Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Overview
American religious leader and civil-rights activist
original name Michael Luther King, Jr.
born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee
U.S. civil-rights leader.
The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, King became an adherent of
nonviolence while in college. Ordained a Baptist minister himself in
1954, he became pastor of a church in Montgomery, Ala.; the following
year he received a doctorate from Boston University. He was selected to
head the Montgomery Improvement Association, whose boycott efforts
eventually ended the city’s policies of racial segregation on public
transportation. In 1957 he formed the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and began lecturing nationwide, urging active nonviolence to
achieve civil rights for African Americans. In 1960 he returned to
Atlanta to become copastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church.
He was arrested and jailed for protesting segregation at a lunch
counter; the case drew national attention, and presidential candidate
John F. Kennedy interceded to obtain his release. In 1963 King helped
organize the March on Washington, an assembly of more than 200,000
protestors at which he made his famous “I have a dream” speech. The
march influenced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and King
was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1965 he was criticized
from within the civil-rights movement for yielding to state troopers at
a march in Selma, Ala., and for failing in the effort to change
Chicago’s housing segregation policies. Thereafter he broadened his
advocacy, addressing the plight of the poor of all races and opposing
the Vietnam War. In 1968 he went to Memphis, Tenn., to support a strike
by sanitation workers; there on April 4, he was assassinated by James
Earl Ray. A U.S. national holiday is celebrated in King’s honour on the
third Monday in January.
Main
American religious leader and civil-rights activist
original name Michael Luther King, Jr.
born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee
Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights
movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by
assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement’s
success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the
South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national
prominence through the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, promoting nonviolent tactics such as the massive March on
Washington (1963) to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Peace in 1964.
Early years
King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the
tradition of the Southern black ministry: both his father and maternal
grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated,
and King’s father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the
prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The family lived on
Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,” the bustling “black
Wall Street,” home to some of the country’s largest and most prosperous
black businesses and black churches in the years before the civil rights
movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a
loving extended family.
This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from
experiencing the prejudices then common in the South. He never forgot
the time, at about age six, when one of his white playmates announced
that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because
the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in
these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left
him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart
attack while attending a parade without his parents’ permission, the
12-year-old Martin attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story
window.
In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a
special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting
promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college,
however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut; it was
his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial
experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was
shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. “Negroes and
whites go [to] the same church,” he noted in a letter to his parents. “I
never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” This
summer experience in the North only deepened young Martin’s growing
hatred of racial segregation.
At Morehouse, King favoured studies in medicine and law, but these
were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as
his father had urged. King’s mentor at Morehouse was the college
president, Benjamin Mays, a social gospel activist whose rich oratory
and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King, Sr.
Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the black
community of complacency in the face of oppression, and he prodded the
black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the
hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was
not lost on the teenage Martin. King graduated from Morehouse in 1948.
King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in
Chester, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi’s
philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary
Protestant theologians and earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951.
Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president of
Crozer’s student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white
students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of recommendation
for King, “The fact that with our student body largely Southern in
constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such
a position is in itself no mean recommendation.” From Crozer, King went
to Boston University, where, in seeking a firm foundation for his own
theological and ethical inclinations, he studied man’s relationship to
God and received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled “A
Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and
Henry Nelson Wieman.”
The Montgomery bus boycott
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a native Alabamian who was
studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. They were married in
1953 and had four children. King had been pastor of the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, slightly more than a year when
the city’s small group of civil rights advocates decided to contest
racial segregation on that city’s public bus system. On December 1,
1955, Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to surrender her
bus seat to a white passenger, and as a consequence was arrested for
violating the city’s segregation law. Activists formed the Montgomery
Improvement Association to boycott the transit system and chose King as
their leader. He had the advantage of being a young, well-trained man
who was too new in town to have made enemies; he was generally
respected, and his family connections and professional standing would
enable him to find another pastorate should the boycott fail.
In his first speech to the group as its president, King declared:
We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown
an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the
feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here
tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with
anything less than freedom and justice.
These words introduced to the nation a fresh voice, a skillful
rhetoric, an inspiring personality, and in time a dynamic new doctrine
of civil struggle. Although King’s home was dynamited and his family’s
safety threatened, he continued to lead the boycott until, one year and
a few weeks later, the city’s buses were desegregated.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Recognizing the need for a mass movement to capitalize on the successful
Montgomery action, King set about organizing the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC), which gave him a base of operation
throughout the South, as well as a national platform from which to
speak. King lectured in all parts of the country and discussed
race-related issues with civil-rights and religious leaders at home and
abroad. In February 1959 he and his party were warmly received by
India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru; as the result of a brief
discussion with followers of Gandhi about the Gandhian concepts of
peaceful noncompliance (satyagraha), King became increasingly convinced
that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to
oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. King also looked to
Africa for inspiration. “The liberation struggle in Africa has been the
greatest single international influence on American Negro students,” he
wrote. “Frequently I hear them say that if their African brothers can
break the bonds of colonialism, surely the American Negro can break Jim
Crow.”
In 1960 King moved to his native city of Atlanta, where he became
co-pastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. At this post
he devoted most of his time to the SCLC and the civil rights movement,
declaring that the “psychological moment has come when a concentrated
drive against injustice can bring great, tangible gains.” His thesis was
soon tested as he agreed to support the sit-in demonstrations undertaken
by local black college students. In late October he was arrested with 33
young people protesting segregation at the lunch counter in an Atlanta
department store. Charges were dropped, but King was sentenced to
Reidsville State Prison Farm on the pretext that he had violated his
probation on a minor traffic offense committed several months earlier.
The case assumed national proportions, with widespread concern over his
safety, outrage at Georgia’s flouting of legal forms, and the failure of
President Dwight Eisenhower to intervene. King was released only upon
the intercession of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—an
action so widely publicized that it was felt to have contributed
substantially to Kennedy’s slender election victory eight days later.
In the years from 1960 to 1965 King’s influence reached its zenith.
Handsome, eloquent, and doggedly determined, King quickly caught the
attention of the news media, particularly of the producers of that
budding medium of social change—television. He understood the power of
television to nationalize and internationalize the struggle for civil
rights, and his well-publicized tactics of active nonviolence (sit-ins,
protest marches) aroused the devoted allegiance of many blacks and
liberal whites in all parts of the country, as well as support from the
administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But there
were also notable failures, as at Albany, Georgia (1961–62), when King
and his colleagues failed to achieve their desegregation goals for
public parks and other facilities.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
The letter from the Birmingham jail
In Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, King’s campaign to end
segregation at lunch counters and in hiring practices drew nationwide
attention when police turned dogs and fire hoses on the demonstrators.
King was jailed along with large numbers of his supporters, including
hundreds of schoolchildren. His supporters did not, however, include all
the black clergy of Birmingham, and he was strongly opposed by some of
the white clergy who had issued a statement urging African Americans not
to support the demonstrations. From the Birmingham jail King wrote a
letter of great eloquence in which he spelled out his philosophy of
nonviolence:
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so
forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling
for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action.
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a
tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is
forced to confront the issue.
Near the end of the Birmingham campaign, in an effort to draw
together the multiple forces for peaceful change and to dramatize to the
nation and to the world the importance of solving the U.S. racial
problem, King joined other civil rights leaders in organizing the
historic March on Washington. On August 28, 1963, an interracial
assembly of more than 200,000 gathered peaceably in the shadow of the
Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law.
Here the crowds were uplifted by the emotional strength and prophetic
quality of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he emphasized
his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers.
The rising tide of civil rights agitation produced, as King had
hoped, a strong effect on national opinion and resulted in the passage
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, authorizing the federal government to
enforce desegregation of public accommodations and outlawing
discrimination in publicly owned facilities, as well as in employment.
That eventful year was climaxed by the award to King of the Nobel Prize
for Peace in Oslo, Norway, in December. “I accept this award today with
an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of
mankind,” said King in his acceptance speech. “I refuse to accept the
idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally
incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever
confronts him.”
Challenges of the final years
The first signs of opposition to King’s tactics from within the civil
rights movement surfaced during the March 1965 demonstrations at Selma,
Alabama, which were aimed at dramatizing the need for a federal
voting-rights law that would provide legal support for the
enfranchisement of African Americans in the South. King organized an
initial march from Selma to the state capitol building in Montgomery but
did not lead it himself; the marchers were turned back by state troopers
with nightsticks and tear gas. He was determined to lead a second march,
despite an injunction by a federal court and efforts from Washington to
persuade him to cancel it. Heading a procession of 1,500 marchers, black
and white, he set out across Pettus Bridge outside Selma until the group
came to a barricade of state troopers. But, instead of going on and
forcing a confrontation, he led his followers in kneeling in prayer and
then unexpectedly turned back. This decision cost King the support of
many young radicals who were already faulting him for being too
cautious. The suspicion of an “arrangement” with federal and local
authorities—vigorously but not entirely convincingly denied—clung to the
Selma affair. The country was nevertheless aroused, resulting in the
passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Throughout the nation, impatience with the lack of greater
substantive progress encouraged the growth of black militancy.
Especially in the slums of the large Northern cities, King’s religious
philosophy of nonviolence was increasingly questioned. The rioting in
the Watts district of Los Angeles (August 1965) demonstrated the depth
of unrest among urban African Americans. In an effort to meet the
challenge of the ghetto, King and his forces initiated a drive against
racial discrimination in Chicago at the beginning of the following year.
The chief target was to be segregation in housing. After a spring and
summer of rallies, marches, and demonstrations, an agreement was signed
between the city and a coalition of African Americans, liberals, and
labour organizations, calling for various measures to enforce the
existing laws and regulations with respect to housing. But this
agreement was to have little effect; the impression remained that King’s
Chicago campaign was nullified partly because of the opposition of that
city’s powerful mayor, Richard J. Daley, and partly because of the
unexpected complexities of Northern racism.
In Illinois and Mississippi alike, King was now being challenged and
even publicly derided by young black-power enthusiasts. Whereas King
stood for patience, middle-class respectability, and a measured approach
to social change, the sharp-tongued, blue jean–clad young urban radicals
stood for confrontation and immediate change. In the latter’s eyes, the
suit-wearing, calm-spoken civil rights leader was irresponsibly passive
and old beyond his years (though King was only in his 30s): more a
member of the other side of the generation gap than their revolutionary
leader. Malcolm X went so far as to call King’s tactics “criminal”:
“Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend
himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”
In the face of mounting criticism, King broadened his approach to
include concerns other than racism. On April 4, 1967, at Riverside
Church in New York City and again on the 15th at a mammoth peace rally
in that city, he committed himself irrevocably to opposing U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War. Once before, in early January 1966, he
had condemned the war, but official outrage from Washington and
strenuous opposition within the black community itself had caused him to
relent. He next sought to widen his base by forming a coalition of the
poor of all races that would address itself to such economic problems as
poverty and unemployment. It was a version of populism, seeking to
enroll janitors, hospital workers, seasonal labourers, and the destitute
of Appalachia, along with the student militants and pacifist
intellectuals. His endeavours along these lines, however, did not
engender much support in any segment of the population.
Meanwhile, the strain and changing dynamics of the civil rights
movement had taken a toll on King, especially in the final months of his
life. “I’m frankly tired of marching. I’m tired of going to jail,” he
admitted in 1968. “Living every day under the threat of death, I feel
discouraged every now and then and feel my work’s in vain, but then the
Holy Spirit revives my soul again.”
King’s plans for a Poor People’s March to Washington were interrupted
in the spring of 1968 by a trip to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of a
strike by that city’s sanitation workers. In the opinion of many of his
followers and biographers, King seemed to sense his end was near. As
King prophetically told a crowd at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis on
April 3, on the night before he died, “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.” The next day, while standing on
the second-story balcony of the Lorraine Motel where he and his
associates were staying, King was killed by a sniper’s bullet; the
killing sparked riots and disturbances in over 100 cities across the
country. On March 10, 1969, the accused white assassin, James Earl Ray,
pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Ray later recanted his confession, claiming lawyers had coerced him
into confessing and that he was the victim of a conspiracy. In a
surprising turn of events, members of the King family eventually came to
Ray’s defense. King’s son Dexter met with the reputed assassin in March
1997 and then publicly joined Ray’s plea for a reopening of his case.
When Ray died on April 23, 1998, Coretta King declared, “America will
never have the benefit of Mr. Ray’s trial, which would have produced new
revelations about the assassination…as well as establish the facts
concerning Mr. Ray’s innocence.” Although the U.S. government conducted
several investigations into the murder of King and each time concluded
that Ray was the sole assassin, the killing remains a matter of
controversy.
Posthumous reputation and legacy
King ranks among the most analyzed men in American history. As with the
study of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, there
is an exhaustive range of perspectives on the man and his legacy, many
of them still evolving as new information about his life becomes
available. What is clear today, decades after his death, is that King’s
extraordinary influence has hardly waned and that his life, thought, and
character were more complex than biographers initially realized or
portrayed. His chapter in history is further proof of the maxim that
martyred heroes never really die—they live on in memories, collectively
and individually, and their legacies take on a life of their own.
King became an object of international homage after his death.
Schools, roads, and buildings throughout the United States were named
after him in the 1970s and ’80s, and the U.S. Congress voted to observe
a national holiday in his honour, beginning in 1986, on the third Monday
of January. In 1991 the Lorraine Motel where King was shot became the
National Civil Rights Museum. In July 1998 a sculpture of King was
unveiled over the door to the west front of Westminster Abbey in London,
an area of honour reserved for 20th-century “victims of the struggle for
human rights.” And in December 1999 the U.S. National Capital Planning
Commission approved a site in the Tidal Basin of Washington, D.C., for a
Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial, the first time in American history
that a private individual has been accorded such distinction.
With many of these tributes, however, came controversy and sometimes
heated debate. Many critics, during King’s lifetime and after, accused
him of harboring communist sympathies, associating with known
communists, and undermining the American war effort in Vietnam. These
charges, along with allegations of King’s marital infidelities,
attracted the attention and surveillance of J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal
Bureau of Investigation during King’s lifetime, and they resurfaced in
the 1970s and ’80s during debate in the U.S. Congress over the King
holiday. King’s personal life and character were scrutinized further
when the public learned in 1989–90 that King had plagiarized much of his
academic work, including his doctoral dissertation.
The posthumous reverence of King, and whether it has helped or
ironically harmed King’s reputation and the cause of civil rights, has
been widely discussed. King’s longtime confidant Ralph Abernathy, for
example, claimed in And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (1986) that his
controversial discussion of King’s private life was necessary to stem
the deification of his friend, “to let everyone know that …[King’s]
humanity did not detract from the legend but only made it more
believable for other human beings.” Similarly, scholars and social
activists who contributed to We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and the Black Freedom Struggle (1993) argued that the lionization of
King had actually caused the civil rights movement to lose sight of the
grassroots efforts critical to social change; the perception of King as
a superman, a saviour, a Christ-like Messiah, they argued, discouraged
initiative and self-reliance and left African Americans dependent on the
appearance of yet another Great Man to save them. According to religious
studies professor Michael Eric Dyson, the canonization of King has also
diluted King’s message, smoothed out its sharp edge, and transformed
King into “a Safe Negro.” “Today right-wing conservatives can quote
King’s speeches in order to criticize affirmative action,” he wrote in I
May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (2000),
“while schoolchildren grow up learning only about the great pacifist,
not the hard-nosed critic of economic injustice.” As these posthumous
debates and tributes make plain, King’s legacy has not waned in social
and political relevance.
Assessment
Martin Luther King, Jr., was the seminal voice during one of the most
turbulent periods in American history. His contribution to the civil
rights movement was that of a leader who was able to turn protests into
a crusade and to translate local conflicts into moral issues of
nationwide, ultimately worldwide, concern. By force of will and a
charismatic personality, he successfully awakened African Americans and
galvanized them into action. He won his greatest victories by appealing
to the consciences of white Americans and thus bringing political
leverage to bear on the federal government in Washington. The strategy
that broke the segregation laws of the South, however, proved inadequate
to solve more complex racial problems elsewhere.
King was only 39 at the time of his death—a leader in midpassage who
never wavered in his insistence that nonviolence must remain the
essential tactic of the movement nor in his faith that all Americans
would some day attain racial and economic justice. Though he likely will
remain a subject of controversy, his eloquence, self-sacrifice, and
courageous role as a social leader have secured his ranking among the
most influential men of recent history.
David L. Lewis
Ed.
Encyclopaedia Britannica