Martin Luther King, Jr.


The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968)
was a Baptist minister and African American civil rights activist. He
organized and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, fair hiring,
and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted
into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the
Voting Rights Act. He is perhaps most famous for his "I Have A Dream"
speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He is regarded as one of America's greatest
leaders and heroes in its history.

Biography

King graduated from Morehouse College with a B.A. degree in 1948 and from
Crozer Theological Seminary with a B.D. in 1951. He received his PhD from
Boston University in 1955.

In 1954, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama. He was a leader of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott,
which began when Rosa Parks refused to cede her seat to a white person. Dr.
King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States
Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on intrastate buses.

Following the campaign, King was instrumental in the founding of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a group created to
organise Civil Rights activism. He continued to dominate the organisation to
his death, a position criticised by the more radical and democratic Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The SCLC derived its membership
principally from black communities associated with Baptist churches. King
was an adherent of the philosophies of nonviolent civil disobedience used
successfully in India by Mohandas Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to
the protests organised by the SCLC. King correctly identified that
organised, non-violent protest against the racist system of Southern
separation known as Jim Crow, when violently attacked by racist authorities
and covered extensively by the media, would create a wave of pro-Civil
Rights public opinion, and this was the key relationship which brought Civil
Rights to the forefront of American politics in the early 1960s. King and
the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with astonishing
success by choosing the method of protest, and the places in which protests
were carried out, in order to provoke the harshest and most shocking
retaliation from racist authorities. King and the SCLC were instrumental in
the unsuccessful protest movement in Albany in 1961-2, where splits within
the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government
defeated the movement, in the Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963, and
in the protest in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964. King and SCLC joined SNCC
in the city of Selma, Alabama in December 1964; SNCC had already been there
working on voter registration for a number of months.

King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, then attempted to
organise a march which was intended to go from Selma to the state capital
Montgomery starting on March 25, 1965. The first attempt to march, on March
7, was aborted due to mob and police violence against the demonstrators. The
day has since become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major
turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights
movement, the clearest demonstration so far of the dramatic potential of
King's techniques of nonviolence. King, however, was not present; after
meeting with President Lyndon Johnson, he had attempted to delay the march
until March 8, and the march was carried out against his wishes and without
his presence by local civil rights workers. The footage of the police
brutality against the protestors was broadcast extensively across the
nation, and aroused a national sense of public outrage.

The second attempt at the march, on March 9, was ended when King stopped the
march at the Pettus bridge on the outskirts of Selma, an action which he
seems to have negotiated with city leaders beforehand. This unexpected
action aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The
march finally went ahead fully on March 25, with the agreement and support
of President Johnson, and it was during this march that Stokely Carmichael
coined the phrase "Black Power".

King was instrumental in the organisation of the March on Washington in
1963. This role was another which courted controversy, as King was one of
the key figures who helped President John F. Kennedy change the intent of
the march. Conceived as a further part of the Civil Rights protest, it
became more of a celebration of the achievements of the movement - and the
government - so far, a development which angered activists who were more
radical than King.

King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience as a
preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a
passionate statement of his crusade for justice.

On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace
Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end
racial prejudice in the United States. Starting in 1965, King began to
express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In February
and again in April of 1967, King spoke out strongly against the US's role in
the war. In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign"
to address issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on
Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the
United States.

Along the way, King also had an impact on popular entertainment. He met
Nichelle Nichols who mentioned that she was going to leave the cast of the
television series, Star Trek, since she felt was being mistreated by the
studio. King personally persuaded her to remain with the series for the sake
of being an excellent role model for African Americans on television.

King was hated by many white southern segregationists. King was assassinated
before the march on April 4, 1968, in a Memphis, Tennessee hotel room, while
preparing to lead a local march in support of the heavily-black Memphis
sanitation workers' union. James Earl Ray confessed to the shooting and was
convicted, though he later recanted his confession. Coretta Scott King,
King's widow and also a civil rights leader, along with the rest of King's
family won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers, who claimed to
have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination.

In 1986, a U.S. national holiday was established in honor of Martin Luther
King Jr., which is called Martin Luther King Day. It is observed on the
third Monday of January each year, around the time of King's birthday. On
January 18, 1993, for the first time, Martin Luther King Day was officially
observed in all 50 United States states.

King and the FBI

King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), especially its director, J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI began
tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Its investigations were largely
superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted
advisers was Stanley Levison. Stanley Levison was a man whom the bureau
suspected of involvement with the Communist Party, USA. The bureau placed
wiretaps on Levison and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's
rooms in hotel rooms as he traveled across the country. The bureau also
informed then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then-President John
Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate
himself from Levison.

Later, the focus of the bureau's investigations changed from King's
relationship with Levison to "discrediting" King through revelations
regarding his private life. The bureau distributed reports regarding King's
extramarital sexual affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters,
potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's
family. The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal
information if he didn't cease his civil rights work. Finally, the Bureau's
investigation shifted away from King's personal life to intelligence and
counterintelligence work on the direction of the SCLC and the "racial"
movement.

Views on anti-Zionism

     ".. You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are
     merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the
     high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green
     earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews - this is God's
     own truth. Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and
     remains a blot on the soul of mankind....And what is anti-Zionist? It
     is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we
     justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other
     nations of the Globe....The anti-Semite rejoices at any opportunity to
     vent his malice. The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to
     proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews. This being the case, the
     anti-Semite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison.
     How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does not hate the Jews, he
     is just 'anti-Zionist'! ...Let my words echo in the depths of your
     soul: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews - make no mistake
     about it."

Although, the basic message of the above "quote" was indeed, without
question, spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr. in a 1968 appearance at Harvard,
where he said: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, You are
talking anti-Semitism." Dr. King's purported "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend,"
quoted above, appears to be a hoax.