Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using the tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs and inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi.
He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president.
He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech.
He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
King helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches and took the movement north to Chicago where he worked on segregated housing.
In his last years Martin Luther King worked to oppose poverty and the Vietnam War, and, unfortunately, alienated many of his liberal allies with his “Beyond Vietnam” speech in 1967.
On April 4, 1967, accompanied by Amherst College professor Henry Commager, Union Theological Seminary President John Bennett, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel at an event sponsored by Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, King spoke to over 3,000 at New York’s Riverside Church. King’s address emphasized his responsibility to the American people and explained that conversations with young black men in the ghettos reinforced his own commitment to nonviolence.
He was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C. when he was assassinated by James Earl Ray on the 4th of April in Memphis. There were riots in many US cities as a result.
James Earl Ray, his assassin, fled the country, only to be arrested two months later at London’s Heathrow Airport. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison and died in prison of hepatitis.
King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. MLK, Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states and made a US federal holiday in 1986.