In the over five decades since Dr. King laid out his dream at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, our country has made great progress toward racial equality by destroying Jim Crow, expanding voting rights, and more thoroughly integrating our society.
Today, black people hold seats in Congress, the Cabinet, Fortune 500 company boardrooms and, of course, the Oval Office.
Born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prominent activist in the civil rights movement, a spectacular orator, and a practitioner of nonviolent resistance.
Inspired by American individualist Henry David Thoreau and Indian nonviolent crusader Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. King, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, established militant nonviolent political action as the principal strategy for attacking segregationist laws.
“As you press on with justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline using only the weapon of love…Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos…In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him…you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself.”
“A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law…But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law…Let us not forget, in the memories of six million who died, that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal,’ and that everything the Freedom Fighters in Hungary did was ‘illegal.’”
“Though the rights of the First Amendment guarantee that any citizen or group of citizens may engage in peaceable assembly, the South has seized upon the device of invoking injunctions to block our direct-action civil rights demonstrations. When you get set to stage a nonviolent demonstration, the city simply secures an injunction to cease and desist. Southern courts are well known for ‘sitting on’ this type of case; conceivably a two or three-year delay could be incurred…in Birmingham, we felt that we had to take a stand and disobey a court injunction against demonstrations, knowing the consequences and being prepared to meet them — or the unjust law would break our movement.”
Dr. King aroused controversy throughout his tumultuous public career. He was jailed 14 times. He was the target of countless death threats. He was stoned, and he was stabbed. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned that King was consorting with communists. So-called liberals like President John F. Kennedy were concerned that he would provoke disorder, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy approved FBI bugging of King’s home, office and hotel rooms across the country. King’s home was blasted by a shotgun, and both it and a motel room where he stayed were bombed. And, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated.
With courage and goodwill, Martin Luther King, Jr. reaffirmed the vision of a “higher law,” the idea that government laws must be judged by moral standards, a bedrock for liberty going back more than 2,000 years.
A Montgomery ordinance required that blacks give up their seats when whites needed seats. In many cases, blacks — especially women — were told to pay their fare at the front of the bus, then leave the bus and re-enter at the back door, only to see the bus drive away.
When bus driver J.F. Blake told Parks to get to the back of the bus, Parks refused to budge. Blake stopped the bus, went to a telephone, and called the police, who summarily escorted Parks to jail.
A woman on the bus got word to E.D. Nixon of the NAACP who, accompanied by white attorney Clifford Dorr, signed bond papers and secured the release of Ms. Parks.
Their efforts were successful: In June 1956, a federal court voted 2-1 to strike down the Montgomery bus segregation ordinance, and later that year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this decision.
On June 28, 1969, members of New York’s gay community took an unprecedented stand against the New York Police Department’s Morals Division, refusing to silently submit to arrest.
The Stonewall riots that resulted are generally regarded as the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States.
To these, of course, one could add many others: the American farmers who fired the shot heard round the world at Concord Bridge, the Gdansk shipyard workers who launched Solidarity in 1980, the Leipzig peace marchers in 1989, Mohammed Bouazizi, a vegetable seller in Tunisia, whom Time magazine dubbed “The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire”….
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