The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968) was the charismatic leader of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. He directed the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, which attracted scrutiny by a wary, divided nation, but his leadership and the resulting Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation brought him fame. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate nonviolent protests and delivered over 2,500 speeches addressing racial injustice, but his life was cut short by an assassin in 1968.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Michael King Sr., pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta Williams, a Spelman College graduate and former schoolteacher. King lived with his parents, a sister, and a brother in the Victorian home of his maternal grandparents.
After attending the World Baptist Alliance in Berlin in 1934, King Sr. changed his and his son's name from Michael King to Martin Luther King, after the Protestant reformist. King Sr. was inspired by Martin Luther's courage of confronting institutionalized evil.
King studied sociology and considered law school while reading voraciously. He was fascinated by Henry David Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience" and its idea of noncooperation with an unjust system. King decided that social activism was his calling and religion the best means to that end. He was ordained as a minister in February 1948, the year he graduated with a sociology degree at age 19.
In September 1948, King entered the predominately White Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania. He read works by great theologians but despaired that no philosophy was complete within itself. Then, hearing a lecture about Mahatma Gandhi, he became captivated by his concept of nonviolent resistance. King concluded that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through nonviolence, could be a powerful weapon for his people.
In 1951, King graduated at the top of his class with a Bachelor of Divinity degree. In September of that year, he enrolled in doctoral studies at Boston University's School of Theology.
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a singer studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. The couple married on June 18, 1953.
When King arrived in Montgomery to join the Dexter Avenue church, Rosa Parks, secretary of the local NAACP chapter, had been arrested for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a White man. Parks' December 1, 1955, arrest presented the perfect opportunity to make a case for desegregating the transit system.
E.D. Nixon, former head of the local NAACP chapter, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a close friend of King, contacted King and other clergymen to plan a citywide bus boycott. The group drafted demands and stipulated that no Black person would ride the buses on December 5.
That day, nearly 20,000 Black citizens refused bus rides. Because Black people comprised 90% of the passengers, most buses were empty. When the boycott ended 381 days later, Montgomery's transit system was nearly bankrupt.
On February 1959 he laid six principles, explaining that nonviolence:
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Is not a method for cowards; it does resist
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Does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding
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Is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil
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Is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back
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Avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit
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Is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice
In April 1963, King and the SCLC joined Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in a nonviolent campaign to end segregation and force Birmingham, Alabama, businesses to hire Black people. Fire hoses and vicious dogs were unleashed on the protesters by “Bull” Connor's police officers. King was thrown into jail. King spent eight days in the Birmingham jail as a result of this arrest but used the time to write "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," affirming his peaceful philosophy.
On October 14th, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War.
For his activism, he was the target of multiple assassination attempts, arrested 23 times, and surveilled and harassed by the police. In particular, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover harassed Dr. King by making him a target of COINTELPRO, a secret program where FBI agents spied on, infiltrated, and attempted to discredit "subversive" political movements.
In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an "economic bill of rights" for poor Americans.
Before the plans for the march could come to fruition, however, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee while supporting striking black sanitation workers. James Earl Rey was convicted for the murder, but speculation of government involvement has persisted for decades after his death.
MLK: SPEECHES, SERMONS, ESSAYS, & INTERVIEWS
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MLK, Jr. is really underrated in leftist spaces, I've realized, and for the wrong reasons too.
Wdym by this? I’ve never seen a bad word spoken about him from the left…well, here at least.
I don't mean to slander leftists, I mean that some still think of him as being "non-violent" or that preaching non-violence was all he did.
I see what you mean now, thanks for clarifying
No problem! I just think that without MLK, Jr., there would be no Black Panthers and there wouldn't even be a Malcolm X, so to speak; he may have crawled so they can walk.
Even if he "didn't go far enough," he still arguably had the bigger movement (albeit still harangued by the mainstream press at the time) and that's why they killed him and he still achieved civil rights as a concession, thus changing the political economy of the United States.
It wasn't just him that was responsible but him uniting with the labor movement also scared the bejeezus out of the bourgeois factions of the state.
Hence, why they killed him.
On that, a lot of people who dismiss non-violent militant tactics don't acknowledge that at the time we didn't know. It hadn't been tried before. afaik King wasn't a fanatic or blind, he began to recognize the limitations of his tactics and was planning a new approach for the poor people's campaign at the time he was killed.
Also, "This nonviolent stuff will get you killed" talks extensively about the part of the Civil Rights movement that has been diligently erased; Everyone was strapped except the SNCC kids and people who were actively participating in non-violent protests, sit ins, and marches. No one was passively laying down to die. SNCC kids who had come down from the north to help with the campaign were committed pacifists while the people who were hosting them in their homes sat up late on the porch with loaded guns to make sure the Klan couldn't kill them without a fight.
Agreed, that's also like the only take I've seen here except for a few too
minded people . Maybe other parts of the site are less true anon brained, but he was totally murdered by the FBI for his union outreach being too dangerous to allow to continue. They didn't start the slander campaign until after that point either (iir the timeline correctly).
Edit: I don't mean to say the takes you are referencing didn't occur, I just spend far too much time online and only recall people criticizing in any way getting slapped down by more theory literate posters.
Yeah, I getcha. Also, lol, Adventure Time-minded people...
Oh damn, I don't get this one.
Have you ever watched the comedy sketch show “the whitest kids you know”? The guy the bottom emoji was the face of it, almost certainly a closeted-comrade. He has a sketch about the line between legal speech and illegal speech regarding the best place to position a mortar…
Wanna hijack the discussion to say that Zack Cregger, Moore's collaborator and costar in WKUK, directed Barbarian, which is a very cool class conscious and feminist movie. I think it may have been featured in a Hexbear movie night?
I didn’t know that existed, thank you for putting it on my radar.
https://youtu.be/QEQOvyGbBtY
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
No offense to Malcolm X or especially the Black Panthers.
Oh yeah. That's insidious. Re-writing history to make Civil Rights a bunch of passive marches on defined routes approved by the police instead of a dedicated campaign to disrupt society without actually throwing any punches.
I mean, compared to other figures like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
He's only seen as a figure that later "grew more radical" in his later years.
Nobody speaks a bad word about him, but I feel that people don't really understand the impact he had on the body politic overall.