Heroes in History: Martin Luther King
By Jess Bretherton
By Jess Bretherton
Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on the fifteenth of January, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, a city in the deep south of the US. He was named after his father, Martin Luther King Senior and grew up in a family which was made up of his father, mother, grandmother, brother and sister. His father was a minister and preacher at their local church and from this he gained the nickname “Daddy King.” The church played a vital role in the life of blacks in the American South as it was their source of inspiration, comfort and courage.
Martin (Jr.) was a smart boy and, at the age five, he was memorizing passages from the bible. When he was six, he began to sing the Gospel songs for the congregation. And one day, after hearing a guest minister give an impressive sermon, Martin told his parents “Some day, I’m going to get me some big words like that.”
Like all black children, Martin’s childhood and youth were scarred by racial prejudice. When he was only a little boy, he was suddenly told not to play with his two white friends. Their mother sent him home, saying that her children were getting too old to be playing with a black child. Martin’s parents tried to explain to him that he wasn’t inferior and that he should never believe anyone who told him that but he was deeply hurt.
As he grew up, Martin learnt that segregation was a fact of life in the South of the US. One of Martin’s most humiliating moments happened when he was fifteen and in his final year of high school. He had just won a contest for the school’s debating society for his speech “The Negro and the Constitution” and he and his teacher were catching a bus home. As the bus filled up with passengers, all of the seats were taken. Two white passengers got on and the bus driver demanded that Martin and his teacher give their seats up to the white men. Martin refused to until his teacher begged him to stand up. It may have been one small incident, but this was fuel for Martin’s fiery determination.
His father stood up for his rights against the white men. When a policeman stopped him on the road one day and said “Boy, let me see your license,” the Reverend King pointed to his son and said “See that child there? That is a boy, I am a man.” He ran a great risk by saying this but his son admired his courage and his dignity. He would always say what his father said about racism: “I don’t care how long I have to live with the system. I am never going to accept it. I’ll fight it till I die.”
Martin began college when he was fifteen, three years earlier than most. He attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the best black colleges in the country, where open discussion of racial matters was encouraged. His father had his heart set on Martin following him into the church, but Martin thought he might like to become a doctor or a lawyer, professions that he felt would be of more use to his people. The president of the college, Dr. Benjamin Mays, was a minister himself and the combination of learning and inspiration in his sermons impressed Martin and he changed his mind. His father organized a trial sermon for Martin at his own church, the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and large crowds arrived to hear the seventeen-year-old preach. Later that same year he was ordained and made assistant minister to his father. But his education was far from over; he wanted to continue his studies in the North.
In 1948, Martin enrolled at the Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania. He worked extremely hard and in his spare time he read the work of famous theologians and philosophers. The philosopher who impressed him the most was Henry Thoreau who was an abolitionist, a man who believed that slavery must be ended. Henry Thoreau served a jail sentence because he refused to pay taxes to a government that allowed slavery to continue, and in 1849 he wrote the famous essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” explaining why he made his stand against, what he believed to be, a shocking, unacceptable, social injustice.
Martin’s biggest inspiration was Mahatma Ghandi. His philosophy of non-violence, or soul-force, pitted the spiritual strength of India’s people against the political and military strength of imperialist Britain. Ghandi said that, although they must be willing to die for independence, they must not be willing to kill for it-however harshly they were treated. Even though Martin did not realise it then, he would continue Ghandi’s philosophy of non-violent protest with his own campaign for justice of the black people in the US.
Martin graduated at the top of his class from Crozer and went on to continue his studies and Boston University where he began working for his doctorate. He enrolled in an advanced course in the philosophy of religion, studying Hinduism, Shintoism and Islam, as well as Christianity.
A friend introduced him to a young singer named Coretta Scott. She was from the South, like Martin, and had grown up in a black farming family in Alabama. A scholarship had allowed her to study music at the New England Conservatory. Martin was bowled over by her strength and intelligence, her vivid personality and her strength of character. On the eighteenth of June, 1953, they were married by Martin’s father at Coretta’s home in Marion.
Both Martin and Coretta finished their studies later that year, and Martin began to look for a job. He wanted to teach theology at a college or university but thought that he should work as a minister for a few years first. The best offer that he received was from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In deciding to take the position at Dexter Avenue, Martin faced the prospect of moving south; back to segregation, discrimination, and the threat of violence that hung over the blacks in the south.
In the spring of 1955, Martin finished his thesis and travelled to Boston to receive his degree. He was awarded a doctorate in theology and was from then on known as “Dr.” or “Reverend” King. At this time Coretta was expecting a child, Yolanda, who would be the first of their four children.
The position of black people in Montgomery was typical of many other areas in the South. Segregation systems were still in place, even after The Supreme Court of the United States had decided in 1954 to abolish the segregation policies in schools. Years of threats, cruelty and insult had made many of the black population afraid to stand up for themselves in even the smallest way. The only way to stay alive and to make some sort of life for themselves was to keep quiet and accept what came, hoping that better things awaited them in Heaven. Martin Luther King saw this and he knew that better things could never come in their world of they went on accepting such a life.
The turning point of Martin’s life came on the evening of December the 1st, 19555, when a black lady by the name of Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and was subsequently arrested. Martin, along with many other leaders in the black community, organised a boycott of the bus service. This meant that no black person would travel on any bus and it would not only bring the end of segregation to the notice of everyone in America, but it would also deprive the bus company of a great deal of money. The bus boycott was a peaceful act of protest and one that gave the black community a new feeling of strength and unity-and hope for better things to come. That very same afternoon, they formed an organisation, the Montgomery Improvement Association, to keep an eye on the boycott and, to Martin’s surprise, elected him to be president. He was only twenty-six at the time and his first task was to address the mass meeting to be held that evening.
Martin Luther King spoke in front of a crowd of over 4,000 people that night, including journalists, photographers and television crews. When he finished speaking and sat down the crowd burst into an uproar of singing and cheering. They had found a cause, they had found unity, they had found hope, and they had found a leader. The civil rights movement in the US had begun and Martin Luther King was at its head.
Ralph Abernathy rose next to read out the list of three demands that the Montgomery Improvement Association wanted to present to city officials and the bus company. The boycott would continue unless these demands were met:
1) Bus drivers would treat black passengers with courtesy.
2) Passengers would be seated on a first-come, first-serve basis, with blacks beginning from the backs and whites from the front.
3) The bus company must immediately hire black drivers on routes through black areas.
It became clear though, that neither the city nor the bus company had any intention of desegregating the buses. But the black people had found the road to freedom and nothing was going to stop them, no matter how long it was going to take for their victory to come.
The Montgomery whites did not take well to being upstaged by “uppity niggers” so they adopted the get-tough policy and joined the deeply racist “White Citizens’ Council.” By January, King and his family were being bombarded with hate mail, thirty or forty threatening letters a day. They received telephone calls too. Sometimes it was just reporters or Montgomery Improvement Association staff wanting information but other times it was someone calling to deliver a death threat. These threats became real when King, who was speaking at a mass meeting, was told that his house had been bombed. He rushed home to find that a bomb had been thrown onto the front porch. The explosion had shattered windows and split the porch in two but no one had been hurt.
The city was determined to defeat them and searched out an old anti-boycott law. Under it, eighty-nine people, including King, were charged. King was the first to be tried and convicted by an all white jury, but his lawyers filed an appeal and the trial of the others was put off until a higher court could hear the case. Even Martin himself was losing hope.
It was during a court session that King received the news that he had been waiting for. The United States Supreme Court had affirmed a US District Court decision declaring Alabama’s state and civil laws requiring segregation on the buses unconstitutional. The quiet, determined fight by the Montgomery Improvement Association had been successful.
The success in Montgomery gave courage to thousands of blacks across the South and protests and boycotts sprang up everywhere. But to be successful they needed to work together so the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded to advise and help them and Martin Luther King was made president. But fame brought problems. King was in tremendous demand as a speaker and in 1957 and 1958 he travelled thousands of miles, giving 208 speeches all over the country as well as working as a minister and president of the SCLC. One week he might be in jail on a civil rights issue and the next he would be a distinguished celebrity in New York, signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom.
Martin’s next brush with death was at a book signing when a middle-aged black woman walked up to him and asked him if he was Martin Luther King. When he answered that he was she let out a cry and plunged a razor-sharp letter opener into his chest. She was a homeless vagrant who had spent years in and out of mental hospitals. The surgeon later told him, after the letter opener had been removed, that if he had sneezed he would have died.
Later that year King submitted his resignation to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He and Coretta moved the family to Atlanta, where King became co-pastor, with his father, of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Martin Luther King was soon arrested again for participating in peaceful protests at a college where a black student had been refused service at a bus-terminal lunch counter. He put on trial in which the jury decided he was guilty and sentenced him to four months hard labour at the state penitentiary. King was driven to the state penitentiary and was shut, alone, into a filthy cell that was alive with cockroaches. The next morning, Coretta received a phone call from Senator John F. Kennedy, the democratic candidate at the time. He said that he had been shocked to hear of her husband’s sentence and offered his help. Coretta accepted the offer gratefully and a few days later the judge reversed his decision. Not only was King out of jail, but Kennedy had just earned one many of the black’s votes and he went on to win the presidency.
During the summer of 1961, groups of black and white students from the North set out to travel south by bus, staging sit-ins at bus terminals and restaurants along the way. They called themselves the” Freedom Riders.” When the students reached Alabama, they were confronted by a group of KKK Klansman who severely beat the students and burnt the bus. Martin Luther King decided that the students needed his help but one evening when he was speaking at his church, asking for support for the Freedom Riders, a mob of white extremists tried to burn the church down. Luckily, a group of National Guard soldiers arrived just in time to put down the riot and help the people inside the church to safety. Once again, King had barely escaped with his life.
Because of the bravery of the Freedom Riders and the reporters and cameramen who risked their lives to get their stories, the world saw the terrible things that ordinary men and women were suffering and the Jim Crow laws (laws that were created in the southern states after the Civil War that separated the blacks from the whites and helped to keep the blacks poor and unequal) were dealt a decisive blow. The US government ruled that segregation at bus stations must come to an end.
The protest sit-ins and boycotts began again in April of 1963. Their aim was to force the city to employ blacks in better jobs and to stop segregation. During the first large march on April 12, 1963, King was arrested again and taken to Birmingham jail. While he was in jail, a group of white churchmen wrote to a local paper and said that he was an outsider and was just stirring up trouble and urged black people to give up demonstrating. King was deeply hurt but he could not reply as he was forbidden to have writing paper, so instead he collected any scraps of paper he could find and wrote down all he believed. This was to become known as “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important documents of the civil right movement.
King was soon released and set out to appeal to students to give their support to the cause. To his astonishment, not only the students came forward, but little children too. He thought very seriously about whether to let them participate or not but he came to the conclusion that it was their future at stake so they had a right to join the demonstrations. On May 3, 1963, young people gathered at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to march to downtown Birmingham, chanting “We want freedom.” They were met by all the law enforcement that “Bull” Conner (the white commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham) could summon. When the students refused to back off, Bull Conner ordered his men to attack, spraying them with powerful jets and setting their dogs on them. Bull Conner laughed aloud and said, “Look at those niggers run,” but all the time the television cameras were recording and the next day people all across the country saw those scenes.
On May 5, 1963, the students returned to their marching, but this time when Bull Conner ordered his men to attack the protestors they refused. The police moved back from their posts and let the protestors through. Martin Luther King’s faith had been justified. Non-violence had triumphed, though at a high cost. Over 3,000 demonstrators had been arrested during the protests.
After the victory at Birmingham, a march on Washington was organized. It took place on August 28, 1963, and commemorated the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the states. Martin Luther King hoped 100,000 people would gather for the protest but the television reports that morning had spoken of a crowd of only 25,000. When King and his wife arrived at where the marchers were gathering they found that there were not 25,000 marchers there but 250,000. Martin Luther king was only 34, but he was the figure that stood for all they believed.
He had planned his speech carefully, so much depended on him finding the right words, but he put aside the notes for his speech and spoke from his heart. He spoke the greatest speech of the civil rights movement, a speech that was to become known by just four words, “I have a dream.”
It was to be a short victory though. Only a few weeks later, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed, killing four young girls and injuring many. A few months later and John F. Kennedy was assassinated. With Kennedy dead, America was looking for a new president and it was vital that the blacks could vote for a president who could help their cause.
In October 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize but he remained focused on his target. In January 1965, he launched the campaign for marches to begin on the ballot boxes. The authorities forbid them to march so King led them on walks to the county courthouse. The people were met by armed police and beaten into submission. Lyndon Johnson condemned the violence and began to prepare a new Voting Rights Bill which came into force, giving the federal government the power to see that voting was fair and free of discrimination.
Martin Luther King was assassinated on the 4th of April, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. Over 100,000 people gathered to pay tribute to him, 100,000 people that Martin Luther King had influenced and inspired. If Martin Luther King had not decided all those years ago that he was not going to live in a world were free people were no better than slaves the world would not be the same. There would have been much more violence, black people would not have submitted to the power of the whites for much longer. Without a leader, one united cause, they would have resorted to whatever they could do to throw off the hands of their oppressors.
Though it has been forty years since the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., his influence has continued through the years and generations. Many of the protest groups that we see today are based upon the philosophy of non-violent action that was created first by Ghandi but then reintroduced by King. Violence is condemned by today’s society and so are those who resort to it.
Martin Luther King brought the hardship and struggle of, not only blacks, but poor and impoverished people to the world’s attention. Because of King, Lyndon Johnson changed the Voting Rights Bill to allow blacks to vote. Because of King, blacks are now people, human beings, not just something to be left in the gutter. And, though there are sometimes problems, man has learnt to coexist with others. No matter what their skin colour is.
References:
Martin Luther King, Valerie Schloredt & Pam Brown, 1988, Exley, Hungary
Collier’s Encyclopaedia, 1990 edition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-bio.html
http://www.thekingcenter.org/
http://martinlutherking.org/
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/special/mlk/
http://www.pocanticohills.org/taverna/98/king.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/king_martin_luther.shtml
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAkingML.htm
http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/mlking.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/4/newsid_2453000/2453987.stm
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/history/us/MLK/
