martin luther king, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a boycott leader of the age 26. He gained national attention for the protest against segregation by invoking Christian morality, American ideals of liberty, and the ethic of nonviolent resistance to evil exemplified by Mohandas Gandhi. Like Gandhi, King confronted authorities with a readiness to suffer rather than inflict harm. In November 1956, despite growing white violence, the boycott triumphed with aid from the NAACP, which overturned Montgomery's laws enforcing bus segregation. He organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a network of nonviolent civil rights activists drawn mainly from the black church, in January 1957. In September of that year Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act. It created a commission to monitor civil rights violations and authorized the Justice Department to guard black voting rights through litigation against discriminatory registrars. It didn’t completely rid of segregation. A coalition of African-American groups, led by King and others, along with their white allies in labor and peace and justice organizations, sponsored a March on Washington on August 28, 1963, to advance the civil rights bill then before Congress. Standing before the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. King told several hundred thousand blacks and whites at this event of his "dream" for interracial brotherhood. In 1963, he was Time magazine's “Man of the Year”, and King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee by James Earl Ray. King's murder touched off riots that left Washington, D.C., in flames for three days. The following week, partly in tribute to the slain King, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which banned discrimination in the sale and rental of most housing.
Emily D.
Emily D.