Martin Luther King Jr. Essay, Research Paper
One of the world’s best known advocates of non-violent
social change strategies, Martin Luther King, Jr., synthesized
ideas drawn from many different cultural traditions. Born in
Atlanta on January 15, 1929, King’s roots were in the African-
American Baptist church. He was the grandson of the Rev. A. D.
Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church and a founder of
Atlanta’s NAACP chapter, and the son of Martin Luther King, Sr.,
who succeeded Williams as Ebenezer’s pastor and also became a
civil rights leader. Although, from an early age, King resented
religious emotionalism and questioned literal interpretations of
scripture, he nevertheless greatly admired black social gospel
proponents such as his father who saw the church as a instrument
for improving the lives of African Americans. Morehouse College
president Benjamin Mays and other proponents of Christian social
activism influenced King’s decision after his junior year at
Morehouse to become a minister and thereby serve society. His
continued skepticism, however, shaped his subsequent theological
studies at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania,
and at Boston University, where he received a doctorate in
systematic theology in 1955. Rejecting offers for academic
positions, King decided while completing his Ph. D. requirements
to return to the South and accepted the pastorate of Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
On December 5, 1955, five days after Montgomery civil rights
activist Rosa Parks refused to obey the city’s rules 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 as a result of his exceptional
oratorical skills and personal courage. His house was bombed and
he was convicted along with other boycott leaders on charges of
conspiring to interfere with the bus company’s operations.
Despite these attempts to suppress the movement, Montgomery bus
were desegregated in December, 1956, after the United States
Supreme Court declared Alabama’s segregation laws
unconstitutional. In 1957, seeking to build upon the success of
the Montgomery boycott movement, King and other southern black
ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC). As SCLC’s president, King emphasized the goal of black
voting rights when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial during the
1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. During 1958, he published his
first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The
following year, he toured India, increased his understanding of
Gandhian non-violent strategies. At the end of 1959, he resigned
from Dexter and returned to Atlanta where the SCLC headquarters
was located and where he also could assist his father as pastor
of Ebenezer. Although increasingly portrayed as the pre-eminent
black spokesperson, King did not mobilize mass protest activity
during the first five years after the Montgomery boycott ended.
While King moved cautiously, southern black college students took
the initiative, launching a wave of sit-in protests during the
winter and spring of 1960. King sympathized with the student
movement and spoke at the founding meeting of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960, but he
soon became the target of criticisms from SNCC activists
determined to assert their independence. Even King’s decision in
October, 1960, to join a student sit-in in Atlanta did not allay
the tensions, although presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s
sympathetic telephone call to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King,
helped attract crucial black support for Kennedy’s successful
campaign. The 1961 “Freedom Rides,” which sought to integrate
southern transportation facilities, demonstrated that neither
King nor Kennedy could control the expanding protest movement
spearheaded by students. Conflicts between King and younger
militants were also evident when both SCLC and SNCC assisted the
Albany (Georgia) Movement’s campaign of mass protests during
December of 1961 and the summer of 1962.
After achieving few of his objectives in Albany, King recognized
the need to organize a successful protest campaign free of
conflicts with SNCC. During the spring of 1963, he and his staff
guided mass demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, where local
white police officials were known from their anti-black
attitudes. Clashes between black demonstrators and police using
police dogs and fire hoses generated newspaper headlines through
the world. In June, President Kennedy reacted to the Birmingham
protests and the obstinacy of segregationist Alabama Governor
George Wallace by agreed to submit broad civil rights legislation
to Congress (which eventually passed the Civil Rights Act of
1964). Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities
culminated in a march on August 28, 1963, that attracted 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 grew as he became Time magazine’s Man of
the Year and, in December 1964, the recipient of the Nobel Peace
Prize. Despite fame and accolades, however, King faced many
challenges to his leadership. Malcolm X’s (1927-1965) message of
self-defense and black nationalism expressed the discontent and
anger of northern, urban blacks more effectively than did King’s
moderation. During the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, King and
his lieutenants were able to keep intra-movement conflicts
sufficiently under control to bring about passage of the 1965
Voting Rights Act, but while participating in a 1966 march
through Mississippi, King encountered strong criticism from
“Black Power” proponent Stokely Carmichael. Shortly afterward
white counter-protesters in the Chicago area physically assaulted
King in the Chicago area during an unsuccessful effort to
transfer non-violent protest techniques to the urban North.
Despite these leadership conflicts, King remained committed to
the use of non-violent techniques. Early in 1968, he initiated a
Poor Peoples campaign designed to confront economic problems that
had not been addressed by early civil rights reforms.
King’s effectiveness in achieving his objectives was limited
not merely by divisions among blacks, however, but also by the
increasing resistance he encountered from national political
leaders. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s already extensive efforts
to undermine King’s leadership were intensified during 1967 as
urban racial violence escalated and King criticized American
intervention in the Vietnam war. King had lost the support of
many white liberals, and his relations with the Lyndon Johnson
administration were at a low point when he was assassinated on
April 4, 1968, while seeking to assist a garbage workers’ strike
in Memphis. After his death, King remained a controversial symbol
of the African-American civil rights struggle, revered by many
for his martyrdom on behalf of non-violence and condemned by
others for his militancy and insurgent views.
It’s been 31 years since that Thursday afternoon when a man
launched a bullet in a modest neighborhood in Memphis, Tenn., and
found his mark standing on a motel balcony. The shot hit Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in the neck. He slumped to the balcony
floor and died two hours later. As a nation conditioned to five-
and 10-year commemorations, we haven’t paid much attention to the
anniversary of his death in the intervening years. But despite
the absence of conspicuous memorials, April 4 should be
remembered for its indelible imprint on history. It was, after
all, yet another day that will live in infamy, for it was the day
the dreamer died.
It’s been 31 years since that Thursday afternoon when a man
launched a bullet in a modest neighborhood in Memphis, Tenn., and
found his mark standing on a motel balcony. The shot hit Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in the neck. He slumped to the balcony
floor and died two hours later. As a nation conditioned to five-
and 10-year commemorations, we haven’t paid much attention to the
anniversary of his death in the intervening years. But despite
the absence of conspicuous memorials, April 4 should be
remembered for its indelible imprint on history. It was, after
all, yet another day that will live in infamy, for it was the day
the dreamer died. The dream — of content over packaging, of
equal regard and equal opportunity, of a nation living up to the
true meaning of its creed — may yet survive, but it has never
since found so splendid a voice as King’s. His were the words
that gave the idea logic. His was the rhythm that made the
thought dance so gracefully. His was the diplomacy to, at once,
call us on the carpet for what we had done wrong without implying
that we deserved no good faith, without telling us we were
incorrigible.
Implicit in King’s dream-weaving — beyond the dream itself –
was the sublime notion that it was all possible. That we could do
it. That a dream, it may have been, but not a fantasy.
But the events of April 4, 1968, broke the hopeful spell and,
suddenly, the difficult, beleaguered work of making a dream real
seemed utterly futile, if not naive. Why bother with patience and
prayerfulness and contemplation when even they are despised to
the point of murder? The civil rights movement, such as it is,
has never been the same. No one has been able to replicate King’s
charisma or inherit his disciples. There is not even the cohesion
of spirit there once was. What progress there has been since
King’s assassination has had the woeful effect of dulling the
senses and disguising the truth so that some actually believe
there is no Great Dream to hold anymore, only millions of
personal ones. Personal responsibility, self-determination and
empowerment for the disenfranchised are today’s popular battle
cries, as if they are new alternatives to “overcoming,” when, in
truth, they are vintage principles, long and widely practiced.
Although the virtues are doubtlessly productive — and it never
hurts to re-emphasize them — the movement must not take them up
as its only weapons against discrimination and duality because
there remains a society to be held accountable. The air is still
fouled with collective bigotry and ignorance. Doors are still
closed, as are minds, and applicants for the dream are still too
often denied on the basis of errant and malefic presumption. Thus
is the dream disturbed, time and time again, and never finished.
As with the murdered Dr. King, the dreamer never finds out how
the