Martin Luther King Jr. And Civil Rights

SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King was leader and founder. They urged blacks to “assert human dignity, and avoid further cooperation with evil.”

NAACP and CORE National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Congress of Racial Equality. Both existed to fight civil rights.

Education King was a well educated minister. He had a PH.D.

Ghandi Ghandi was King’s biggest influence. He also preached non-violence.

Sit-Ins His most famous form of protest.

Freedom Rides Organized by CORE. Placed groups of black and white activists on interstate buses heading south and stopping along the way. They faced danger in the South.

Albany Movement A year long campaign of protest marches led by King.                                                         Albany Movement A year long campaign of protest marches led by King. The year was filled with struggles and few accomplishments.

March on Washington JFK had written a civil rights bill that Congress would not pass. King led a march on Washington to protest. Site of his most famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

Excerpt from “I Have A 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, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood…I have a dream that my four little 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…

When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants, and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

Civil Rights Act of 1964 Initiated by Pres. LBJ. It banned discrimination in all public accommodations.

Assassination In 1968 King was assassinated on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis. A bullet went through his jaw. His assassinations led to violence and riots throughout the nation. A man was arrested, but many believed it was an FBI conspiracy.

You know what it is to be black in the 1960s “…When you have to concoct an answer to a five year old son who is asking ‘Daddy why do white people treat colored people so mean;’ when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored;’ when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle becomes ‘boy’…when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to expect next… MLK Jr.