The History of the Man Who Marked History through Peace
The one man who greatly influenced the outcome of the civil rights movement of the 1960’s was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was a great leader and an African-American Civil Rights activist that established change through nonviolent protests he helped lead. For centuries in America, black people suffered the lash of the whip as slaves, and the agonizing humiliation of segregation and the Jim Crow laws of the south. Dr. King believed that progress is made through reconciliation instead of violence, which is profound since lashing out against the oppressing society with hatred or violence might have been is easier if not ultimately doomed to failure. He was inspired to nonviolent protests by many different people, such as his father who
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Dr. King sacrificed and he was arrested about thirty times during his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. Regardless of his trials, Dr. King put his full faith in God and he never gave up his cause. In fact, his nonviolent protests were, “mainly responsible for the two major legislative gains of the Civil Rights Movement… the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA),” (Violence and/or Nonviolence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement). The Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s could be considered the beginning of the end of racism and the rise of a new, accepting multicultural society. It was not violence that led to the victory that was equal rights, instead it was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding, it’s a story with a fundamental and simple truth, violence is a dead end (Violence and/or Nonviolence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement). The peaceful protests forced America to see the error of her ways, in fact, without nonviolent protests it could be argued that change for the African-American Community would