Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Achievements

King came from a middle-class family and had a relatively secure upbringing. His parents were college educated, and his father was a Baptist minister. King encountered his first experience with racism at the age of six, when one of his white playmates told King that his parents would no longer let him play with him because the children were now attending segregated schools. In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high school students. Before he began college, he had spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut and was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. This experience deepened his opposition to racial segregation. While at Morehouse King was mentored by the college president, Benjamin Mays, an activist committed to fighting racial inequality. Mays prodded the Black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now. It was a call to service that was not lost on the teenaged King. He graduated from Morehouse in 1948. He later earned a bachelor of divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. Ordained a Baptist minister, in 1954 he became pastor of a church in Montgomery, Alabama. The following year he received a doctorate from Boston University.

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger and, as a result, was arrested for violating the city’s segregation laws. Following this incident, a group of civil rights activists decided to contest racial segregation on the city’s public bus system. The activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to boycott the public transportation system. King, who had been pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for just over a year, was chosen to lead the group. He led the boycott using a nonviolent approach, even though his home was bombed during this period. For more than a year people protested segregation by refusing to ride the city buses. Finally, late in 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional.

In 1957 King and other civil rights leaders established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group to help local organizations carry out civil rights activities in the South. As leader of the SCLC, King inspired Blacks throughout the South to hold peaceful sit-ins and voter education clinics and registration drives. The SCLC gave King a platform to speak about race-related issues and to discuss race relations with leaders all over the world. In 1959 he went to India to meet with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and others and to discuss Gandhi’s concepts of peaceful noncompliance. From this trip King became even more convinced that nonviolent resistance was the most effective way to fight against oppression and injustice. In 1963 King’s campaign to end segregation at lunch counters gained national attention in Birmingham, Alabama, when police officers turned dogs and water hoses on demonstrators who had gathered there. King was jailed along with a large number of supporters. From the Birmingham jail he wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he spelled out his philosophy of nonviolence.

Near the end of the Birmingham campaign, King and other civil rights leaders joined together to organize the historic March on Washington. On August 28, 1963, an interracial group of more than 200,000 people gathered peacefully near the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law. Prominent civil rights leaders delivered speeches, most memorable being King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The speech called for equality and freedom and became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement. It is one of the most famous speeches in U.S. history. As King had hoped, the march had a strong effect on national opinion and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later that year King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1965 King led a drive to register Black voters in Selma, Alabama. King organized an initial march from Selma to the state capitol building in Montgomery but did not lead it himself. The marchers were violently turned back by state troopers who used nightsticks and tear gas. More than 50 marchers, including civil rights leader John Lewis, were hospitalized. This incident, which took place on Sunday, March 7, became known as “Bloody Sunday.” King led a second march two days later, despite a restraining order by a federal court. Heading a procession of more than 2,000 marchers, Black and white, King set out across Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma until the group came to a barricade of state troopers. But instead of going on and forcing a confrontation, he led his followers to kneel in prayer and then, unexpectedly, turned back. This decision cost King the support of many young radicals who faulted him for being too cautious. The country was nevertheless aroused, resulting in the later passage (in August) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On March 21, after a federal judge had ruled the march to Montgomery could continue, King led marchers out of Selma, over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and on to the state capital. Estimates put the number of demonstrators at the beginning between 3,000 and 8,000. That number grew to about 25,000 during the course of the five-day march. There King addressed the crowd in what became known as his “How Long, Not Long” speech.

King later shifted his focus to economic justice, speaking out against poverty and war. In 1967, to bring attention to the issue of poverty and its relationship to urban violence, he helped plan a Poor People’s March to Washington. In the spring of 1968, before the march was scheduled to take place, King made a trip to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike by the city’s sanitation workers. On April 4, while standing on the second floor balcony of the motel where he was staying, King was shot and killed by a sniper. King’s death shocked the country. He was buried in South-View Cemetery in Atlanta. King’s remains were later transferred to a tomb on the grounds of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center) adjacent to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. His new tomb bears the same epitaph as that of his original gravestone: “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last.” King’s career greatly advanced the cause of civil rights in the United States. His energetic personality and persuasive oratory helped unite many Blacks in a search for peaceful solutions to racial oppression. In 1977 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his battle against prejudice. In 1983 the U.S. Congress established a national holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, in his honor, to be celebrated annually on the third Monday in January. A national memorial opened in Washington, D.C., in 2011.