans to lend his support to the Memphis sanitation men's strike. He wanted to discourage violence, and he wanted to focus national attention on the poor. He unorganized workers of the city. The men were bargaining for basic union representation and long-overdue raises.

King is released

Biography.com King realized that this incident would hurt the city's reputation, Atlanta's mayor negotiated a truce and charges were eventually dropped. But soon after, King was imprisoned for violating his probation on a traffic conviction. The news of his imprisonment entered the 1960 presidential campaign, when candidate John F. Kennedy made a phone call to Coretta Scott King. Kennedy expressed his concern for King's harsh treatment for the traffic ticket and political pressure was quickly set in motion. King was soon released.

Religion

Biography.com King was a Christian minister and King's main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels. King stated: "Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don't plan to run for any political office. I don't plan to do anything but remain a preacher. And what I'm doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man."

King arrested

Biography.com By 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was gaining national notoriety. He returned to Atlanta to become co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church, but also continued his civil rights efforts. On October 19, 1960, King and 75 students entered a local department store and requested lunch-counter service but were denied. When they refused to leave the counter area, King and 36 others were arrested.

Early Life

Biography.com Editors Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. When Martin was older, he went to Boston University in 1953. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott. The couple got married in 1953 and settled down in Montgomery, Alabama. Later he had four children named, Yolanda, Martin, Dexter, and Bernice. Soon after, Martin became a baptist minister and civil rights activist.

Martin Luther King Day

Blackhistory.com After years of campaigning by activists, members of Congress and Coretta Scott King, among others, in 1983 President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) signed a bill creating a U.S. federal holiday in honor of King. Observed on the third Monday of January, it was first celebrated in 1986.

Jail

Blackhistory.com In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and sent to jail because he and others were protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham, Alabama. A court had ordered that King could not hold protests in Birmingham.

SCLC

History.com In 1960. King moved back to his family in Atlanta, where he joined his father as co- pastor of the Embenzer Baptist Church. This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of 1960s. Their philosophy of the nonviolence was put to a test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activist used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation, in one of America's most racially divided cities.

St. Augustine

History.com In March 1964, and the SCLC joined forces with Robert Hayling's controversial movement in St. Augustine in Florida. The SCLC is short for Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King and the SCLC worked together to bring white Northern activists to St. Augustine, including a 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, all of whom were arrested. In June, the movement marched through the city, "often facing counter demonstrations by the Klan, and provoking violence that garnered national media attention."

Opposition to the Vietnam War

History.com King is against the involvement in Vietnam War but at first he avoided this topic in his speeches to avoid the interference with the civil rights goals. King also avoided the Vietnam War because it took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare at home. The United States Congress was spending more money on military and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. King also criticized American opposition to North Vietnam's land reforms. Martin said that "North Vietnam did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands"

I Have a Dream Speech

History.com Martin Luther King traveled across the country to different destinations to give lectures and protests against the Civil Rights act. One of the most famous speeches said by Martin was his I Have a Dream speech. This speech was told on August 28, 1963. This told in Washington D.C. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A quarter of a million people came together in peace. This speech said that his dream is to not have black people judged for their color and to scrutinize them for looks. This speech was on live TV reaching out to millions of americans and also reached out to the president whom watched it from the White House.

March on Washington

History.com On August 28, 1963 roughly 250,000 people marched in Washington D.C. from the Washington monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where they listened to speeches by American Civil Rights leaders, including Martin Luther King. Later this march was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This event was a major success, and was the start of the Birmingham campaign. This campaign had also contributed to the atmosphere in which federal civil rights legislation could be pass.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

History.com On December 1, 1955 a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in a bus to a white person. The government chose Martin to be the protest's leader of this event and the official spokesman. From this event, people found that Martin was an inspirational supporter of this act.

New York City

History.com On February 6, 1964, King delivered a speech of a lecture series at the new school called The American Race Crisis. His speech was never recorded but in August 2013 which was almost fifty years later the school discovered an audiotape with a fifteen minute part of the speech.

Personalism

History.com Personalism was popular at Boston University when King was a doctoral student there, and it completed the picture of God that he had adopted from the Southern Baptist church.

King was Stabbed

MartinLutherKing.com On September 20, 1958 King was unfortunately stabbed by forty two year old insane woman in a Harlem department store while Martin was autographing copies of the novel, ''Stride Toward Freedom". When Martin went to the hospital, called Harlem Hospital, his surgeon told him the the razor tip of the knife had touched his aorta and that they had to open up his chest to take it out. If the knife got a little bit closer to his heart, the nation would have never survived.

King's Address at Prayer Pilgrimage

MartinLutherKing.com Since few blacks were able to read or write, the literacy test for them was much harder which make it harder for them to be able to have the opportunity to vote. King decided to make a speech at the Prayer Pilgrimage for freedom for those southern blacks in Washington D.C. This speech brought him a a lot of national gratitude.

Congress of Racial Equality

Sparknotes.com The first organization in the Civil Rights Movement involving non-violent direct action. The Congress of Racial Equality was founded in Chicago in 1942 in the 1960s. It participated in activism in the South, providing support and supervisions to sit-ins and voter-registration campaigns, often cooperating with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Speech Quote

Sparknotes.com "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners 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 oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children one day will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountains of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing we will be free one day" - Martin Luther King

Selma Voting Rights

Sparknotes.com A man named James Bevel wanted a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest against not having black people vote. King and Bevel and the SCLC in partial collaboration with SNCC and they attempted to march to the state's capital. The first attempt to march on March 7, 1965 was cancelled because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day has become known as Bloody Sunday, and was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement.

Voting Rights Act

Sparknotes.com Five days after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became a law, the black neighborhoods of Watts in south central Los Angeles, California erupted in riots. Police officers also provoked an uprising which killed 34 lives, destroyed 209 buildings, and also led to over 4,000 arrests. King visited this city on August 17th condemning the violence happening, but emphasized its causes for happening. King then made his attention toward the Northern and Western cities which suffered s racial tension that his victories in the south had not yet been relieved.

Chicago Open Housing Movement

Sparknotes.com In 1966, after several successes in the South, King, Bevel, and others in the civil rights organizations tried to spread the movement to the North, with Chicago as their first destination. King and Ralph Abernathy, both from the middle class, moved into a building at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave., in the slums of North Lawndale[109] on Chicago's West Side, as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor.

Black Power

Sparknotes.com In March in 1966, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, used a slogan, "Black Power". This slogan came to to denote a brand of civil rights activism more violent than that of King. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference refused to use the slogan for fear of alienating white sympathy.

Freedom Sunday

Sparknotes.com King returned to Chicago in time for Freedom Sunday. Freedom Sunday is a global day of worship. On this day in Chicago he addressed a crowd of 45,000 people and nailed a list of people that were wrong to the door of City Hall. King told the city, specifically to the mayor of Chicago named Daley, that he wants to spend more money on public school to integrate them. Shortly after Freedom Sunday, young African Americans rioted on Chicago's West Side leading to the disposal of the National Guard, and said that King's influence over events in that city lead to returns on great investments.

Nobel Peace Prize

Sparknotes.com King's fame even increased in October of 1964 when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. On December 10th the Nobel Committee honored him at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. King announced that he accepted the honor on his behalf of the Civil Rights Movement. King also said that he would give all $54,000 of the prize money. And by early 1965 the Nobel Prize Laureate was back in a jail cell in the southern United States.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Sparknotes.com The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been struggling to secure the civil rights for African Americans since 1909. This was long before the activism of the period symbolized by King. Its approach depended heavily on legal action and victories in court.

Death

kinginstitute.stanford.edu King is shot and killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. King is buried in Atlanta.

Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change

seattletimes.com In 1969, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, organized the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change. Today it stands next to his church Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. King's birthday, January 15, 1929 is a national holiday, celebrated each year with educational programs, artistic displays, and concerts throughout the United States. The Lorraine Hotel where he was shot is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

The North

seattletimes.com In the North, however, King soon discovered that young and angry blacks cared little for his preaching and even less for his pleas for peaceful protest. Their disenchantment was one of the reasons he rallied behind a new cause: the war in Vietnam.

Segregation is Unconstitutional

seattletimes.com Married by then, King returned South to become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. There, he made his first mark on the civil-rights movement, by mobilizing the black community during a 382-day boycott of the city's bus lines. King overcame arrest and other violent harassment, including the bombing of his home. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional.

Poor People Campaign

thekingcenter.org Between 1965 and 1968, King shifted his focus toward economic justice which he highlighted by leading several campaigns in Chicago, Illinois, and international peace, which he championed by speaking out strongly against the Vietnam War. His work in these years culminated in the "Poor Peoples Campaign," which was a broad effort to assemble a multiracial coalition of impoverished Americans who would advocate for economic change.