Martin Luther King Jnr

Ok, I know who this guy is – he had a dream, right?

He certainly did.  Most people can quote Martin Luther King’s famous line “I have a dream”, but fewer people are able to say when and where and, most importantly, why he said it.

So let’s start at the beginning (it’s a very good place to start)…

Martin Luther King Junior was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in the South of the United States of America on 15 January 1929.

Martin Luther King Junior was known as Martin Luther King Junior because his father was Martin Luther King Senior.  True story.

Well, no - actually, it isn’t.

Martin Luther King was in fact born Michael King.  His Dad’s name was Michael King too.  When the family went to Fifth Baptist World Alliance Congress (a big meeting of Baptists from all over the world) in Berlin in 1934, Michael King Senior changed his and his son’s name to Martin Luther King Snr and Jnr, in honour of the German religious reformer Martin Luther.

Martin Luther: German religious bloke from the 16th century 

Although slavery had been ended in the USA in 1865, conditions for Black people in America, particularly in the southern states were still very bad.  They had to use separate facilities, such as schools, shops and public transport.  The Jim Crow Laws that had existed since the 1880s stated that Black facilities had to be ‘separate but equal’.  In reality, they were anything but equal.  In fact, they were much, much worse.

There were three important factors in King’s teenage years that influenced his later teaching and activism (this means actively doing something about something you believe in):

1.  The way his father refused to accept the segregation that was imposed upon him and his family, on one occasion refusing to listen to a policeman who referred to him as “boy” (something white people did to humiliate Black men)
2. He suffered from depression, which was partly due to the humiliation that he felt because of segregation
3. He had a very religious upbringing

He was a super intelligent child and skipped a couple of years of school before going to university at the age of fifteen.  After getting his first degree, in sociology, at the age of 19, he decided that he wanted to go into the church and studied to become a pastor (like a vicar).

As if that wasn’t enough studying, King then went on to gain a PhD (Philosophy Doctorate) from Boston University in 1955.  This meant that from that point onwards he was a Doctor.  Of Philosophy.  You probably wouldn’t have wanted him to operate on you.

After this, he became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, a city in Alabama, one of the southern states of the USA.

He married his wife Coretta Scott on 18 June 1953, with whom he had four children.

Civil Rights

Dr Martin Luther King Jnr became involved in Civil Rights from an early age.

The word ‘civil’ refers to anyone who is an ordinary citizen of a country – people like you and me.  So Civil Rights are the basic rights of ordinary people.  In the USA, during the 1950s, African Americans didn’t have the same rights as white Americans.  King felt, quite rightly, that African Americans deserved the same rights as white Americans and he became involved in the fight for Black Civil Rights.

No, not that sort of fight.

King was a big fan of non-violent protest.  He was inspired by Gandhi, who had used non-violent protest to help India gain independence from the British in the 1930s and 1940s.

Non-violent protest involved peaceful marches and simply sitting where the law said Black people were not allowed to sit.

However, this did lead to criticism from other Black civil rights campaigners, like Malcolm X, who felt that Black people should fight back.  They also accused King of being too friendly with white politicians.  With some people, he just couldn’t win.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The buses of Montgomery were segregated, which meant that Black people had to sit at the back of the bus.  I know, they must have been pretty cool, huh?  Everyone wants to sit at the back of the bus.  Well, actually, no – in Montgomery in the 1950s, people wanted to sit at the front.

Not only did Black people have to sit at the back, but if white people had filled up the seats at the front, Black people were required to give up their seats for any more white people getting on.  As if that wasn’t unfair enough, Black people had to pay for their tickets at the front of the bus, then get off and get back on through the back doors.  Often the bus drivers would drive off before they could get back on!

On 1 December 1955, a Black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery bus.  She was arrested.

A man named E.D. Nixon, who was the president of local branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), organised a meeting of local ministers at Martin Luther King’s church.  They decided to organise a boycott of the buses by all Black people in Montgomery.

Black people stopped using the buses for 17 days.  People rallied together to organise car sharing and walked long distances to work.  The boycott lasted long enough to cause the bus companies to lose lots of money and eventually the courts decided that segregating the buses was unconstitutional.  (This means it was against the constitution of the United States, which is the document that sets the ground rules for all the laws in the country).

The boycott was one of the first major successes of the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King played a big role in it.  He gave a lot of speeches and spent two weeks in prison as a result.  It also demonstrated that King was starting to get under the skin of all the Washington bigwigs who hoped that Black people would just shut up and accept their lot in life.  After the Montgomery Bus Boycott, J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation – the US national police organisation), started investigating King to try and dig some dirt on him to make him and the Civil Rights movement look bad.

'Coloured' (or 'Colored' as the Americans spell it) was a

derogatory (BAD!) term that whites used to described

Black or African-American people

Letter from Birmingham Jail

Hang on, I though Martin Luther King was a good guy?  What was he doing in prison?

In 1957, King and some other ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in order to try and organise the non-violent protest movements.  He was involved in lots of protests and marches against segregation laws.

In April 1963, the SCLC started a series of protests against segregation in the city of Birmingham, in Alabama.  They organised lots of sit-ins.  These were protests where Black people literally just sat in places they weren’t supposed to be, like Whites-Only cafes.  King intended to provoke mass arrests to raise publicity for his cause.

King himself was arrested early on the campaign.  He wrote a letter from his jail cell, which, funnily enough, became known as the Letter from Birmingham Jail.

The letter called for the Civil Rights movement to pursue all legal routes for change and responded to criticisms that change should be sought through the courts only, and not in the streets, as in the Birmingham campaign.

He wrote that Black Americans had been asked to wait for too long and the time had come to demand change – NOW.

The letter was published in lots of magazines and gained a lot of popularity for the strength of its words.

The Birmingham campaign was very successful.  Shortly after King was released in May 1963, thousands of children joined the protests in Birmingham and the city’s police chief, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor turned high pressure hoses and police dogs on them.  The television images of police attacking children caused outrage in the rest of America and around the world.

As a result, Birmingham became less segregated – Connor lost his job and public places became more open to Blacks.

The March on Washington and THAT speech

A series of marches organised and lead by King and the SCLC culminated in the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963. (Washington is the capital city of the United States).  More than 200,000 people were in the crowd when King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech.  His speech imagined a time when the promise of freedom and equality for all would become a reality in America.

After the speech…

Less than a month after King delivered his famous speech, four young Black girls were killed in by a bomb in a Birmingham church.  The dream may have been further off than King hoped.

However, the March on Washington had a major impact in the way Civil Rights were viewed around the world.  It prompted President John F. Kennedy to ask for a new Civil Rights Act to be drawn up.  However, there was still a lot of opposition from politicians and it wasn’t until July 1964 that the Civil Rights Act finally became law in the USA, which made segregation illegal.  The Act ended segregation in public places and banned discrimination (treating someone differently because of the colour of their skin, their religion, their gender or the country they were born in).  The Act is often seen as the crowning triumph of the Civil Rights Movement.

Actual Images of celebrations following the passing

of the Civil Rights Act.  Maybe.

In 1964, Martin Luther was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in it all.

But that wasn’t the end for Civil Rights.  Although African Americans had their rights under federal law (laws affecting the whole country), the individual states didn’t always change their laws straight away.  King kept campaigning to make sure that the laws actually did change.

He also started talking about other causes, championing the cause of poor people (who in many cases were also Black) and protesting against the Vietnam War (many of the soldiers sent to fight there were poor, and therefore often Black).

Death and Legacy

In April 1968, Martin Luther King arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, to support local rubbish collectors who were on strike.

The day after he arrived, the 4 April 1968, he was shot dead on his motel balcony.  James Earl Ray, an escaped prisoner, was convicted of King’s murder and sent to prison.  Many people, however, think Ray wasn’t the only person involved, but that mystery is as yet unsolved!

His death sparked riots in cities across the United States and President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national day of mourning.

He left an enormous legacy behind.  A legacy is the things, both physical objects and ideas, that you leave behind when you die.  Martin Luther King certainly left a lot of brilliant ideas behind.  He had greatly improved Civil Rights for Black people, as well as other minorities and poor people, in America.  Only a few days after his death, Congress passed the 1968 Civil Rights Act.  He is remembered as someone who never gave up on the things he believed in and inspired others to do the same.

Sound Smart!

“Did you know?   President Kennedy was so worried about scandals upsetting the progress of the Civil Rights movement that he authorised wire-tapping of Martin Luther King’s phones by the FBI.”

“Martin Luther King wrote his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on the margins of a newspaper as it was the only paper available to him.”

Impress people by quoting from some of his other speeches!

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

(From a sermon given in Alabama in 1957)

“We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop… And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.”

(Delivered 3 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.  It was his last speech)

Some other fun sources

The BBC Bitesize website has loads of information and videos about the Black Civil Rights movement

This history website also has several interesting videos and articles about Martin Luther King.  You can also browse their other Black History topics.

Watch a clip of Martin Luther King's most famous speech here: