Introduction
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Turn to any period in human history, and you’ll see a lot of turmoil and upheaval.
But very few eras can rival the twentieth century for sheer degree of change.
Among those who experienced that change firsthand were African Americans, whose status in the United States shifted tremendously in the second half of the twentieth century.
And no name is more closely associated with those changes than that of Martin Luther King Jr.
What was the story behind the man who helped define the civil-rights movement in the US?
Settle in, get comfortable, and listen to the autobiography of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
On January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr.
was born into a devout Baptist family.
Chapter 1
They lived in Atlanta, Georgia.
The community into which he was born labored under two heavy burdens.
The first was racism, and the segregation that came with it in the American South.
The second was the Great Depression, which was just taking hold when King was born.
King’s neighborhood, however, enjoyed relative peace and security – if there was little wealth among its working-class families, there was also little crime.
And most of King’s neighbors were people of strong Christian faith – as were the Kings.
The King family lived on Auburn Street.
That street was also home to Ebenezer Baptist Church, to which the family had a deep connection: Martin Jr.
’s maternal grandfather, A.
D.
Williams was pastor there, as was Martin Luther King Sr.
In time, Martin Jr.
would follow in the footsteps of these patriarchs, becoming Ebenezer’s most famous pastor.
King’s parents had very different personalities, but both were clear-eyed about the obstacles and challenges their three children would face as Black people in the southern United States.
Martin Luther King Sr.
was an outgoing, vibrant man whose character was well suited to community work and preaching.
He was confident and fearless, and had a sharp eye for injustice of any kind.
He became an early civil-rights figure in the US.
His wife, Alberta Williams King, was a soft-spoken, kind woman whose childhood as the daughter of a successful minister had sheltered her from the worst of the racism around her.
Well-educated and determined, Alberta King undertook the hard task of trying to explain slavery, racism, and segregation to her children.
She made it clear to them that they were full human beings of equal value to anyone else of any race.
That racist system of the southern states confused the young Martin Jr.
As a child, he often noted how arbitrary the injustices produced by segregation were.
Because he was Black, he couldn’t play in most public parks.
He had to sit in the back of the bus, even if it was empty.
And when a new movie came out, he had to wait for months until it reached Black theaters.
These were rules that applied to every Black person of any age, and they made no sense to King.
But even earlier than this, the legacy of the racism behind segregation confronted King in a painfully personal way.
As a very little boy, he had formed a friendship with a white playmate whose father owned a store near the Kings’ home.
Since the age of three, the two little boys had played together without issue.
But once they turned six and began formal education – each attending a separate, segregated school – the little white boy said that his father had told him he could no longer play with King.
The child’s father didn’t want his son to associate with Black people anymore.
The breach between King and his young playmate was one of Martin Jr.
’s first experiences of racism, but it would be far from his last.
In King’s youth, everything about African American life in the South was structured by segregation.
The injustice of this all-pervasive structure transformed King into someone who wanted to change things, and he soon began to advocate for racial justice.
He led church and Bible study groups.
And, at the age of fourteen, he participated in a public-speaking competition in his region, passionately advocating for the end of segregation.
King spent his last summer before college working in Connecticut, a northern US state.
There, where segregation was not part of the social or legal structure, he attended church and ate in restaurants alongside white people – the first time in his life he’d been able to do so.
Chapter 2
King was a precocious student.
He skipped a total of two grades in school and graduated when he was just 15.
He then entered Atlanta’s Morehouse College, a historic Black men’s college, where he first encountered an approach to injustice that would definitively shape his life as an activist and Black community leader.
This approach was nonviolent resistance, and it would become a cornerstone of King’s philosophy.
Nonviolent resistance has several roots, but King found it through Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience.
” In it, Thoreau wrote of his refusal to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican-American War and the spread of slavery throughout the United States.
King became convinced that peaceful but unyielding resistance to evil was the only constructive way to bring about change for African Americans.
After Morehouse, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary, in Pennsylvania.
Here, he embarked on an intellectual quest to both understand social injustice and learn how to fight it.
He read everything from Plato to Locke, wanting to see the historical shape of humanity’s long discussion on issues such as the nature of evil.
Of all the people he read, however, one man made a particularly significant impression: Walter Rauschenbusch.
Rauschenbusch, an American theologian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a champion of the concept of the Social Gospel.
Proponents of the Social Gospel contended, among other things, that Christian leaders had a moral obligation to fight poverty, exploitation, and inequality.
His fascination with nonviolent resistance was also strengthened at Crozer.
Here, King was introduced to Mahatma Gandhi and his successful nonviolent resistance campaigns against British rule in India.
King graduated from Crozer in 1951 with a Bachelor of Divinity degree.
He was the class valedictorian.
, By now, his convictions regarding nonviolent resistance were set.
He decided to pursue a PhD in systematic theology at Boston University’s School of Theology.
Before he graduated in 1955, King would have yet another life-changing encounter.
In Boston, a friend introduced him to Coretta Scott, a singer from Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Scott was also knowledgeable about the struggle against social injustice and interested in the pursuit of equal rights for her community.
King was immediately smitten, and by the end of their first date he’d made up his mind to marry her.
Scott and King were married by his father in 1953, and she’d remain by his side as an equal partner in the civil-rights movement throughout their marriage.
The couple would go on to have four children: Martin Luther III, Dexter, Yolanda, and Bernice.
After King finished his doctoral studies, he was appointed minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
Though he was nervous about returning to the segregated South, he felt a moral obligation to serve the Black community in this troubled city.
In May 1954, King preached his first sermon as a minister in Montgomery.
As it turned out, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
King discovered that pastoral work suited him.
But, beyond that, Montgomery was the epicenter of particularly sharp tensions between the Black and white communities.
Even by the standards of the South at the time, Montgomery was known to be especially oppressive to Black people.
Along with his duties to his congregation, King soon found himself involved with civil-rights organizations in the city.
In 1954, he joined the local chapter of the NAACP – the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – and encouraged members of his congregation to do the same.
Chapter 3
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was traveling on a Montgomery city bus.
When a white man boarded the bus, the driver instructed her to give up her front seat and move to the back.
Parks refused to move.
This small but powerful gesture of resistance would kick off an entire movement to gain Black Americans the rights that other citizens enjoyed.
The arrest of Rosa Parks proved a pivotal event in Martin Luther King Jr.
’s development as a civil-rights leader.
A meeting of Black ministers and civic leaders was immediately called, where it was agreed that the best way to further the momentum of Rosa Parks’s action was to organize a boycott of the entirety of Montgomery’s racist bus system.
Black people were informed of the boycott effort through leaflets and word of mouth.
The effect was swiftly felt.
For several months following Rosa Parks’s arrest, not a single Black person was seen riding a bus in Montgomery.
Black cab companies, and, later, a carpooling system helped members of the community get where they needed to go without using Montgomery’s public transit.
The Montgomery Improvement Association, or MIA, was founded by King and other community leaders to help manage the burgeoning movement.
As its president, King presented to Montgomery city officials the MIA’s demand that buses be integrated.
Until that happened, the boycott would continue – and Montgomery city would continue to lose revenue.
The city fought back.
Its police commissioner ordered all Black cab drivers to charge at least 45 cents per ride – a considerable amount that would put the cabs out of reach of most Black people.
And then a smear campaign against King began: rumors were spread that he’d used MIA donations to buy himself a new Cadillac.
Eventually, police started to find reasons to arrest Black drivers taking part in the carpooling system – even the most minor traffic violation would get a driver picked up.
Among those arrested was King himself.
Eventually, the city of Montgomery declared the bus boycott illegal.
In response, the MIA decided to stage a peaceful “jail-in.
” That meant that, all at once, thousands of Black people – including King – offered themselves up to be arrested over the new law.
This overwhelmed the police and the city’s related resources.
Many of those arrested were even released before their cases made it to court.
Then, in November 1956, after 381 days of protest in Montgomery, the US Supreme Court finally declared bus segregation unconstitutional.
Segregationists reacted strongly to this outcome.
That night, the Ku Klux Klan went on a terrifying rampage, and the Kings’ telephone rang nonstop with new threats of violence.
In December 1956, one month after the court’s decision, King rode Montgomery’s first integrated bus, sitting in a front seat between two white people.
He’d proven that nonviolent resistance in the Christian spirit wasn’t just possible – it was also effective.
King became a founder and the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
This was an organization of African American ministers and activists dedicated to the advancement of civil rights for Black Americans.
King and the SCLC focused on targeting segregation in two cities famous for being hardcore bastions of segregation: Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama.
In 1961, a nonviolent, civil-rights organization called the Albany Movement was started by Dr.
W.
G.
Anderson.
The SCLC pledged its support, and King and others traveled to the city to participate in the Movement.
Through resistance, violence, and arrests, the Movement got results.
Several months of boycotts, accompanied by jail-ins and demonstrations, finally succeeded in integrating buses and shops in Albany.
The SCLC then moved on to Birmingham, Alabama.
A boycott of segregated shops in the city’s downtown core was initiated, and a march to open a voter registration drive was also planned.
In Birmingham, resistance to desegregation was personified by the city’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor.
Connor was a proud racist who had little respect for any authority but his own, including that of the US government.
King and the SCLC called their Birmingham boycott efforts “Project C,” for “confrontation.
” At first, mass arrests steadily filled up the jails with protestors.
King himself was arrested and found himself in an overcrowded jail cell – before an unexpected phone call from presidential candidate John Kennedy led to King’s release a few days later.
As the protests continued, using every resource available to him, Connor tried to sweep the protesters away.
They were ruthlessly terrorized: beaten with fists and billy clubs, blasted with pressure hoses, attacked by police dogs.
Images of this violence soon began to appear in newspapers around the world.
Despite being attacked, the protestors kept their promise of nonviolence.
Many Americans were shocked and disgusted by what they were seeing in Birmingham – and the national mood in the US began to turn.
On May 10, Birmingham city officials finally faced reality: all their brutality was not enough to stop the force of change.
They announced an agreement to desegregate shops, restrooms, and drinking fountains, and to ensure that Black people were hired and paid fairly.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Chapter 4
’s profile rose with the rising tide of the civil-rights movement.
In 1957, Time magazine did a cover story on the movement, featuring King as its spokesman; a few years later, they declared King 1963’s Man of the Year.
And, in 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
King was aware that he was becoming a symbol, and he was not always comfortable with it.
In particular, he felt pressured to live up to the high standards that people had set for him, worrying that, in his words, “a man who hits the peak at 27 has a tough job ahead.
” But his fame also helped him make important political contacts.
Over the years, King corresponded with presidents Dwight D.
Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, seeking their support for the goals of the movement.
While he was skeptical about Eisenhower’s and Johnson’s commitment to civil-rights issues, he found an ally in Kennedy, who was an outspoken supporter of the movement.
More than once, John and his brother Robert Kennedy used their political power to get King out of jail.
King never officially endorsed JFK during his presidential run, however, because he didn’t want to create the impression that the civil rights movement was a partisan effort.
This was also an era of change and advancement within the international Black community, and King drew inspiration from it.
In 1957, he attended independence celebrations in Ghana – the first African country to gain independence from the British colonial administration.
In 1959, he traveled to India, where he met with Prime Minister Nehru and walked in the footsteps of his hero Mahatma Gandhi.
Martin Luther King’s best-known speech is surely that which begins with “I have a dream .
.
.
” But these words are as much associated with an event as they are with the man who uttered them.
The event, of course, is the March on Washington, which took place in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963.
Over 200,000 African Americans and white supporters from all over the United States attended.
The goal was to call attention to racism as a national problem that needed to be recognized and addressed across the country.
King was so busy with preparations for the event that he didn’t finish writing the speech he was supposed to give until 4:00 a.
m.
on the morning of the march.
But once he began to speak to the vast crowd gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, their response overwhelmed him – and he broke away from what he’d written to express what was in his heart.
This impulse gave birth to the famous “I have a dream” speech, in which King spoke of his longing for an America that would “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed” by valuing equality for all.
The wide media coverage of the March on Washington helped spread the message of civil rights.
This brought about a new wave of support, and helped the SCLC expand its campaigns into places like St.
Augustine, Florida – a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan – as well as Mississippi and Alabama.
With the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy in November 1963, the SCLC lost an outspoken and powerful supporter.
But King managed to convince the next president, Lyndon Johnson, to continue to pursue the progressive legislation Kennedy had started.
Just a few months into his presidency, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
A voters’-rights campaign spearheaded by the SCLC in Alabama then brought about the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Together, these Acts helped outlaw racist voting policies as well as public segregation.
But holding the line on nonviolent resistance was proving harder as time went on.
Black community members had endured a great deal of abuse and extreme violence.
Black people across the US were also beginning to express frustration with the poverty, unemployment, and lack of educational opportunities the country’s systemic racism had fostered.
And in northern cities in particular, they felt they hadn’t seen the benefits promised by the civil-rights movement.
The result of these tensions sparked fierce riots – most notably in the Watts area of Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles riots highlighted for King the particular role of racism in perpetuating poverty.
So he and his family moved to one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods in 1966 to organize a campaign for improved housing, employment, and education for Black residents.
While King had been sympathetic to the rioters and the anger they felt, he still believed that nonviolent resistance was the only truly effective, long-term path to change for Black people.
In Chicago, he insisted that all protestors be trained in the principle of nonviolence.
He even convinced gang leaders to join in peaceful marches.
But King also said that he’d never seen white mobs “as hostile and as hate-filled” as the ones in Chicago, despite his years of dealing with hardcore white supremacists in the South.
And this violent reaction to civil rights wasn’t limited to Chicago.
Faced with an increasing white backlash, a growing number of Black campaigners were becoming less patient and more radical.
The year 1963 was particularly brutal for Black Americans.
In Mississippi, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in his own driveway.
In Birmingham, one of the most notorious incidents of the civil-rights movement took place when four young Black girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
All over the country, police seemed to respond to Black protests with fresh brutality.
And then, late in the year, came the murder of President Kennedy, leaving many who had been buoyed by the promise of his progressive nature stunned and bereft.
Malcolm X, the prominent Nation of Islam minister and Black community leader, was a key representative of the new, more radical approach to the rights and advancement of Black Americans.
King knew Malcolm to be a man of integrity, and he admired his talent as a speaker.
But he didn’t agree with Malcolm’s belief that equality should be achieved “by any means necessary.
” For his part, Malcolm thought that King’s idea of purely nonviolent protest was naive.
Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 while preparing to deliver a speech at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom.
Following his death, the Black Power movement, which was inspired by Malcolm X’s work, rose to prominence.
King had first encountered the “Black Power'' slogan during a planning meeting for the Freedom Marches in Mississippi.
Stokely Carmichael, a member of the Black Power movement and one of the demonstration’s organizers, had suggested that the slogan be used by the marchers.
But King didn’t believe in their message and also worried that the slogan might make potential white allies feel their support was not welcome.
King would meet with various Black Power leaders during the remainder of his life.
And though he sympathized with many of the movement’s goals, he never abandoned his conviction that the only truly enduring change was arrived at by peaceful means.
For King, anything else represented a rejection of hope and the abandonment of love – and nothing, he believed, could be achieved without love.
For most of his career as an activist, King had avoided involvement in issues that weren’t directly related to matters of civil rights.
But, as the Vietnam War gained momentum during the 1960s, he found himself increasingly unable to turn away from the toll it was taking on his community.
The deaths of thousands of young Black men – and millions of Southeast Asian civilians – weighed on him.
Then, in 1967, the US government declined an offer of peace that would have brought its bombing of North Vietnam to an end.
That was too much for King.
He jumped into the antiwar movement, helping to organize protests and privately pleading with President Johnson to bring the Vietnam conflict to a resolution.
Public and media reaction to this new facet of King’s activism was not kind.
The goodwill extended to King as a leader of the civil-rights movement seemed to evaporate the moment he looked beyond the domestic American sphere.
Both critics and some of his NAACP colleagues made it clear that they felt he had no business interfering in foreign policy.
But King maintained his opposition.
While for the US government the war was a lucrative business, many of the young men fighting in Vietnam – especially the young Black men – struggled in poverty at home.
So, in addition to racism and civil rights for African Americans, King also turned his attention to what he saw as the inherent economic injustice of capitalism.
He warned that America, in his words, “must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented to a person-oriented society” if it were to survive as a democracy.
In 1968, the SCLC organized the nationwide Poor People’s Campaign, leading masses of disenfranchised people to Washington, DC.
Lower-income Black and white people, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinx communities protested for economic justice, dignified work, and better housing.
But, just as this campaign was gaining momentum, tragedy struck once more.
Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.
His murderer was a white supremacist named James Earl Ray.
Black people in the United States had lost a leader whose faith in the sure, steady, lasting impact of nonviolent resistance was unshakeable, and who ultimately laid down his life in service to the ideal of the freedom and dignity of his fellow African Americans.
King once said that he wanted to be remembered as a person who spent his life serving, loving, and caring for others.
“If I can help somebody as I pass along,” he wrote, “my living will not be in vain.
You’ve reached the end of this Bedtime Biography.
The End
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