Ministerul Educatiei si Cercetarii

Colegiul National Grigore Moisil

Lucrare de atestat la Limba Engleza

Coordonator: Profesor:Jipa Mioara

Candidat: Lacatusu Claudiu-Gabriel Clasa a XII-a F

Onesti, 2012

Ministerul Educatiei si Cercetarii

Colegiul National Grigore Moisil

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Onesti , 2012

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ARGUMENT.................................................................................................................4 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................4 I.HIS LIFE....................................................................................................................5 I.1 EARLY YEARS..................................................................................................5 I.2 HIS MARRIAGE................................................................................................6 II. HIS ACTIVITY.......................................................................................................7 II.1 MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT, 1955.......................................................7 II.2 ALBANY MOVEMENT....................................................................................8 II.3 BIRMINGHAM CAMPAIN..............................................................................9 II.4 MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM.......................9 II.5 BLOODY SUNDAY, 1965.............................................................................10 III. ASSASSINATION..................................................................................................10 IV. AWARDS.................................................................................................................11 CONCLUSION...............................................................................................................13 BIBLIOGRAPHY...........................................................................................................14

Foreword
I have been chosen Martin Luther King as a topic for my project because he was a proeminent leader in the African American Civil rights movement , being often presented as a heroic leader in the history of modern America. I have also chosen Martin Luther King because I believe in the same rights like he did and because he was a very influencing man in the way of modelling peoples character.

The early 20th century is a period often referred to as the nadir of American race relations. While problems and civil rights violations where most intense in the South , social tensions affected African-Americans in the other regions as well.

Invigorated by the victory of Brown and frustrated by the lack of immediate practical effect , private citizens increasingly rejected gradualist, legalistic approaches as the primary tool to bring about desegregation. They were faced with massive resistance in the South by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, African-Americans adopted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolent resistance, known as a civil disobedience, giving rise to the African-American Civil Rights Movement of 1955-1968.

I. HIS LIFE
1. EARLY YEARS

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia in the large twelve room house of his parents on January 15, 1929. He was born during a time when black people did not have the rights which they have today. Martin Luther., as he was called, first experienced racial discrimination when their white neighbors refused to let him play with their boys. This was hard for him to understand because the boys had grown up as neighbors and had played together for years. At a later time he and his father were asked to move to the back of a shoe store to be fitted with shoes. They left without buying anything. These early incidents made a deep impression on the young boy. When he was five years old his mother persuaded the first grade teacher, Miss Dickerson, to make room for him in her class. Even though he started several weeks after the other children, he soon caught up with them academically and even surpassed them before the year was over. He attended Oglethorpe Elementary School which was a private school associated with Atlanta University. His parents paid $25 a year which covered all his expenses. Miss Lemon, his teacher taught him to be independent. She taught him if there was an injustice, he could rebel, but still keep his dignity and find quiet ways to resist. She inspired her students to learn about black history and take pride in their heritage . She took the class on field trips to visit with successful black businessmen and professionals. Her students started each day by singing the song, Lift Every Voice and Sing. He attended Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta. He was younger than most of the students and also skipped some subjects because he already knew the subject matter. On one occasion he and his teacher were riding on a bus. When the bus filled up with people, the driver asked them to stand up and let two white people have their seats. It was the law. Martin saw the injustice of it, and he never forgot that incident. When he was 15 years old he entered Morehouse College. After two years in school he decided he could best serve others by becoming a minister. He became assistant minister of the Ebenezer Baptist church where his father was minister. The following year he graduated from college. He was only 19 years old. He attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. While he was at Crozer he began to study the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, a man who brought about changes in India through "passive resistance". Gandhi urged people to not fight, but to protest peacefully. Martin saw this method of non-

violent resistance as the answer to the unfair treatment blacks received in America
2. HIS MARRIAGE

Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr., were married on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her mother's house; the ceremony was performed by Martin Jr.'s father, Martin Luther King, Sr.. After completing her degree in voice and violin at the New England Conservatory, she moved with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama in September 1954.The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King (November 17, 1955 May 15, 2007) was a human rights activist and actress. An alumna of Smith College, she was a member of the Board of Directors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc. (the official national memorial to her father) and was founding Director of the King Center's Cultural Affairs Program. She served on the Partnership Council of Habitat for Humanity, was the first national Ambassador for the American Stroke Association's "Power to End Stroke" Campaign, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a sponsor of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Human Rights Campaign. King received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, a Master's degree in theater from New York University and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Marywood University. In 1978 she starred as Rosa Parks in the TV miniseries King (which was based on her father's life and released on DVD in 2005). King was a spokeswoman for the national stroke awareness association. She died at the age of 51 on the 14 of May. Martin Luther King III (October 23, 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama) His mother had reservations about naming him after his famous father, "realizing the burdens it can create for the child," but King, Jr. always wanted to name his son Martin Luther III. He was raised in Vine City, an urban neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia, and was ten years old when his father was assassinated. King lived with his mother in his childhood home until his adulthood. As an adult, King was a shy man who rarely socialized, and friends have claimed he tends to overwork, in part due to the pressure to live up to his father's name; one friend, Rev. E. Randel T. Osburn, said of King, Watching him is like watching somebody trying to outrun themselves. Its like theres a ghost in front of him and hes always trying to catch it. On June 26, 1985 Martin Luther King III was arrested, along with his mother and sister, Bernice A. King, while taking part in an anti-apartheid protest at the Embassy of South Africa in Washington, D.C. King served as an elected county commission member in Fulton County, Georgia, the county encompassing most of Atlanta, from 1987 to 1993. He was defeated for re-election after revealing that he owed the federal government
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more than $200,000 in back taxes and fines.Also in 1993, King helped found the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr. Inc., the company that manages the license of Martin Luther King Jr.'s image and intellectual property. King remains a commissioner in the company as of 2008. Dexter Scott King (January 30, 1961 in Atlanta, Georgia) Born in Atlanta, Georgia and named after the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where his father was pastor before moving to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, Dexter was seven years old when his father was killed. Twenty-nine years later, Dexter met with James Earl Ray, imprisoned for his father's 1968 murder. He believes that Ray was not involved with his father's assassination. King attended Morehouse College, the alma mater of his late father. He did not graduate, but studied Business Administration while there. He later became an actor and documentary film maker. King splits his time between Atlanta, Georgia, where he serves as chairman of the King Center, and Malibu, California.Dexter Scott King served as president of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, but resigned in 1989 only months after taking the office after a dispute with his mother, Coretta Scott King. He resumed the position in 1994, but the King Center's influence was sharply reduced by then. Dexter has been a dedicated vegan and animal rights activist since the late 1980s. Bernice Albertine King (March 28, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia) Bernice is the only King child to become a minister. She was elected in 2009 as the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), but declined in January of 2011, citing disagreements with the organization's leadership. Bernice was only five years old when her father died. At 17, she was invited to speak at the United Nations in the absence of her mother. She is a graduate of Douglass High School in Atlanta, attended Grinnell College in Iowa and she graduated from Spelman College with a degree in psychology.

II. HIS ACTIVITY

1.Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955

In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old school girl, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in compliance with the Jim Crow laws. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; because Colvin was pregnant and unmarried, Edgar Nixon and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King led the SCLC until his death. On September 20, 1958, while signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein's department store on 125th Street, in Harlem, King was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener by Izola Curry, a deranged black woman, and narrowly escaped death. Gandhi's nonviolent techniques were useful to King's campaign to change the civil rights laws implemented in Alabama. King applied non-violent philosophy to the protests organized by the SCLC. In 1959, he wrote The Measure of A Man, from which the piece What is Man?, an attempt to sketch the optimal political, social, and economic structure of society, is derived. His SCLC secretary and personal assistant in this period was Dora McDonald. The FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, began telephone tapping King in the fall of 1963. Concerned that allegations (of Communists in the SCLC), if made public, would derail the Administration's civil rights initiatives, Kennedy warned King to discontinue the suspect associations, and later felt compelled to issue the written directive authorizing the FBI to wiretap King and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.J. Edgar Hoover feared Communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, but when no such evidence emerged, the bureau used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years in attempts to force King out of the preeminent leadership position.
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King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the Civil Rights Movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s. King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. King and the SCLC put into practice many of the principles of the Christian Left and applied the tactics of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent.
2.Albany movement

The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia in November, 1961. In December King and the SCLC became involved. The movement mobilized thousands of citizens for a broad-front nonviolent attack on every aspect of segregation within the city and attracted nationwide attention. When King first visited on December 15, 1961, he "had planned to stay a day or so and return home after giving counsel." But the following day he was swept up in a mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators, and he declined bail until the city made concessions. "Those agreements", said King, "were dishonored and violated by the city," as soon as he left town.King returned in July 1962, and was sentenced to forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine. He chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Chief Pritchett discreetly arranged for King's fine to be paid and ordered his release. "We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools ... ejected from churches ... and thrown into jail ... But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail." After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible results, the movement began to deteriorate. King requested a halt to all demonstrations and a "Day of Penance" to promote non-violence and maintain the moral high ground. Divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts. However, it was credited as a key lesson in tactics for the national civil rights movement.