MLK Jr. Remembered

He began his career as a Baptist Preacher, but went on to lead a sweeping grassroots effort to end racial discrimination known as the civil right 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 seperate restaurants, and even had to use separate public restrooms. They had to sit at the back of buses and give up their seats to any white people standing. But 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 fledge boycott of the Montgomery city bus system. 13 months later the buses integrated. The Montgomery boycott inspired more efforts to end segregation, in 1963 King and other civil rights leaders organized the march on Washington. More than 200,000 people came to the nation´s capital to demand equality for blacks and urged 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 lead lived on, inspiring other groups such as Hispanics, Women, and the Disable to fight for equal treatment under the law and completing King`s legacy of greater social justice for all Americans.