King, Martin Luther, Jr

King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929–1968), civil rights leader, preeminent voice of the post–World War II African American freedom movement.Born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and namesake of a prominent Baptist minister, King entered Atlanta's Morehouse College at age fifteen. After graduation he enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he encountered Walter Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel theology, Reinhold Niebuhr's justifications for the use of coercion to combat evil, and Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent direct action. Enrolling at Boston University, he earned a Ph.D. in systematic theology (1955). He married Coretta Scott in 1953; they had four children.

In 1954, King was appointed pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. On 1 December 1955, the arrest of Rosa Parks for violating the city's racial‐segregation ordinances sparked a bus boycott, and local organizers selected the twenty‐six‐year‐old King to lead it. “It happened so fast,” King remembered, “that I did not even have time to think it through.” At the boycott's first mass meeting, King delivered a speech that revealed not only his oratorical gifts and his expansive vision of African American liberation, but also a political strategy. Declaring “the only weapon we have is the weapon of nonviolence,” King situated the movement within U.S. civic traditions and Cold War politics. “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation we couldn't do this,” he said, “but the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” Underlining the threat that black protest could pose to U.S. foreign policy, King envisioned God proclaiming to the United States: “Be still and know that I am God—and if you don't obey Me I'm going to break the backbone of your power—and cast you out of the arms of your international and national relationships.” He concluded with a prophetic call for African‐American self‐affirmation: “Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a race of people, black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.’ ” Nonviolent direct action, Cold War realism, and appeals to what he later called “a sense of somebodiness” among African Americans summed up King's ensuing strategy. After a 381‐day bus boycott, a federal district court declared Alabama's bus‐segregation statutes unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court concurred. King told the Montgomery bus boycott story in Stride toward Freedom (1958).

Following up this victory, King in 1957 founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Based in the black churches, SCLC led a series of campaigns in southern cities to expose the reality of racism for all to see, with the goal of securing federal civil rights legislation. A self‐described reformer, King invoked the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the “American dream”—even though he declared in 1957 that he “could never accommodate [him]self” to capitalism “because it denies necessities to the many to provide luxuries to the few.” Moving to Atlanta in 1960, he became co‐pastor, with his father, of Ebenezer Baptist Church. That fall he was imprisoned following a sit‐in at an Atlanta snack bar. John F. Kennedy's intervention to secure his release helped Kennedy solidify the black vote in the November presidential election.

King's strategy failed in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, when shrewd local authorities responded mildly to the demonstrations, but succeeded spectacularly in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. As the television cameras rolled, Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor battled peaceful demonstrators with firehoses and snarling dogs, and imprisoned King, whose “Letter from Birmingham Jail” eloquently summarized his goals and strategy. That August, thousands flocked to Washington, D.C., for an interracial civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 resulted directly from these events. Further demonstrations led by King and SCLC, including one in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Selma demonstrations, which also triggered police violence, culminated in a major demonstration at the capital in Montgomery, where 25,000 protesters heard King's powerful oratory and sang the movement's anthem, “We Shall Overcome.”

King's protests were predicated on Cold War realpolitik. America was “battling for the hearts of men in Asia and Africa,” he declared, “and they aren't going to respect the United States if she deprives men and women of the basic rights of life because of the color of their skins.” Images of violence against protestors, broadcast worldwide, forced the federal government to intervene. The movement that King symbolized brought about the 1964–1965 civil rights legislation, which, along with the Supreme Court's earlier Brown v. Board of Education ruling, stands as enduring achievements of a freedom movement that toppled the formal racial caste system in the United States and created a new black sense of self.

By 1965, as King took up the issues of poverty and structural racism in northern cities, and began to criticize the Vietnam War, his popularity waned. Young black activists in the Student Non‐Violent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, together with the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, urged a more militant approach. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, seizing upon King's sexual indiscretions, sought to destroy him by a campaign of spying, blackmail, and humiliation. On 4 April 1968, as he lent support to striking garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee, King was assassinated by James Earl Ray, a white racist who was convicted of the crime, though aspects of the killing remain unclear.

The brief career of Martin Luther King Jr. took him to the heights of world leadership, capped by the Nobel Peace Prize (1964), and led him to die fighting for garbage workers, urging a nonviolent revolution of the poor, and denouncing America's military role in Southeast Asia. His legacy as a symbol of nonviolent direct action and progressive social change continues to resonate throughout the world. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed as a national holiday on the third Monday in January.
See also African American Religion; Baptists; Black Nationalism; Civil Rights Movement; Segregation, Racial; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

David Levering Lewis , King: A Critical Biography, 1970.
David Garrow , Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1986.
Adam Fairclough , To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., 1987.
Taylor Branch , Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63, 1988.
Adam Fairclough , Martin Luther King, Jr., 1995.

Timothy B. Tyson