Enduring Freedom- America's History
Dr Martin Luther King
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Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the original
leaders of the American civil rights movement and an advocate
of peaceful protest. He was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta,
Georgia. He had a brother Alfred, and a sister, Christine. Both
his father and grandfather were ministers; Martin Himself eventually
became a clergyman. His mother was a schoolteacher who taught
him how to read before he attended formal school.
As a youth, Martin was an excellent student; he skipped grades
in both elementary school and high school. One of his favorite
pastimes was reading huge books. An outstanding student, Martin
entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, when he was only
15 years old. He was truly a motivated and gifted youth!
Experiencing racism early in life, Martin decided to do something
about this terrible injustice in America. He had a dream to make
the world a much more hospitable and fair place, and he was going
to pursue that dream. King fought segregation and racial discrimination
in the 1950s and 1960s and greatly helped to convince a large
cross-section of white Americans to support the cause of civil
rights in the United States.
After graduating from college and getting married, Dr. King became
a minister and moved to Alabama. Montgomery Alabama's black community
had many issues regarding the mistreatment of blacks on city buses.
Several white bus drivers treated blacks rudely, many-times cursing
them and severely ridiculing them in an attempt at enforcing the
city's segregation laws. These laws forced black riders to sit
in the very back of buses and give up their seats to white passengers
on these crowded buses. By the beginning of the 1950s, Montgomery's
blacks had discussed boycotting the buses in order to make an
effort to gain better treatment.
Rosa Parks, one of the leaders of the local chapter of the NAACP,
was ordered by a bus driver to give up her seat to a white passenger
on December 1st 1955. When she refused, she was arrested and taken
to jail. Another local leader of the NAACP, Edgar D. Nixon, recognized
that the arrest of the popular and much respected Parks was the
event that could influence local blacks to participate in a bus
protest.
Nixon saw King's public-speaking gifts as great assets in the
battle for black civil rights in Montgomery. King, who only recently
arrived in Montgomery, was soon chosen as president of the Montgomery
Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that directed
the bus boycott.
Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.
Commemorating the life of a tremendously important leader, we
celebrate Martin Luther King Day each year in January, the month
in which he was born. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became an icon
in the struggle for racial justice.
