An overview of King’s life and legacy.
In His Own Words
“I was born in the late twenties on the verge of the Great Depression, which was to spread its disastrous arms into every corner of this country for over a decade. I was much too young to remember the beginning of this depression, but I do recall, when I was about five years of age, how I questioned my parents about the people standing in breadlines. I can see the effects of this early childhood experience on my present anti-capitalistic feelings.
“My mother confronted the age-old problem of the Negro parent in America: how to explain discrimination and segregation to a small child. She taught me that I should feel a sense of ’somebodiness’ but that on the other hand I had to go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying that you are ‘less than,’ you are not ‘equal to.’ She told me about slavery and how it ended with the Civil War. She tried to explain the divided system of the South — the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing, the white and colored signs on drinking fountains, waiting rooms, lavatories — as a social condition rather than a natural order. She made it clear that she opposed this system and that I must never allow it to make me feel inferior. Then she said the words that almost every Negro hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: ‘You are as good as anyone.’ At this time Mother had no idea that the little boy in her arms would years later be involved in a struggle against the system she was speaking of.”
– excerpted from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, edited by Clayborne Carlson
A Life’s Work
This lesson, while offering a chronology of King’s life, will explore the essence of the man. For a detailed timeline, visit http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/mlk/man/MLKtimeline.html.
“The church has always been a second home for me.”
King grew up in the church and it sustained him throughout his life. Church folk were his extended family and though he had grave doctrinal doubts during his life, he remained firmly planted in the church. Each Sunday, young Martin Luther saw his father command a position of power in Atlanta’s Negro community from his elaborate pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist.
Ensconced in pastoral splendor, Daddy King conducted the traditional southern black Baptist sermon in high-voltage oratory that called forth choruses of “Amen!” “Tell it!” and “Teach!” and murmured and shouted, “Well, well.” Though a bit emotional for young King’s temperament, he was to absorb the powerful cadences of sanctified oratory in his own impassioned speeches and sermons.
“My thinking went through a state of transition.”
King entered Morehouse College at 15. Because the college was private and didn’t depend on state funding, professors spoke freely about race from an academic perspective. It was at Morehouse that King first read Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience (http://www.wakeamerica.com/past/books/thoreau/civildisobedience/index.html). It was a defining work for King. The refusal to cooperate with evil, he realized, is as much a moral imperative as cooperation with good.
King the student was turned off by the traditional religion of his childhood, feeling that it was too emotional and didn’t square with scientific facts. He wanted the Church to serve as a vehicle for modern thinking and for social and economic justice. His inner conflict continued until he took a Bible studies course and realized that many of the Bible stories contained profound, relevant truths. At 19, he entered Crozer Theological Seminary. At Crozer and later at Boston University, where he earned his Ph.D., King seriously delved into liberal theology and economic theory.
“So I went back to Montgomery.”
While at B.U., he met Coretta Scott, an aspiring classical singer and the daughter of a rural Alabama farmer. She was 25 years old. After some loud opposition from Daddy King, who felt that Martin could do better, they married.
When King had finished all but his doctoral dissertation, he began looking in earnest for a job. He received offers from three colleges and was invited to deliver guest sermons at churches around the country. Officers of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama offered King the pastorate of the solidly middle-class flock. King had several offers to consider but selected Dexter. A bit more than a month later, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus so a white man could be seated.
“Little did we know we were starting a movement.”
The Montgomery bus boycott brought King both fame and jail time. When the Supreme Court declared bus segregation laws unconstitutional — without listening to any argument — King was hailed as the movement’s leader.
After the success in Montgomery, King became head of the newly established Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He and other civil rights leaders led a Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. on the third anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In Washington, King delivered his first major national address, calling for black voting rights. He later resigned the pastorate of Dexter to move to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, where he became associate pastor at Daddy King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. To read an overview of the Civil Rights Movement, visit http://encarta.msn.com/index/conciseindex/AC/0AC60000.htm?z=1&pg=2&br=1.
“Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.”
Between 1957 and 1968, King became a national figure, at times revered, sometimes reviled. He traveled to India, Ghana, Rome, Paris, and London. He spent weeks in jail and was harassed by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who considered King a Communist pawn. He was stabbed by a deranged woman while signing copies of his book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
Spontaneous non-violent demonstrations erupted around the South, organized around desegregating lunch counters, interstate travel, schools, achieving voting rights, and fair housing. The Black Power Movement emerged as a divergent philosophy of members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Groups such as the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims advocate violence when necessary for self-defense.
- For information about SNCC, visit http://encarta.ms.ncom/find/Concise.asp?z=1&pg=2&ti=04BA1000
- For information about the Black Panthers, visit http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?z=1&pg=2&ti=761563992
- For information about the Black Muslims (Nation of Islam), visit http://encarta.msn.com/index/conciseindex/21/021C5000.htm?z=1&pg=2&br=1
A Life-Changing Event
The death of his beloved Grandmother Williams awakened King to religious inquiry. His religious scepticism burst forth in public heresy the year after his grandmother’s death, when at 13, he stunned his Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. His grandmother’s death brought him to a belief and unbelief, to faith and despair. He would carry the opposites within him, creating a dynamic psychic tension, until the day he died.
A Marked Man
J. Edgar Hoover put King on his enemy’s list and considered him unfit to receive warnings of death threats. The 1989 BBC television documentary, “Inside Story: Who Killed Martin Luther King?” raised a number of unanswered questions about the case. Allegations of collusion between government, organized crime, and local law enforcement officials have fueled ongoing belief in a conspiracy.
“There will be neither rest or tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.”
In 1963, King led more than 250,000 marchers, including 60,000 whites, in the largest and most dramatic civil rights demonstration in history — the March on Washington — where he delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech. It’s King’s most noted speech, but he later “saw that dream turn into a nightmare” when four little girls attending Sunday school were killed by a dynamite blast at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptists Church.
Other murders of Negroes by whites shortly after the March on Washington deeply depressed King, who later contended that most whites were unconscious racists. His famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” http://www.triadntr.net/~rdavis/mlkbrim.htm) addressed white clergymen who publicly criticized the movement, calling the activists anarchists and lawbreakers.
During the March on Washington, King and other civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy. When JFK was assassinated in November of 1963, King made it clear that Kennedy’s killing was part of the same climate of hate that caused the lynching of Southern Negroes.
King’s relationship to LBJ was complicated. Though they differed about the pace and strategy of integration and the alleviation of poverty, King hailed Johnson as sincere and realistic. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, King appreciated Johnson, but said that “Demonstrations, experience has shown, are part of the process of stimulating legislation and law enforcement.” It was their differences over the Vietnam War that would pit the preacher against the president.
“World peace through nonviolence is neither absurd nor unattainable.”
When King received the Nobel Peace Prize, his perspective broadened considerably. As the Vietnam War escalated, King condemned militarism and demanded an immediate peace agreement. He endured the disapproval of his friends, fellow civil rights leaders, the press, clergymen, and politicians — including Johnson, who railed against the “nigger preacher” for not sticking to the business of civil rights.
King agonized over the issue but couldn’t avoid linking his clerical responsibility to exhort people to live according to the law of love and his status as a spokesperson for peace conferred by the Nobel Prize. He also pointed out that the war put proportionately more black and poor people on the front lines. Blacks did not yet enjoy at home the rights that they were drafted and sent overseas to secure for others. Since the escalating war drew attention and resources away from the civil rights agenda, there was a definite link between them.
“We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end.”
At a mid-1967 SCLC retreat to determine the direction of the organization, King called for a radical redistribution of economic and political power. The outlines for the Poor People’s Campaign on Washington — a march that called for multicultural participation demanding jobs or income for all — were set forth.
In March of the following year, King led a demonstration in Memphis in support of the striking sanitation workers. The march became violent. One black was killed and more than 50 people were injured. King left Memphis distressed over the violence, but returned April 3rd in the hopes of leading a peaceful march. He told a crowd at the Memphis Masonic Temple, “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
The following day, April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. He died of a gunshot wound in the neck.
The Excerpt”
I have a dream that my four 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.”
Sharing Your Thoughts
Be sure to visit the message boards to learn from your instructor and fellow students.
A Closer Look
Like all of us, King’s life was sculpted by the forces surrounding him:
- His father’s bigger-than-life presence
- Close relationships with his sister, mother, and grandmother
- Early experiences with racism
- A liberal education
- His sense of destiny
These converged to create a great and greatly flawed man, whose contributions changed American society.
King’s complexity has been flattened by the 34 best-known words of his famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” As Michael Eric Dyson writes in I May Not Get There With You, “In ways that King could never imagine — indeed, in a fashion that might make him spin in his grave — ‘I Have a Dream’ has been used to chip away at King’s enduring social legacy. One phrase has been pinched from King’s speech to justify assaults on civil rights in the name of colorblind policies.”
Conservatives use his words to justify the rollback of affirmative action programs.
But King stated clearly, and more than once, the need to compensate the African American by “doing something for him now, in order to balance the equation,” saying that, “our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.”
We forget, Dyson says, the very conditions — white racism and black oppression — that made the March on Washington necessary.
Today, we’ve achieved a certain racial progress, but is it enough? The University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs published a study in September 2000, in which 60 percent of Austin residents rate race relations as “fair to poor.” Racial profiling has caused the harassment, imprisonment, and death of black men across the nation. The lynching of James Byrd and hate crimes against homosexuals indicate the deep hatred that still permeates our society.
King’s words, as valid today as 30 years ago, should inspire each of us to work for racial and social justice.
Assignment: The Making of This King
Visit http://www.mlkday.com/news_index.html for a listing of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebrations that may be in your area and plan to attend some portion of one. Notice what the speakers emphasize. Is it how far we’ve come or how much further we have to go? Jot down your initial thoughts about Dr. King and what you know of his work.
Visit http://www.mlkday.com/theman_index.html and read “In His Own Words,” excerpts from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
