Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement

No other human rights activist is more recognizable, more lionized, or more revered for his work toward achieving social equality than Martin Luther King, Jr. King rose to recognition Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. In what became historically known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks' and King's actions would herald the dawn of a new age in America in which African Americans would take a collective stand against the oppression of the Jim Crow South and set into motion an unprecedented series of events that would culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, to appreciate fully the courage this man expressed, one must first understand the climate of the social stage he was entering at the time. 

Just one year before Rosa Parks defied Jim Crow law that segregated whites from blacks on public transportation, progress was being made in education. In 1954, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas was successful in integrating schools. However, integration would not be fully realized until the Little Rock Nine (among others) would attend formerly segregated schools in the South. Amidst these successes, there were tragedies and bloodshed. In 1955, young Emmet Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago came to visit an uncle in the tiny town of Money, Mississippi. Till, unaccustomed to the rigidly enforced segregation laws, was dared to wolf whistle at a shop-owner's wife. His act--merely a bit of innocent bravado--cost him his life. 

Danger came to anyone willing to assist African Americans in the South in those days. Though they had been granted the right to vote nearly 100 years before, African Americans in the South, who were typically poor and uneducated, were deterred from the polls. The White Citizens Council, an aggregate of white, male businessmen, politicians, and others, enforced the rule that African Americans who wished to cast their votes must take a series of tests designed to confound them. Meanwhile, the KKK acted as the enforcers, terrorizing blacks away from the polls and intimidating anyone who offered to help them--or even expressed sympathy for them. In 1964, two young men from New York State, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, together with native Mississippian, James Cheney, ventured into the insulated little enclave of Neshoba County, Mississippi, with the aim of establishing voter registration schools and bringing civil rights to the South. The three were intercepted on their way into Neshoba, however: they were stopped and murdered by Neshoba deputies and members of the Klan. 

More deaths occurred, with that of Medgar Evers, activist and field secretary for the Jackson, MS office of the NAACP was shot to death in front of his home by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith. De La Beckwith would escape the penalty for his crime until he was finally brought to trial and sentenced to life in prison in 1994. 

Though the White Citizens Council and racist legislators like Ross Barnett of Mississippi, Orval Faubus of Arkansas and George Wallace of Alabama did their best to suppress and intimidate, the rise of social justice pushed back. There would be further marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins: peaceful demonstrations such as that at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the Woolworth's Lunch Counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. And when Dr. King heard the call, he answered. Hearing of the persistent segregation in the city of Birmingham, King chose to come to Birmingham on Easter weekend, when he was aware that there would be much activity in the whites-only shops in the center of town. Several Catholic ministers cautioned him to wait, saying that it was "unwise and untimely" for him to provoke the situation. However, King was tired of waiting. 

Jailed for 'civil disobedience,' Dr. King set upon the task of an open letter to his fellow clergymen, defending the call for nonviolent, direct action as the immediate need in the South. Painstakingly, King hand wrote the lines of the letter in the margins of a newspaper, tearing each one out and handing it, through the bars of his cell, to a member of SCLC. As one reads his words some fifty-five years later, one hears the tenor and modulation of his voice as it frames some of the most powerful prose in American history. Many of the most memorable phrases attributed to King are found in this Letter, among them "A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."