Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2010

Martin Luther King Jr. was a very successful man with an outgoing life that made him one of America’s great leaders of the 20^th Century. He was a black civil rights leader, who successfully led a bus boycott, and gave amazing speeches that uplifted the young and old.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929. His mother was a school teacher and his father and grandfather were both preachers actively involved in black civil right movement. He graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1948. He was undecided into which field he wanted to go, law, medicine, or the ministry. He ultimately chose the ministry following in his family’s footprints. He studied at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Divinity. Then, King attended Boston University where he began his doctoral studies in systematic theology and earned his Ph.D.

While in college, King heard a lecture on Mahatma Gandhi and his nonviolence civil disobedience campaign. After this lecture, he began to read and study several books about Gandhi’s ideas and beliefs. With both his father and grandfather being actively involved in the black civil right movement, he believed the same tactics Gandhi used could help black Americans obtain civil rights. Henry David Thoreau was another person who influenced king with his theories on how to use nonviolence resistance to achieve social change.

King followed in his family’s footsteps and became a pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama in 1954. In 1955, on December 1, Rosa Parks, a middle-aged tailor’s assistant, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat when the bus driver instructed her to do so to make room for more white passengers. Following This event, on December 5, King became president of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the bus boycott began.

On December 1, 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested and fined, Martin Luther King Jr. and his friends came together to help organize a bus boycott. Until passengers were completely integrated, the black people of Montgomery would refuse to use city buses. King was arrested and his house was fire bombed, but this was not uncommon. Others involved in the boycott endured harassment and other types of threatening behavior. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a success after the thirteenth month passed and 17,000 black people walked or got rides from the small, car-owning black population. The boycott finally ended on December 20, 1956, after a Supreme Court decision and a loss of revenue had forced the Montgomery Bus Company to integrate their buses.

After the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. had many achievements. In 1958, he published Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, depicting the events of the boycott, from describing the plans and problems of a nonviolent campaign, to the eventual desegregation of the city’s bus system. In 1963, he marched to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to civil right marchers. In the same year, he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year, becoming the first black American to be honored. In 1964, he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership of the “Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” King organized a mass march to create national support for federal voting-rights legislation in 1965. In 1968, on April 3, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech, “I’ve been to the Mountain Top” in Memphis, Tennessee. The next day, while waiting for an event he was going to attend later that night, King was shot and killed on the balcony of his motel room. This sparked riots in 125 different cities and resulted in forty-two people being shot. Two months later, James Earl Ray, the assassin, was found in London after he robbed a bank. He was later identified and arrested for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.’s and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison.

The process to make Martin Luther King Jr. birthday a national holiday was a long process that took over fifteen years. U.S. Representative John Conyers was the first person to call for a holiday honoring King. The bill got stalled in Congress, but when six million names were submitted, it was discussed about at every session of Congress until it was passed in 1983. President Reagan signed the bill, but recieved many complaints that the day chosen was too close to other holidays, including Christmas and New Years. After some compromising, the third Monday of every January is now known as Martin Luther King Day. Some states thought that naming a holiday after someone who was so involved in civil reform should represent the group of civil rights activists. Because of this, some states renamed this holiday Human Rights Day or Civil Rights Day.

There is no question why this man was an American great, or what he did to better this country. He was, as some may say, the greatest leader of all time.