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<\/a>King deeply admired his father, saying, \u201cHe is a man of real integrity, deeply committed to moral and ethical principles.\u201d As a community leader, Martin Luther King Sr. championed the rights of blacks, working diligently to register black voters and to help black teachers earn the same salary as white teachers. One day a policeman pulled him over for a minor traffic infraction and referred to him as \u201cboy\u201d\u2014one of many demeaning terms white people directed at blacks during that time. Mr. King calmly pointed to his son and said, \u201cThat\u2019s a boy there. I\u2019m a man.\u201d On another occasion, father and son waited patiently at a store to buy shoes. The clerk insisted that they move to the \u201ccolored\u201d section of the store before he would agree to assist them. Mr. King said, \u201cWe\u2019ll either buy shoes sitting here or we won\u2019t buy shoes at all.\u201d When the clerk refused, King took his son and left the store. Young Martin was learning the ways of the segregated South. He also learned to emulate his father\u2019s method of confronting racism with dignity and self-control.<\/p>\nUnfortunately, growing up in the South, Martin had many hard lessons yet to learn. Early in his life, Martin\u2019s best friend was a white boy. They often played together when they were very young, but because of segregation they enrolled in separate schools. Soon the neighbor boy told Martin that they could no longer spend time together. Like countless other black mothers of the time, Mrs. King reluctantly sat her son down and explained the concepts of discrimination, prejudice, and segregation. She told him that many white people would perceive him as inferior. More importantly, she ended this talk with a statement she never wanted him to forget: \u201cYou are as good as anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
In many ways Martin had a normal childhood. He played baseball and football. He loved reading and discovered several black role models through books. Martin was very bright. He skipped several grades in elementary school and was admitted to Booker T. Washington High School, which was named for one of his role models. When he was 14, one of his teachers entered him in an educational competition. His speech, \u201cThe Negro and the Constitution,\u201d won first place. On the way home from the competition, however, he and his teacher sat in the \u201ccolored\u201d section of the bus. As the bus filled up, the driver instructed them to give up their seats to a white person. When they didn\u2019t move fast enough to suit him, the driver began cursing at them. Martin was forced to bite his tongue, but later recounted, \u201cThat night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.\u201d As similar experiences accumulated over the years, his contempt toward white people grew.<\/p>\n
Martin was accepted to Morehouse College, an all-black school in Atlanta, at the age of 15. Even at this tender age, he knew he wanted to dedicate his life to helping others. To earn money for college, he harvested tobacco in Connecticut. During those summers in the North, he was free from Jim Crow laws and enjoyed freedoms he was denied in his hometown of Atlanta. He went to fine restaurants, sat wherever he pleased, and was treated with respect. However, as soon as the train passed Washington, D.C., he was sent back to the \u201ccolored\u201d section. After having a taste of what life could be like without segregation, he had trouble adjusting to the loss of freedom, saying, \u201cIt did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.\u201d Partly due to the influence of his father and two of his mentors at college, King decided to enter the ministry. He also understood the powerful influence preachers had in the black community. He was ordained as a minister at the age of 18 and graduated from Morehouse College the next year. He then enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. After graduating at the top of his class, he entered Boston University to earn a doctoral degree.<\/p>\n
College was an enlightening experience for Martin. It changed the way he viewed the world. He began to interact with white people who empathized with his struggle to overcome racism and shared his desire to end segregation in the South. \u201cAs I got to see more of white people…my anger softened,\u201d he said. \u201cI began to see that they weren\u2019t the enemy. The enemy was segregation itself.\u201d Martin also began to encounter philosophers and ideas that influenced his thinking and began shaping him as the future leader of the civil rights movement. He read the work of Henry David Thoreau, who coined the term \u201ccivil disobedience.\u201d Thoreau wrote, \u201cIf a law is unjust, men should refuse to cooperate with it. They should be willing to go to jail for not obeying such a law.\u201d He was also heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, who used nonviolent resistance to free India from oppressive British rule. \u201cIt was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking,\u201d he said. He believed that he could help his race overcome racism and segregation by combining Gandhi\u2019s nonviolent resistance with Jesus Christ\u2019s principles of love and forgiveness.<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King Jr. seemed ready for greatness. His parents gave him a solid moral foundation and his education provided him with a remarkable ability to think and reason. He was spiritually grounded and exhibited a calm demeanor, which gave him confidence, even in difficult situations. He had a rare ability to lead people with his actions and inspire them with his words. The final ingredient was added when he married Coretta Scott. King said he knew he wanted to marry her after less than an hour of meaningful conversation. He claimed that she had all the qualities he was looking for in a wife: \u201ccharacter, intelligence, personality, and beauty.\u201d They were married in June 1953. King later credited his wife for sustaining him through the tough times that would soon come. \u201cI am convinced that if I had not had a wife with the fortitude, strength, and calmness of Corrie, I could not have withstood the ordeals and tensions surrounding the movement,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After graduating from Boston University, King had several job offers, most of which were in the Northeast. However, he and his wife felt a \u201cmoral obligation\u201d to return to the South and try to change the plight of blacks there. King accepted an offer to become minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery was often considered the heart of the South because it was the most segregated city. From his church, King could actually see the spot where Jefferson Davis took his oath as the President of the Confederate States. Although the Civil War had been over for 90 years, Confederate flags remained clearly visible and the sounds of Dixie could be heard from his church. If King wanted to change things, he had certainly come to the right place.<\/p>\n
Not only was it the right place, it was also the right time. In\u00a0 The following morning King received a phone call from E.D. Nixon, who had just posted bond for Rosa Parks and exclaimed, \u201cWe have taken this type of thing too long already.\u201d Less than 12 hours later, more than 40 ministers and civic leaders gathered for a meeting at King\u2019s church. The leaders unanimously decided to organize a boycott of the city buses. They handed out thousands of flyers and passed the word through black churches. The following Monday, December 5, the black community responded to the challenge. One empty bus after another passed King\u2019s house that morning. Thousands of black individuals walked to and from work, sometimes up to 10 miles. King said, \u201cAs I watched them, I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.\u201d<\/p>\n The boycott was successful, but to have any long-term impact, black citizens knew they needed to organize a long-term effort. The same 40 leaders who organized the initial boycott met again later that day. They formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and elected 26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. as their leader. He was surprised to be chosen, because of his age and the fact that he had only been a resident of Montgomery for just over a year. Nonetheless, he was pleased to accept the leadership position. Later that night, the MIA held an open rally. An estimated 5,000 people crowded the church and surrounding streets. King did not disappoint the masses. With only 15 minutes of preparation and without the use of notes, he gave one of the most inspiring speeches of his life.<\/p>\n You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression…. We are not wrong. We are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God almighty is wrong…. We are going to work together. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, \u201cThere lived a race of people, a black people…who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and civilization.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n That night the world was introduced to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. through radio and television. And that night the black community unanimously decided to continue their boycott of city transportation until three demands were met: bus drivers would begin treating black passengers with courtesy; passengers would be seated on a first-come, first-served basis; and black bus drivers would be employed on predominantly black routes. For the next 382 days\u2014whether the weather was hot and muggy or cold and rainy\u2014black people refused to ride the city buses.<\/p>\n King viewed the boycott as a nonviolent protest against unjust laws. Years later he wrote in his autobiography, \u201c…What we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system.\u201d Of course, many of the white people in Montgomery, including city and state government officials, did not see it that way. They tried everything imaginable to end the boycott and resist changing segregation laws. As King would explain later, \u201c… no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of the anger of the city\u2019s white leaders was directed at King himself. He was arrested for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone, the first of 30 times he was arrested during the fight for equality. He received up to 40 threatening phone calls per day. One such caller said, \u201cListen, nigger, we\u2019ve taken all we want from you; before next week you\u2019ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.\u201d A few nights later, his house was bombed. His wife and first born daughter were in the house at the time, but both survived. Hundreds of black individuals began to form an angry mob outside his house. King kept his composure and addressed the crowd with the following words:<\/p>\n<\/a>1954 the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that segregated schools were unconstitutional. This decision essentially reversed the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 and set in motion the wheels of change. On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old black woman named Rosa Parks further challenged the chokehold of segregation by refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. In Montgomery, blacks were expected to sit in the back of the bus and whites sat in the front. On her way home from work one day, Parks sat in the middle\u2014the unreserved section. As the bus filled up with white people, the bus driver directed her to give up her seat for them. When she calmly said, \u201cNo,\u201d she was arrested for violating segregation laws.<\/p>\n\n