Martin Luther King Jr

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“I Have A Dream”

An essay on Dr Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King Jr was born on the 15th of January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia.

In 1948 King was made a Baptist minister after attending Croze theological seminary in Pennsylvania. He then went on to study at Boston University where he got his PhD in theology 1955. In Boston he met a girl named Corletta Scott whom he married 1953 in Marion, Alabama. He became the reverend of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama where they settled in 1954.

On December 1st that same year, Rosa Parks refused to move when a white man wanted to sit on a bus in Montgomery, which led to a one-year boycott of the busses there. King was made leader of the boycott on December 5th.

It didn’t take officials long to react and King was arrested together with some associates on Febuary 21st 1956. This however was no tragedy. A big trial was held and the court found that the racial segregation on the busses was in fact a violation of the constitution.

Of course there was an appeal, but the Supreme Court supported the ruling on November 13th. This was the first victory but not the last for the civil rights fighters.

In 1957 King founded the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference),
A group founded for the purpose of “fighting” (King shared Gandhi’s theories on non violence) discrimination and racial segregation. King released his first book “stride towards freedom” in 1958. The same year somebody tried to assassinate him in Harlem N Y. As a firm believer in non-violence King went to India in 1959 to study Mahatma Gandhi’s theories.

In 1960 two black boys walked into an “all white” lunch bar in Greensboro, North Carolina and demanded service. Of course they were refused. But they kept coming back day after day.

This was the beginning of a wave of “sit-ins” across the south. King, who attended these “sit-ins” in Atlanta where he now resided, was arrested and sentenced to 4 months hard labour. But he had good lawyers and as it happened it was an election year and the Kennedys seized the opportunity to gain votes and got him acquitted on all charges. This won them the election.

King had now gone to prison two times but it was only the beginning, in the next couple of years he was to be arrested 16 more times.

In 1963 one of the biggest demonstration marches of all times was held in Washington, and it was there King held his most famous speech “I have a dream”.

Times magazine elected him “man of the year” in 1964 after he had gotten the Nobel peace price for his humanitary work. All the hard work finally paid off in 1965 when president Lyndon Johnson passed a law which gave all black people full voting rights, putting a stop to the idiotic tries of the southern states to stop blacks from voting.

In 1968 King held his last speech “I have seen the top of the mountain” in Memphis, Tennessee only one day before he died.

Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony on April 4th 1968.
A sniper shot him. James Earl Ray (a white man who didn’t like that black people got voting rights) was later tried and convicted of the heinous crime. However there are many who speculate that he wasn’t guilty and that the ...