Martin Luther King and the Principles of Non-violence

Martin Luther King and the Principles of Non-violence
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of the principal leaders of the American civil rights movement and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest. King’s challenges to segregation and racial discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s helped convince many white Americans to support the cause of civil rights in the United States. After his assassination in 1968, King became a symbol of protest in the struggle for racial justice.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister and Alberta Williams King. King, Jr. was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18.
King attended local segregated public schools, where he excelled. King also read and heard the sermons of white Protestant ministers who preached against American racism.
Montgomery’s black community had long-standing grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on city buses. Unlike Nixon and other leaders in Montgomery’s black community, the recently arrived King had no enemies. Furthermore, Nixon saw King’s public-speaking gifts as great assets in the battle for black civil rights in Montgomery. King was soon chosen as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that directed the bus boycott.
Incidents of violence against black protesters, including the bombing of King’s home, focused media attention on Montgomery. By the time the Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision in November 1956, King was a national figure.
In 1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As SCLC’s president, King became the organization’s dominant personality and its primary intellectual influence.
SCLC sought to complement the NAACP’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation through the courts, with King and other SCLC leaders encouraging the use of nonviolent direct action to protest discrimination.
King made strategic alliances with northern whites that would bolster his success at influencing public opinion in the United States.
In the early 1960s King led SCLC in a series of protest campaigns that gained national attention. The protest was led by SCLC member Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the ministers who had worked with King in 1957 in organizing SCLC. In May 1963 King and his SCLC staff escalated antisegregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagers and school children to join. During the demonstrations, King was arrested and sent to jail. National reaction to the Birmingham violence built support for the struggle for black civil rights.
King and other black leaders organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive protest in Washington, D.C., for jobs and civil rights. On August 28, 1963, King delivered a stirring address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. After the Selma protests, King had fewer dramatic successes in his struggle for black civil rights. King’s outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War (1959-1975) also angered President Johnson.
Throughout 1966 and 1967 King increasingly turned the focus of his civil rights activism throughout the country to economic issues. This emphasis on economic rights took King to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black garbage workers in the spring of 1968. King’s historical importance was memorialized at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Social Justice, a research institute in Atlanta.