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MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. 1929-1968

Any number of historic moments in the civil rights struggle have been used to identify Martin Luther King Jr.-prime mover of the Montgomery bus boycott (1956), keynote speaker at the March on Washington (1963); youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1964). But in retrospect, single events are less important than the fact that King, and his policy of non-violent protest, was the dominant force in the civil rights movement during its decade of greatest achievement, from 1957 to 1968.

King was born Michael Luther King in Atlanta on January 15, 1929-one of the three children of Martin Luther King, Sr., pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta (Williams) King, a former schoolteacher. (He did not receive the name of "Martin" until he was about six years of age.)

After attending grammar and high school locally, King enrolled in Morehouse College (also in Atlanta) in 1944. At this time not inclined to enter the ministry, but while there, he came under the influence of Dr. Benjamin Mays, a scholar whose manner and bearing convinced him that a religious career could have its intellectual satisfactions as well. After receiving his B.A. in 1948, King attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, winning the Plafker Award as the outstanding student of the graduating class, and the J. Lewis Crozer Fellowship as well. King completed the course work for his doctorate in 1953, and was granted the degree two years later upon completion of his dissertation.

Married by then, King returned South, accepting the pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It was here that he made his first mark on the civil rights movement, by mobilizing the black community during a 382-day boycott of the city's bus lines. Working through the Montgomery Improvement Association, King overcame arrest and other violent harassment, including the bombing of his home. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Alabama laws requiring bus segregation unconsti tutional, with the result that blacks were allowed to ride Montgomery buses on equal footing with whites.

A national hero and a civil rights figure of growing importance, King summoned together a number of black leaders in 1957, and laid the groundwork for the organization now known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Elected its president, he soon sought to assist other communities in the organization of protest campaigns against discrimination, and in voterregistration activities as well.

After completing his first book and making a trip to India, King returned to the United States in 1960 to become co-pastor, with his father, of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Three years later, King's nonviolent tactics were

put to their most severe test in Birmingham, Alabama during a mass protest for fair hiring practices, the establishment of a bi-racial committee, and the desegregation of departmentstore facilities. Police brutality used against the marchers dramatized the plight of blacks to the nation at large with enormous impact. King was arrested, but his voice was not silenced as he issued his classic "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to refute his critics.

Later that year, King was a principal speaker at the historic March on Washington (1963), where he delivered one of the most passionate addresses of his career. At the beginning of the next year Time magazine designated him as its Man of the Year for 1963. A few months later he was named recipient

of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.

Upon his return from Oslo, where he had gone to accept the award, King entered a new battle, in Selma, Alabama, where he led a voter-registration campaign which culminated in the Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March.

King next brought his crusade to Chicago where he launched a slum-rehabilitation and openhousing program.

In the North, however, King soon discovered that young and angry blacks (such as the ones in Watts who once replied "Martin Luther Who?" to a question about whether the civil rights leader would approve of their behavior) cared little for his pulpit oratory and even less for his solemn pleas for peaceful protest.

Their disenchantment was clearly one of the factors influencing his decision to rally behind a new cause and stake out a fresh battleground: the war in Vietnam. King himself antagonized many civil rights leaders by declaring the U.S. to be "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." His clear aim was to fuse a new coalition of dissent based on equal support for the peace crusade and the civil rights movement.

The rift was immediate. The NAACP saw King's shift of emphasis as "a serious tactical mistake"; the Urban League warned that the "limited resources" of the civil rights movement would be spread too thin; Bayard Rustin claimed black support of the peace movement would be negligible; Ralph Bunche felt King was undertaking an impossible mission in trying to bring the campaign for peace in step with the goals of the civil rights movement.

From the vantage point of history, King's timing could only be regarded as superb. In announcing his opposition to the war, and in characterizing it as a "tragic adventure" which was playing "havoc with the destiny of the entire world," King again forced the white middle class to concede that no movement could dramatically affect the course of government in the U.S. unless it involved deliberate and restrained aggressiveness, persistent dissent and even militant confrontation. These were precisely the ingredients of the civil rights struggle

in the South in the carly 1960s.

Speaking at the U.N., King again found words to prod the conscience of white America. "Let us save our national honor stop the bombing. Let us save American lives and Vietnamese lives stop the bombing. Let us take a single instantaneous step to the peace table-stop the bombing. Let our voices ring out across the land to say the American people are not vainglorious conquerors--stop the bombing."

As students, professors, intellectuals, clergymen and reformers of every stripe rushed into the movement (in a sense forcing fiery black militants like Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick to surrender their control over anti-war polemics), King turned his attention to the domestic issue which, in his view, was directly related to the Vietnam struggle: the War on Poverty.

At one point, he called for a guaranteed family income, he threatened national boycotts, and spoke of disrupting entire cities by non-violent "campins." With this in mind, he began to draw up plans for a massive march of the poor on Washington, D.C. itself, envisioning a popular demonstration of unsurpassed intensity and magnitude designed to force Congress and the political parties to recognize and deal with the unseen and ignored masses of des'perate and downtrodden Americans.

King's decision to interrupt these plans to lend his support to the Memphis sanitation men's strike was based in part on his desire to discourage violence, as well as to focus national attention on the plight of the poor, unorganized workers of the city. The men were bargaining for little else beyond basic union representation and long-overdue salary considerations.

Though he was unable to eliminate the violence which had resulted in the summoning and subsequent departure of the National Guard, King stayed on in Memphis and was in the process of planning for a march which he vowed to carry out in defiance of a federal court injunction if necessary.

On the night of April 3, 1968, he told a church congregation: "Well I don't know what will happen now... But it really doesn't matter..." "" (At other times, musing over the possibility he might be killed, King had assured his colleagues that he had "the advantage over most people" because he had "conquered the fear of death.")

Death came for King on the balcony of the black-owned Lorraine Motel just off Beale Street on the evening of April 4. While standing outside with Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, a shot rang out. King fell over, struck in the neck by a rifle bullet which left him moribund. At 7:05 p.m., he was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital.

The assassination caused a wave of violence in such major cities as Washington, D.C. (11 dead; 24 million dollars property damage, over 8,000 arrests, over 1,000 injuries); Chicago (nine dead, 11 million dollars property damage, nearly 3,000 ar500 injured), and Baltimore (6 dead, 14 million dollars property damage, 5800 arrests, and 900 injured). Without restraint against looters, death tolls would have been even higher. Both grief and anger suffused the black community. The anger was assuredly all the more fanatic precisely because King had been so irretrievably dedicated to nonviolence.

King's birthday, January 15, is now recognized as a national holiday.

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A Children's Tribute To
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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