King
married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953. The wedding ceremony took
place in Scott's parent's house in Marion Alabama, and was performed
by King's father.
King and Scott had four children:
Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama)
Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama)
Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia)
Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia)
In 1954, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
in Montgomery, Alabama. He was a leader of the 1955 Montgomery bus
boycott, which began when Rosa Parks refused to cede her seat to
a white person. Dr. King was arrested during this campaign, which
ended with a United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial
segregation on intrastate buses.
Following the campaign, King was instrumental in the founding of
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a group
created to organise Civil Rights activism. He continued to dominate
the organisation to his death, a position criticised by the more
radical and democratic Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). The SCLC derived its membership principally from black communities
associated with Baptist churches. King was an adherent of the philosophies
of nonviolent civil disobedience used successfully in India by Mohandas
Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to the protests organised
by the SCLC. King correctly identified that organised, non-violent
protest against the racist system of Southern separation known as
Jim Crow, when violently attacked by racist authorities and covered
extensively by the media, would create a wave of pro-Civil Rights
public opinion, and this was the key relationship which brought
Civil Rights to the forefront of American politics in the early
1960s.
He organized and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation,
fair hiring, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights
were later successfully enacted into United States law with the
passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with
astonishing success by choosing the method of protest, and the places
in which protests were carried out, in order to provoke the harshest
and most shocking retaliation from racist authorities. King and
the SCLC were instrumental in the unsuccessful protest movement
in Albany in 1961–2, where splits within the black community and
the canny, low-key response by local government defeated the movement,
in the Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963, and in the protest
in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964. King and SCLC joined SNCC in
the city of Selma, Alabama in December 1964; SNCC had already been
there working on voter registration for a number of months.
King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, then attempted
to organise a march which was intended to go from Selma to the state
capital Montgomery starting on March 25, 1965. The first attempt
to march, on March 7, was aborted due to mob and police violence
against the demonstrators. The day has since become known as Bloody
Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to
gain public support for the Civil Rights movement, the clearest
demonstration so far of the dramatic potential of King's techniques
of nonviolence. King, however, was not present; after meeting with
President Lyndon B. Johnson, he had attempted to delay the march
until March 8, and the march was carried out against his wishes
and without his presence by local civil rights workers. The footage
of the police brutality against the protestors was broadcast extensively
across the nation, and aroused a national sense of public outrage.
The second attempt at the march, on March 9, was ended when King
stopped the march at the Pettus bridge on the outskirts of Selma,
an action which he seems to have negotiated with city leaders beforehand.
This unexpected action aroused the surprise and anger of many within
the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March
25, with the agreement and support of President Johnson, and it
was during this march that Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase
"Black Power".
King was instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington
in 1963. This role was another which courted controversy, as King
was one of the key figures who helped President John F. Kennedy
change the intent of the march. Conceived as a further part of the
Civil Rights protest, it became more of a celebration of the achievements
of the movement—and the government—so far, a development which angered
activists who were more radical than King.
King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience
as a preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written
in 1963, is a passionate statement of his crusade for justice.
On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel
Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance
to end racial prejudice in the United States. Starting in 1965,
King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the
Vietnam War. In February and again in April of 1967, King spoke
out strongly against the US's role in the war. In 1968, King and
the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address
issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on
Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities
of the United States.
Along the way, King also had an impact on popular entertainment.
He met Nichelle Nichols who mentioned that she was going to leave
the cast of the television series, Star Trek, since she felt was
being mistreated by the studio. King personally persuaded her to
remain with the series for the sake of being an excellent role model
for African Americans on television.
King was hated by many white southern segregationists. On the night
before his assassination, King prophetically told a euphoric crowd:
"I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you,
but I know tonight we, as a people, shall get to the promised land".
King was assassinated before the march on April 4, 1968, on the
balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, while preparing
to lead a local march in support of the heavily-black Memphis sanitation
workers' union. Friends inside the apartment he was in heard the
shot fired, and ran to the balcony to find Martin Luther King Jr.
shot in the jaw. He was pronounced dead several hours later. James
Earl Ray confessed to the shooting and was convicted, though he
later recanted his confession. Coretta Scott King, King's widow
and also a civil rights leader, along with the rest of King's family
won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers, who claimed
to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination.
Since his death, King's reputation has grown to become one of the
most revered names in American history to the point where his popular
esteem has described him as effectively the 20th Century's equivalent
of Abraham Lincoln. Supporters of this idea point out that both
were leaders credited with strongly advancing human rights against
poor odds in a nation divided against itself on the issue and were
assassinated in part for it.
In 1986, a U.S. national holiday was established in honor of Martin
Luther King Jr., which is called Martin Luther King Day. It is observed
on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King's
birthday. On January 18, 1993, for the first time, Martin Luther
King Day was officially observed in all 50 U.S. states. In addition,
many U.S. cities have officially renamed one of their streets to
honor King.
Since his death, Coretta Scott King has followed her husband's footsteps
as a civil rights leader. Her children are also following their
father's footsteps.
King and the FBI
King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI), especially its director, J. Edgar Hoover.
The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Its investigations
were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of
King's most trusted advisers was Stanley Levison. Stanley Levison
was a man whom the bureau suspected of involvement with the Communist
Party, USA, to which another key King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell,
was also linked by sworn testimony before the House Un-American
Activities Committee. The bureau placed wiretaps on Levison and
King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels
as he traveled across the country. The bureau also informed then-Attorney
General Robert Kennedy and then-President John F. Kennedy, both
of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself
from Levison. For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections
to Communism, stating at one point that "there are as many
Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida"—to
which Hoover responded by calling King "the most notorious
liar in the country."
Later, the focus of the bureau's investigations shifted to "discrediting"
King through revelations regarding his private life. The bureau
distributed reports regarding King's extramarital sexual affairs
to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition
partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. The
Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal
information if he didn't cease his civil rights work. Finally, the
Bureau's investigation shifted away from King's personal life to
intelligence and counterintelligence work on the direction of the
SCLC and the "racial" movement.
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