What did this man actually

do?

What kind of person do you

think he was?
 Martin Luther King Jr.
Learning Objectives:
To assess the imprtance of Marting Luther King Jr in
the Civil Rights movement.

Success Criteria:
To be able to give an overview of King’s life.
To say whether he deserves his ‘saintly’ reputation
and justify your point of view
 Key Dates
1956 – Mongomery Bus Boycott
1957 – Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
formed
1960 – Sit-ins in the South
1961 – Freedom Riders travelled the South
Albany Movement
1963 – Birmingham riots
March on Washington
1964 – Mississippi Freedom Summer
Civil Rights Act
1965 – Selma to Montgomery march
Voting Rights Act
Watts riots
1966 – Meredith March
King Assassinated
 In this unit……
Some of Martin Luther King’s
contemporaries and some historians
consider him to be a crucial figure in the
civil rights movement. Others regret the
emphasis upon King and stress the
importance of the contributions of other
individuals and organisations. King’s
organisational abilities and his personal
reputation are also controversial.
 Background
Childhood, youth and education

King was born into a well-educated and relatively prosperous family

that gained strength from the church and NAACP. His grandfather
and father were pastors of a Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia, and
NAACP activists.
As a small child, MLK had a white friend, King recalled…..
“He told me that one day his father had demanded that he would play
with me no more. I never wil forget what a great shock this was to
me….For the first time, I was made aware of the existence of a race
problem.”
I he wanted a day out downtown, he would have to travel from ‘nigger
town’ at the back of the bus. He could not buy a soda or hot dog at
a downtown lunch counter. If a white drugstore served him they
would hand him his ice cream through a side window and in a
paper cup so no white would have to use any plate he had used. He
had to drink from the ‘coloured’ water fountain and use the
‘coloured’ restroom. King said of this it made him
‘determined to hate every white person’.
King received poor-quality education in Atlanta’s segregated
schools. When he went North to college, he experienced further
racial prejudice. When he demanded service in a Philadelphia
restaurant, his plate arrived filled with sand. A New Jersey
restaurant drew a gun on King when he refused to leave. King had
problems getting student accommodation in Boston in 1951:

“I went into place after place where there were signs that rooms
were for rent. They were for rent until they found out I was a
Negro and suddenly they had just been rented.”

However, his attitude towards whites changed. He particularly liked

white women. Devastated when friends convinced him that
marriage to a white sweetheart would not work, he married fellow
black student Coretta Scott. She hated the segregated South, but
King insisted on returning there, ‘because that’s where I’m
needed’.
 Minister in Montgomery
Initially King rejected a church career, believing the church concentrated on life in the next
world instead of working to improve life in this world. However, he felt called by God
and became pastor of a ‘rich folks’ church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. King
urged his congregation to register to vote and join the NAACP. His involvement in the
black boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses resulted in many threats on his life
and family. His family urged him to give up activism. He wavered, but:

“it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther,
stand-up for righteousness. Stand-up for justice. Stand-up for truth. And lo I will be with
you, even until the end of the world’……..I heard the voice of Jesus………He promised
never to leave me’.

King lacked reliable legal protection in the South. After the bus boycott, two whites who
had confessed to trying to blow up King’s home were adjudged innocent by an all white
Alabama jury. He was nearly killed on a 1958 visit to Harlem. A deranged black woman
stabbed him. It took hours for surgeons to remove the blade, which was milimeters
from his aorta. Had King sneezed while awaiting the blade’s removal he would have
died. This did not dter him,

“My cause, my race, is worth dying for”.

By 1957, he was recognised as one of black America’s leading spokesmen.

In 1960, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia to the HQ of the SCLC.
 Protest and Publicity
As few blacks were registered to vote in the segregated
South, they lacked the political power to change the
situation. King therefore became increasingly involved
in demonstrations to draw attention to black problems.
He wanted demonstrations to be peaceful and non-
violent but was frequently arrested while participating
in them. The publicity drew national and international
attention to black problems and helped procure civil
rights legislation. King then concentrated on the
problems of Northern black ghettos: one hot July
weekend in Chicago in 1965, he made 20 speeches in
less than 48hrs. The workload, the constant fear for his
life, the slow rate of progress, ghetto riots and
increasing numbers of black and white extremists all
made him increasingly pessimistic. His close friend
Reverand Ralph Abernathy said, ‘He was just a
different person…..sad and depressed’.
 Disillusionment
Increasingly pessimistic, King concluded he had overestimated the
success of 1955-65. He said the ‘vast majority’ of whites were
racist, ‘hypocritical’, and had committed a kind of ‘psychological
and spiritual genocide’ against blacks. King also felt he had
underestimated black rage. He was exasperated by militant black
racists such as Stokely Carmichael. ‘Many people who would
otherwise be ashamed of their anti-negro feeling now have an
excuse.’ However, ‘Stokely is not the problem. The problem is
white people and their attitude’.
Whites and blacks became increasingly critical of him. When he
toured riot-stricken Cleveland, Ohio, black teenagers mocked and
ignored him. He knew he had raised their hopes but failed to fulfil
them. Many blacks thought him too moderate. Many whites
considered him an extremist. The Washington Post accused King
of inciting anarchy because he had urged non-violent disruption of
Washington DC to ‘create the crisis that will force the nation to
look at the situation’. He called that ‘massive civil disobedience’.
In spring 1968 King went to support black strikers in Memphis,
Tennessee. There, he was assassinated by a social misfit who
called him Martin ‘Lucifer’ King or Martin Luther ‘Coon’.
 Question
What did Martin Luther King actually
do?

What kind of person do you think he

was?
 “I have a dream………..”

How does this speech show the

influence of Martin Luther King?
What is the message of his speech?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk
 The Controversy of MLK
Did Martin Luther King deserve his
‘saintly’ reputation?

Read through the notes and complete

your sheet to help you focus your
response to this question.