Life Of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.

Life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of many American ministers and Nobel Prize winners. He differed because he was one of the primary leaders of the American civil rights movement; he also fought to stop violence. The things that King went through like, segregation and racial discrimination helped many white Americans support his cause. When he was assassinated, he became a symbol of protest in the struggle for racial justice, and was also a huge role model for many.

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia; he was the oldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., and Alberta Williams King. King also had one brother, Albert Daniel, and one sister, Willie Christine. His father was a pastor at a large Atlanta church called Ebenezer Baptist. King was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18. King went to many local segregated public schools; he did very well at these schools. He got into Morehouse College at age 15; he graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1948. After he graduated with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in 1951, he attended Boston University where he got a doctoral degree in systematic theology in 1955.

King's public-speaking abilities became something everyone knew him by. He earned a second-place prize in a speech contest while he was an undergraduate at Morehouse, even though he got Cs in two public-speaking courses in his first year at Crozer. By the time he was in his third year at Crozer his professors were flattered by King's public speaking abilities. While King was in school he was exposed to things that related Christian theology to the struggles of demoralized people. At Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University, he studied the teachings on nonviolent protest of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. While attending Boston University, King met his future wife, Coretta Scott; she was a music student and native of Alabama. They married in 1953 and had four children.

The black community in Montgomery had many arguments with the ways the blacks were mistreated on city buses. White bus drivers treated blacks with disrespect, and often swore at them or embarrassed them. They embarrassed them by imposing segregation laws, which made black riders sit at the back of the bus and give up their seat to white passengers. In the early 1950s people in Montgomery discussed abandoning the buses in an attempt to get better treatment.

Rosa Parks was a top member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was demanded to give up her seat to a white passenger on October 1, 1955. Since she refused, she was taken under custody and put in jail. Local Leaders of the NAACP recognized that the arrest of the well known and greatly admired Parks was the person that could rally local blacks to a bus protest. Leaders also thought that a protest should be led by someone who could make the community whole. Unlike the leaders in Montgomery's black community, the recently arrived King had no enemies. In addition, leaders saw King's public-speaking gifts as great attributes in the battle for black civil rights in Montgomery. King was elected to be the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).

Lasting for more than a year the Montgomery bus boycott gave the protesting southern blacks a new spirit. The serious attitude that King had and continuous call to Christian brotherhood had a positive impact on the whites outside the south. Cases of violence among the black protesters include the bombing of King's house had the Montgomery media's attention. In February 1956 an attorney for the MIA filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction against Montgomery's segregated seating practices. The federal court ruled in favor of the MIA, ordering the city's buses to be desegregated, but the city government appealed the ruling to the United States Supreme Court. By the time the Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision in November 1956, King was a national figure. His memoir of the bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), provided a thoughtful account of that experience and further extended King's national influence.

In 1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As SCLC's president, King became the organization's dominant personality and its primary intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the organization's fund-raising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with preaching engagements in Northern churches.

SCLC sought to complement the NAACP's legal efforts to dismantle segregation through the courts, with King and other SCLC leaders encouraging the use of nonviolent direct action to protest discrimination. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts. The violent responses that direct action provoked from some whites eventually forced the federal government to confront the issues of injustice and racism in the South.

King made strategic alliances with Northern whites that later bolstered his success at influencing public opinion in the United States. Through Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights and peace activist, King forged connections to older radical activists, many of them Jewish, who provided money and advice about strategy. King's closest adviser at times was Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist and former member of the American Communist Party. King also developed strong ties to leading white Protestant ministers in the North, with whom he shared theological and moral views.

In 1959 King visited India and worked out more clearly his understanding of Gandhi's principle of nonviolent persuasion, called Satyagraha, which King had determined to use as his main instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate in Montgomery to become co-pastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

In the early 1960s King led SCLC in a series of protest campaigns that gained national attention. The first was in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, where SCLC joined local demonstrations against segregated restaurants, hotels, transit, and housing. SCLC increased the size of the demonstrations in an effort to create so much dissent and disorder that local white officials would be forced to end segregation to restore normal business relations. The strategy did not work in Albany. During months of protests, Albany's police chief jailed hundreds of demonstrators without visible police violence. Eventually the protesters' energy, and the money to bail out protesters, ran out.

The strategy did work, however, in Birmingham, Alabama, when SCLC joined a local

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