MARTIN LUTHER KING

     Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a Baptist minister and he became a civil rights activist early in his career. In this summary I am going to point to some of the most important events through his life until his death, for example:

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses.

In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King led the SCLC until his death.

The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia in November, 1961. In December King and the SCLC became involved. The movement mobilized thousands of citizens for a broad-front nonviolent attack on every aspect of segregation within the city and attracted nationwide attention.

The Birmingham campaign was a strategic effort by the SCLC to promote civil rights for African Americans. Its goal was to end the city's segregated civil and discriminatory economic policies. The campaign lasted for more than two months in the spring of 1963.

King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, segregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. The most important march was to Washington for jobs and freedomm, which took place on August 28, 1963. The march was a resounding success and more than a quarter million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event.  At the time, it was the largest congregation of protesters in Washington's history. King's "I Have a Dream" speech electrified the crowd. It is regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory.

 Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And also, in 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other nonviolent means. This concept of non-violent resistence was influenced by Gandhi and Gandhi's success with non-violent activism against the British control in India.

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee where he had travelled to support the black sanitary public works employees while he was staying at the Lorraine Motel. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and Congressional Gold Medal in 2004; Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. national holiday in 1986. By the time of his death in 1968, he had refocused his efforts on ending poverty and stopping the Vietnam War.