MLK Jr. Remembered

He began his career as a Baptist preacher but went on to lead a sweeping grass roots effort to end racial discrimination known as The Civil Rights Movement. Along the way Martin Luther King Jr. made history and emerged as one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century. Before The Civil Rights Movement began, segregation policies known as Jim Crow laws kept African Americans in a separate and generally inferior world from whites. African Americans went to separate public schools, ate in separated restaurants and even had to use separate public restrooms. They had to sit in the back of busses and give up their seats to any white people standing. But in 1954 Jim Crow suffered a stunning defeat. The Supreme Court declared that separate schools for blacks and whites were inherently unequal in a case called Brown vs. Board of Education. The following year in Montgomery, Alabama a tailor’s assistant named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. Parks was arrested but Martin Luther King organized a full fledged boycott of the Montgomery City Bus System, 13 months later the busses integrated. The Montgomery Boycott inspired more efforts to end segregation. In 1963, King and other civil rights leaders organized a march on Washington. More than 200,000 people came to the nations capital to demand equality for blacks, and urge Congress to pass pending civil rights laws. Standing at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, King spoke the words: ‘’I have a dream today´´, describing his hope for a future in which all men would be brothers. The Civil Rights Movement was changing the nation. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which made racial discrimination in public places illegal. The same year, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee, but the movement he helped to lead lived on inspiring other groups such as Hispanics, women and the disabled to fight for equal treatment under the law and completing King’s legacy of greater social justice for all Americans.