Preview

Martin Luther King

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1610 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

The most important person to have made a significant change in the rights of Blacks was Martin Luther King. He had great courage and passion to defeat segregation and racism that existed in the United States, and it was his influence to all the Blacks to defy white supremacy and his belief in nonviolence that lead to the success of the Civil Rights movement.

Martin Luther King was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia where the city suffered most of the racial discrimination in the South, and, in addition, the Ku Klux Klan had one of it's headquarters there. But it was his father, Martin Luther King Sr. who played an important role in shaping the personality of his son. M.L. Sr. helped to advocate the idea that Blacks should vote. He was involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, an important Civil Rights group. These efforts to improve the way of life for Blacks could be seen by his son.

In December 5, 1955 King began to be significant in the changing of the Black man's way of life. The boycott of the Montgomery Bus was begun when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white man on
December 1st. Two Patrolmen took her away to the police station where she was booked. He and 50 other ministered held a meeting and agreed to start a boycott on December 5th, the day of Rosa Parks's hearing. This boycott would probably be successful since 70% of the riders were black. The bus company did not take them seriously, because if there was bad weather, they would have to take the bus. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was established to co-ordinate the boycott. They had a special agreement with black cab companies, in which they were allowed to get a ride for a much cheaper price than normal. Blacks had to walk to work, and so they did not have time to do any shopping and therefore the sales decreased dramatically. On January 30, while M.L was making a speech, his house was
bombed.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Emmett Till Trial

    • 618 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In December, 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refuse to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery Alabama. This was nothing new that she was asking to give up her seat since it was a segregated bus. Because she didn’t give up her seat, actions were triggered that led to her arrest and the boycott.…

    • 618 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man forty- five years ago on December 1, 1955, she was tired and weary from a long day of work. At least that's how the event has been retold countless times and recorded in our history books. There's a misconception here that does not do justice to the woman whose act of courage began turning the wheels of the civil rights movement on that fateful day.…

    • 249 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Thanks to the courage of Rosa Parks, just one bus trip changed the future of the whole nation and had a huge impact on the movement in support of civil rights throughout the world. At that time in America, and especially in the southern states, the so-called laws of Jim Crow, adopted after the Civil War, were being operated. These acts concerned almost every aspect of the everyday life of the representatives of the colored population and severely restricted their rights: for blacks, there were separate cafes and restaurants, their own hairdressers,and special waiting rooms. Note that there were not any school buses for colored people in the South of America...…

    • 487 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    dbq cschoolwork

    • 1261 Words
    • 6 Pages

    to vote. African Americans had moved to northern cities in great numbers, automobile filled the streets,…

    • 1261 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The organizer of the boycott is a fairly popular minister in southern United States at the time, he is known as Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleague Ralph Abernathy. The organizers called for all African Americans to no ride the city busses until further notice. According to Felicia Mcghee’s article The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Fall of the Montgomery City Lines, bus service was a core method of transportation for Montgomery’s black residents, as about half of the city’s 44,000 black residents regularly paid to use the service. Many blacks lived on Montgomery’s west side and would take the buses to the courtyard square in downtown Montgomery, then transfer buses to get to the city’s eastside. Many black domestic workers used buses to get to and from the white homes where they worked. So to get around town to get to their normal daily functions such as going to work/school, and other things they needed to get done many African Americans would walk, carpool, and take taxis. African Americans created taxi services that ran the same exact routes as the public transit and charged the same amount as they would pay to ride the…

    • 1790 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Communities in Chicago

    • 2547 Words
    • 11 Pages

    The reason for this massive movement of African Americans laborers and sharecroppers to Chicago was to escape violence and segregation. They also desired the relief of economic burdens that have haunted them throughout their lives. However, these conditions did not really alter over time as some southerners found it even more difficult to find a steady job and decent living conditions while competing with European immigrants. In an interview with Leroy Martin, who was a former black superintendent of police in Chicago with author Mr. Tim Black, the socioeconomic status was bad. Mr. Martin says black people worked, but the good jobs for black people were as waiters on the railroad. There were no black bus drivers, very few black police officers, and no black firefighters at that time. Those jobs…

    • 2547 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Not only they were forced to live in places they did not want to live; public transportation was places of hallucinations for Negroes. Once their fares were deposited, they were sent straight to the rear. During such time, both the driver and white folks tormented them. Imagine the type of pushing and shoveling that occurred. Such dramatic and…

    • 1165 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The African Americans that had moved to the city lived in poor slums, also known as ghettos. The African Americans usually lived in one-room kitchenettes. Many African-Americans took the opportunity to start new business such as hairdressing. With many African Americans succeeding in “areas of finance that whites considered too risky” . The whites discriminated against African Americans because African-Americans competed with whites for jobs because they work for less and are sometimes used as strikebreakers, or people who would be hired when workers in a union went on strike.…

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Though his idea focused more on manual labor, per se, Booker’s idea sought to start the blacks to get to know how to start living and becoming a more independent self. Booker relays his position by saying, “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house. ”(Document C) By blacks beginning to work and get acquainted with becoming more independent, it made more sense to progress both white and blacks lives together to promote…

    • 419 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Free Blacks In The North

    • 1904 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Because of prejudice, free black men found it especially hard to find employment in skilled trades such as construction. White workers often refused to work alongside blacks. In Cincinnati, a city that is just across the Ohio River from the then-slave state of Kentucky, the president of a union was put on trial by his organization for taking on a black apprentice (Curry 19). In New York City, white dock workers used violence to keep black men from obtaining jobs on the docks. As a result of such attitudes and behavior, 87 percent of the employed African Americans in that city in the 1850s worked in menial occupations (Takaki, Iron Cages 111). In 1830, a writer who called himself “a Colored Philadelphian” said, “If a man of color has children, it is almost impossible for him to get a trade for them, as the journeymen and apprentices generally refuse to work with them” (qtd. in Curry 19). A young free black man of that era wrote, “Shall I be a mechanic? No one will employ me; white boys won’t work with me” (Takaki, A Different Mirror 110). To feed themselves and their families, most free black men in the North took whatever work they could find as servants, day laborers, or sailors. Women often worked as maids, cooks, or laundresses (“African American…

    • 1904 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Martin Luther King

    • 809 Words
    • 4 Pages

    According to the Dictionary Online (2013), “Injustice is the violation of the rights of others; unjust or unfair action or treatment.” Martin Luther King Jr. defined an unjust law in the Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963), “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.” Judeo-Christian ethics were applied to allow for civil disobedience during the protest. King believed that there are the laws that are legal, and the laws that are just. Justice is above legality, and it holds a moral context to it. In his words: “A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” I also feel it is important when thinking about what is just, and unjust to realize the importance between the what is legal and illegal, and see how these go hand in hand. Also, it is important to be able to notice the difference between the two of them. This way, we can figure out whether or not civil disobedience is ever acceptable. King had also mentioned a few examples of the differences between legality and justice in his Letter From Birmingham Jail. In that letter he reminds us of everything the Nazis and Adolf Hitler did during the Holocaust, and how it was apparently “legal”. In Germany, they changed the laws to cover up what they had done. It became this poor excuse for them brutally killing thousands of people. These people died based on their religious views, handicaps, and life-style choices. Although what they did was legal, what they did was not just. The laws they made were unjust, and because justice is a higher power than legality. Those laws and those…

    • 809 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    which directly undermined the status of black by placing them under unfair restrictions. In 1866,…

    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Martin luther

    • 2893 Words
    • 12 Pages

    “ Luther was both a revolutionary and a conservative.” Evaluate this statement with respect to Luther's response to the political and social questions of his day.…

    • 2893 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Great Migration

    • 327 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Railroad companies were so desperate for help that they paid African Americans' travel expenses to the North. While northern labor agents traveled to the South to encourage blacks to leave and go find jobs in the North.…

    • 327 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    US History

    • 807 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Discrimination was still an issue in the South after the war. African Americans couldn’t enjoy the new sources of transportation because of the laws that prevented them from doing so.…

    • 807 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays