1 Not
long
ago, our Southern states were much different from the way they are
today. The people lived divided lives. White people and black people
did not eat in the same restaurants, go to the same schools, or even
drink from the same water fountains. That division is called
segregation. Many people did not like that and wanted to change things,
but they needed a leader. That leader was Martin Luther King Jr.
2 Dr.
King was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He learned about
segregation at the age of six, when the parents of his white friends
would not let him play with them anymore. After finishing college in
Boston, he returned to the South and became the pastor of a church in
Montgomery, Alabama. Dr. King knew that segregation was wrong. It meant
that people got treated better or worse just because of the color of
their skin.
3 People
began to notice Dr. King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The law
then said that white people got to sit at the front of the bus and got
in at the front door of the bus. Blacks sat at the back of the bus and
got in at the back door. On December 1, 1955 a black woman named Rosa
Parks got on the bus and did not move to the back. She had worked all
day, and she was tired. When a white man wanted to sit in her seat, she
refused, and she was arrested.
4 Her
trial made many people angry, and they refused to ride the buses. They
would walk or ride bicycles to work, which made the bus company lose a
lot of business. Dr. King convinced the people to act with an attitude
of dignity and courage rather than anger. At age 27 his self-control
and insistence on nonviolence made him a great spokesman for the
boycott and a strong leader for the civil rights movement. In November
1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on transportation was
unconstitutional. The first of many battles had been won.
5 In
1957 Dr. King took another big step as a leader for civil rights by
forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Then on May 17 of
that year he spoke to a crowd of 15,000 in Washington, D.C.
6 In
response to that conference, in 1958 Congress passed the first Civil
Rights Act since Reconstruction. Not everyone liked Dr. King's
influence, though. One day, while on a walking tour through Harlem, he
was attacked and stabbed. That did not stop him from doing what he
thought was right. He met with other black leaders and President Dwight
D. Eisenhower to discuss problems.
7 Dr.
King was very interested in the idea of nonviolent protest that
Mohandas Gandhi had been teaching in India. It was an idea that Dr.
King believed in, and he was finally able to go to India in 1959 to
study Gandhi's ideas more fully.
8 Early
in 1960, he and his family moved back to Atlanta. In those days, blacks
could not go and sit down in any café or lunchroom. Dr. King was
arrested there while he waited to be served in a restaurant. He did not
serve jail time, because John F. and Robert Kennedy stepped in to help.
9 Due
to Dr. King's continuing work, segregation was outlawed on all
interstate transportation in 1961. That meant all public transportation
that went from one state to another could not be segregated. During
another demonstration to desegregate public facilities in 1963, he was
arrested in Birmingham, Alabama. It was from the jail there that he
wrote his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." Several white
ministers thought that his efforts were badly timed. He noted that
while countries in Africa and Asia were quickly getting their
independence, American blacks had almost none.
10 In
August 1963 the largest civil rights demonstration in history was held;
almost 250,000 people attended. It was at this time that Dr. King gave
his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
11 When
Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he was the youngest person
to ever receive this honor, and it became a crowning achievement in his
life. Soon afterward, new legislation was passed in Congress. Until
that time, some states had kept blacks from voting by making them pay a
poll tax first. The poor could not afford the tax. Congress outlawed
this practice with the 24th Amendment.
12 Some
states then tried to keep people from voting if they could not read.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 stopped that. A drive to register voters
in Selma, Alabama was met with violent resistance. In protest,
thousands of people marched for five days from Selma to Montgomery, the
capital of Alabama.
13 Civil
rights had changed many things in the South, but little was changing in
the North. There, they were not segregated, but the poor blacks had
fewer opportunities than their white neighbors. Dr. King was determined
to help them, too. In 1966, he moved to a slum apartment in Chicago,
Illinois and began to organize protests. He wanted the city's
discrimination against blacks for jobs, housing, and schools to stop.
14 It
was not long before Dr. King became active in taking a stand against
the war in Vietnam. He complained that all the money spent on weapons
could have been used to make the lives of the poor better. He also
hated the violence of it. Many people thought his comments took
attention away from civil rights.
15 In
November 1967, Dr. King announced a new Poor People's Campaign to help
the poor of all races obtain jobs and freedom. He announced a march to
be held in Washington, D.C. for the next year; unfortunately he was
unable to attend that event.
16 In
March 1968, Dr. King led a march in Memphis, Tennessee. It was the
first of his marches to turn violent. At it, he delivered his "I've
Been to the Mountaintop" speech.
17 On
April 4, as he was standing on the balcony of the hotel where he was
staying, a sniper shot him. His death shocked the nation and spawned
riots in more than 100 American cities. He was buried in Atlanta.
18 Within
a week of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Congress passed the
Open Housing Act. In 1977 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom for his work. No one person has done more to improve
civil rights in the United States than Dr. King. His persuasive ability
united many people in a quest for racial equality. To honor his
achievements, a national holiday was established by Congress in 1986,
and is celebrated on the third Monday of January.
