Setting the Civil Rights Movement

Martin Luther King Jr. was key in establishing what would become the modern American Civil Rights Movement.

In 1953, Martin Luther king Jr. became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was the  leader of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, that began when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man. The whole boycott lasted for 381 days. later,(because of this) Martin Luther king's house was bombed.Also, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on intrastate buses.

After the campaign, Martin Luther King Jr. was  instrumental or key  in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, (this is a group created to harness the moral authority and organizing  the power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests, in the service of the civil rights reform.

Throughout his whole career of service, Martin Luther King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience as a preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail”, written in 1963, is considered by many a passionate statement of his crusade or movement for justice. On October 14, 1964, Martin Luther King became the youngest person to ever receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the United States.

Martin luther King was hated by many white southern segregationists, but his speeches turned  mainstream media against him too. ''TIME'' called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi (a propaganda radio station run by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War)", and the ''Washington Post'' declared that Martin Luther King had "diminished or made smaller his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

His speeches reflected his evolving political support in his later years. He also began to speak of the need for changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther King  expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Eventhough his public language was guarded,  to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism.

Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by negros, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of  public opinion that made the Civil Rights Movement the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.

Martin Luther King is also probably most famous for his "I Have a Dream" speech, which was given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  Martin Luther King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. Most of the rights were successfully enacted  into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Martin Luther King and the SCLC applied or used nonviolent protest with good success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out in often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes this confrontations would end up with violence.

As you can see, Martin Luther King Jr was key in what would become the civil rights movements, and thanks to his actions and devotion for what he thought was right, he takes a stand in history.