THE READER'S COMPANION TO AMERICAN HISTORY
Dec. 1, 1991, n.p.

© 1991 Houghton Mifflin.

King, Martin Luther, Jr.

By Eric Foner and John A. Garraty

     (1929-1968), civil rights leader. One of the world's best-known advocates of nonviolent social change, King was born in Atlanta. As a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and at Boston University, he deepened his understanding of theological scholarship and of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent strategy for social change. He received a Ph.D. in theology in 1955 and became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

     In December 1955, after Montgomery civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to obey the city's policy mandating segregation on buses, black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King as president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association. As the boycott continued during 1956, King gained national prominence for his exceptional oratorical skills and personal courage. His house was bombed, and he and other boycott leaders were convicted on charges of conspiring to interfere with the bus company's operations. But in December 1956 Montgomery's buses were desegregated when the Supreme Court declared Alabama's segregation laws unconstitutional.

     In 1957, seeking to build upon the success in Montgomery, King and other black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president, King emphasized the goal of black voting rights when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. He traveled to West Africa to attend the independence celebration of Ghana and toured India, increasing his understanding of Gandhi's ideas. At the end of 1959, he resigned from Dexter and returned to Atlanta where SCLC headquarters were located.

     Although increasingly portrayed as the preeminent black spokesman, King did not mobilize mass protest activity during SCLC's first few years. Then southern black college students launched a wave of sit-in protests in 1960. Although King sympathized with their movement and spoke at the founding meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960, he soon became the target of criticisms from SNCC activists. Even King's joining a student sit-in and his subsequent arrest in October 1960 did not allay the tensions. (After the arrest presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's sympathetic telephone call to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, helped attract crucial black support for Kennedy's campaign.) Conflicts between King and the younger militants were also evident when SCLC and SNCC assisted the Albany (Georgia) movement's campaign of mass protests in 1961-1962.

     After achieving few of their objectives in Albany, King and his staff initiated a major campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, where white police officials were notorious for their antiblack attitudes. In 1963, clashes between unarmed black demonstrators and police with attack dogs and fire hoses generated newspaper headlines throughout the world. Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities culminated in a march on August 28, 1963, attracting more than 250,000 protesters to Washington, D.C. Addressing the marchers from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous I Have a Dream oration.

     During the year following the march, King's renown as a nonviolent leader grew, and, in 1964, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite the accolades, however, King faced strong challenges to his leadership. Malcolm X's message of self-defense and black nationalism expressed the anger of northern urban blacks more effectively than did King's moderation, and in 1966 King encountered strong criticism from " black power" proponent Stokely Carmichael. Shortly afterward, white counterprotestors in Chicago physically assaulted King during an unsuccessful effort to transfer nonviolent protest techniques to the North. Nevertheless, King remained committed to nonviolence. Early in 1968, he initiated a "poor people's campaign" to confront economic problems not addressed by civil rights reforms.

     King's ability to achieve his objectives was also limited by the increasing resistance he encountered from national political leaders. As urban racial violence escalated, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover intensified his efforts to discredit King, and King's public criticism of American intervention in the Vietnam War soured his relations with the Johnson administration. When he delivered his last speech during a bitter sanitation workers' strike in Memphis, he admitted, "We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop." The following evening, April 4, 1968, he was assassinated by James Earl Ray.

     After his death, King remained a controversial symbol of the civil rights struggle, revered by many for his martyrdom on behalf of nonviolence and condemned by others for his insurgent views. In 1986 King's birthday, January 15, became a federal holiday.

     Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988); David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986); David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (1970).

     Clayborne Carson


Accessed on 04/28/2008 from SIRS Researcher via SIRS Knowledge Source <http://www.sirs.com>