Starting in , Montgomery's Black community staged an extremely successful bus boycott that lasted for over a year. King, played a pivotal leadership role in organizing the protest. His arrest and imprisonment as the boycott's leader propelled King onto the national stage as a lead figure in the civil rights movement.
Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's model of nonviolent resistance, King believed that peaceful protest for civil rights would lead to sympathetic media coverage and public opinion. His instincts proved correct when civil rights activists were subjected to violent attacks by white officials in widely televised episodes that drew nationwide outrage. With King at its helm, the civil rights movement ultimately achieved victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in and the Voting Rights Act in In , King returned to Atlanta to serve as co-pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
His involvement in a sit-in at a department presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Pressure from Kennedy led to King's release. Again, the protests drew nationwide attention when televised footage showed Birmingham police deploying pressurized water jets and police dogs against peaceful demonstrators. The campaign was ultimately successful, forcing the infamous Birmingham police chief Bull Connor to resign and the city to desegregate public spaces.
It's worth going to jail for. It's worth losing a job for. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for days. The Montgomery Bus Boycott placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners.
They chose Martin Luther King, Jr. By the time the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in November , King—heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin —had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.
King had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that January. Emboldened by the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in he and other civil rights activists—most of them fellow ministers—founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC , a group committed to achieving full equality for African Americans through nonviolent protest.
In King and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the s. Later that year, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Held on August 28 and attended by some , to , participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of Captured on television, the brutal scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country to gather in Alabama and take part in the Selma to Montgomery march led by King and supported by President Lyndon B.
Johnson , who sent in federal troops to keep the peace. As more militant Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael rose to prominence, King broadened the scope of his activism to address issues such as the Vietnam War and poverty among Americans of all races.
On the evening of April 4, , Martin Luther King was assassinated. In the wake of his death, a wave of riots swept major cities across the country, while President Johnson declared a national day of mourning. Popular Courses. Part Of. Elements of Inequality. Role of the Financial System. Legal Protections. Measuring Inequality. Theories Explaining Inequality. Models to Reduce Inequalilty. Economy Economics. After the "Dream" speech, Dr.
King continued to push for economic reforms that addressed the welfare of all people, most notably in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Article Sources.
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You can learn more about the standards we follow in producing accurate, unbiased content in our editorial policy. Compare Accounts. The offers that appear in this table are from partnerships from which Investopedia receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where listings appear. Investopedia does not include all offers available in the marketplace. That speech, along with many others that Dr.
King delivered, has had a lasting influence on world rhetoric. In , King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights and social justice activism. Most of the rights Dr. King organized protests around were successfully enacted into law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of and the Voting Rights Act. King also suggested that the United States declare a truce with the aim of achieving peace talks, and that the U.
Ultimately, Dr. King was driven to focus on social and economic justice in the United States. But Dr. King would not live to realize that vision. The next day, April 4, , Dr. King was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by James Earl Ray , a small-time criminal who had escaped the year before from a maximum-security prison.
Ray was charged and convicted of the murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison on March 10, But Ray changed his mind after three days in jail, claiming he was not guilty and had been framed. He spent the rest of his life fighting unsuccessfully for a trial, despite the ultimate support of some members of the King family and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
The turmoil that flowed from Dr. But, today, young people around the world still learn about Dr. King's life and legacy—and his vision of equality and justice for all continue to resonate. All rights reserved. It was here where he gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech. Early life Though Dr.
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