King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1929-1968

KING, MARTIN LUTHER, JR. 1929-1968

Minister and civil rights leader

New Pastor

Martin Luther King, Jr., first attracted national attention as the president of the Montgomery Improvement Agency, which successfully conducted a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1955 to 1956. This role began when, as the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he was elected president of the ad hoc group organized in December 1955 to coordinate a one-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system to protest the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Parks had violated a city ordinance by refusing to give up her seat for a white man.

Success of the Boycott

The success of the one-day boycott was such that it was continued for over a year as blacks refused to ride the buses until the Jim Crow restrictions were lifted. In time the bus company went into bankruptcy, and the city ordinance segregating blacks was struck down as unconstitutional. On 20 December 1956 King was one of the first to board the bus when the Montgomery bus company allowed its riders to occupy seats of their choice.

National Attention

King, who was completing his Ph.D. at Boston University during this time, solidified his support in the black community of Montgomery and gained national attention when his house was bombed 30 January 1956. The threat to the lives of his wife and small children garnered much sympathy. His appeal for calm and his insistence that the boycotters would face their opponents with Christian love gave a special character to the demonstration and the southern civil rights movement that followed. King was noted for his adoption of the Gandhian strategy of nonviolence, in which protesters rejected violence as a means of political and social change.

SCLC

In 1957 King joined a group of Baptist ministers in forming what became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He was elected the first president of what became one of the leading civil rights organizations. His leadership helped form the nonviolent character of much of the civil rights movement. As the leader of the SCLC, King made 208 speeches and traveled more than 780,000 miles during 1957.

Influence of India

In 1958 King published Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, his first book. At a book signing in Harlem King was nearly killed when a deranged woman stabbed him in the chest. King's reaction was to see this act of violence as a product of "the climate of hate and bitterness" that permeated the Linked States. In 1959 King traveled to India to visit the land of Gandhi. He spent the rest of the year demonstrating against segregation.

Effect on Religious Leaders

The religious content of the civil rights movement, due in large part to the influence of King, helped develop the social conscience of American churches. Many U.S. religious leaders and preachers came of age during the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and King's influence on them was hard to underestimate.

Sources:

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954—1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988);

David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Morrow, 1986),