Martin Luther King, Jr.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jan. 15, 1929: Martin Luther King, Jr., born in Atlanta, Georgia
May 17th, 1954: The United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown vs. the Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional
October 31st, 1954: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., becomes the 20th pastor of the Dexter Avenue Church, Montgomery, Alabama.
December 1st, 1955: Mrs. Rosa Parks refuses to relinquish her bus seat to a white man and is arrested. Dr. King is unanimously elected president of an organization named the Montgomery Improvement Association. A bus boycott is launched.
Jan. 26, 1956: Dr. King is arrested on the charge of traveling 30 miles an hour in a 25 mile an hour zone in Montgomery.
Jan. 30th, 1956: a bomb is thrown onto the porch of Dr. King's Montgomery home. No one is injured.
February 21st, 1956: Dr. King is indicted with other figures in the Montgomery bus boycott on the charge of being party to conspiracy to hinder and prevent the operation of business without "just or legal cause."
November 13th, 1956: the United States Supreme Court affirms the decision of the three-judge District Court in declaring unconstitutional Alabama state and local laws requiring segregation on buses.
December 20th, 1956: federal injunctions prohibiting segregation on buses are served on city and bus company officials in Montgomery.
December 21st, 1956: Montgomery buses are integrated.
Jan. 27, 1957: an unexploded bomb is discovered on Dr. King's front porch.
February 18th, 1957: Time magazine puts Dr. King on its cover.
September, 1957: President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalizes the Arkansas National Guard to escort nine African-American students to an all-white high school in Little Rock AR.
September 20th, 1958: Dr. King is stabbed in the chest during a book signing in Harlem.
February and March 1959: Dr. King spends a month in India studying Gandhi's techniques of nonviolence.
Jan. 24, 1960: Dr. King moves to Atlanta and becomes copastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
February 1st, 1960: a lunch counter sit-in to desegregate eating facilities is held by students in Greensboro, North Carolina.
October 19th, 1960: Dr. King is arrested in Atlanta sit-in and is jailed on the charge of violating the state's trespass law.
10/22/1960: the Atlanta charges are dropped. All jailed demonstrators are released except for Dr. King, who is ordered held on the charge of violating a probate sentence in a traffic arrest case. He is transferred Dekalb DeKalb County jail in Decatur, Georgia.
5/4/1961: the first group of Freedom Riders, intent on integrating interstate buses, leaves Washington D.C. by Greyhound bus.
5/14/1961: a bus is burned outside of Anniston, Alabama. A mob beats the riders upon their arrival in Birmingham. They are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, and spend 40-60 days in the penitentiary.
April, 1963: Dr. King is arrested and writes the "letter from Birmingham jail" while imprisoned for demonstrating.
5/3-5/1963: Eugene ("Bull") Conner, director of public safety of Birmingham, orders the use of police dogs and fire hoses upon the marching protesters (young adults and children).
5/20/1963: the Supreme Court of the United States rules Birmingham segregation ordinance is unconstitutional.
6/1/1963: Gov. George C. Wallace tries to stop the court ordered integration of the University of Alabama by a "standing in the schoolhouse door" and personally refusing interesting black students and Justice Department officials. President John F. Kennedy then federalizes the Alabama National Guard, and Gov. Wallace removes himself from blocking the entrance of the black students.
8/28/1963: the march on Washington, the first large integrated protest march, is held in Washington DC. Dr. King and other civil rights leaders meet with President John F. Kennedy at the White House. Martin Luther King delivers his "I have a dream" speech On the steps of Lincoln Memorial.
"The Christian virtues of love, mercy, and forgiveness should stand at the center of our lives. There is the danger that those of us who have lived so long under the yoke of oppression, those of us who have been exploited and trampled over, those of us who have had to stand amid the tragic midnight of inustice and indignities will enter the new age with hate and bitterness. But if we retaliate with hate and bitterness, the new age will be nothing but a duplication of the old age. We must blot out the hate and injustice of the old age with the love and justice of the new. This is why I believe so firmly in nonviolence. Violence never solves problems. It only creates new and more complicated ones. If we succumb to the temptation of using violence in our struggle for justice, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos…
"There is still a voice crying out in terms that echo across the generations, saying: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven.
"This love might well be the salvation of our civilization… It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men." (Facing the Challenge of a New Age, 1957)
He specifically addressed the issue of agnostics and atheists in 1958 (The Power of Nonviolence):
"I am quite aware of the fact that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speakes of it as an unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether one speaks of it as a personal God."
To underscore the universality of his message, he studied under the tutelage of Mahatma Gandhi (a Hindu who in turn had been inspired by the works of Henry David Thoreau, a Transcendentalist who was jailed for his civil disobedience to what he considered the injustice of the Mexican American war.) The genius of King was that he understood that his enemy was a system, not the human beings, both black and white, caught up in that system. The fatal flaw of the fundamentalists of our age is that their exclusivist world vision discounts or even condemns most of those who might otherwise be sympathetic to some aspects of their cause.
"I believe that the world has lost the most devoted Christian of our time."
Bayard Ruskin upon the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Other key events in Civil Rights Movement:
2/1/60 counter sit-in - ordered coffee and doughnuts in Woolsworth in Greensboro, NC,
Bull Conner ordered tear gas, bludgeoning, firehouses and dogs on unarmed marchers.
Spring '61: Freedom Riders bus bombed
9/15/63 bombing of 16th St Baptist church in Birmingham -> 4 girls KIA
6/66 James Meredith shot = 1st black student at University of Miss., was leading a "March Against Fear"
Andrew Goodman 6/21/64 KIA by the KKK the night of his release from prison; the arresting officer was in the KKK group who killed him in Philadelphia, MS
- 3 KIA also included James Earl Chaney, Michael Henry Schwerner
In 2004, > 14 million Americans live in poverty
"It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence & nonviolence. It is a either nonviolence or nonexistence." MLK
I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South…. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
Click here for the full text of the speech delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.