Martin Luther King Jr.: Prior To The Civil Rights Movement

Prior to the civil rights movement in 1954 to 1968, African-Americans faced so many hardships; such as slavery, racial and public discrimination and segregation. Even though the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation Act in 1863 which said that all slaves in states which had seceded from the Union were free. Still the African-American’s faced racial segregation and discrimination. In 1890 many southern states imposed “Jim Crow laws” on blacks. These were local state laws that were placed on Blacks which segregated African-Americans from almost everything, restaurants, work places and schools were segregated, they couldn’t even drink out of the same water fountain as a white person. During this time the violence towards African-Americans

Martin Luther King Jr was a very famous civil rights movement leader. He was famous for his nonviolent protest approaches, which he was prosecuted for these nonviolent protests, but that didn’t stop him. For example, He was arrested after leading an anti-segregation, nonviolent protest in Birmingham AL. while in jail, Martin Luther King Jr wrote a letter in response the white religious leaders of the south “Letter from Birmingham Jail” stating that everyone that lives in the United States has the right to be treated equally and they also have the right to disobey any law that is unmoral. “A just law is a synthetic 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. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal 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”( Letter From Birmingham) King also goes on to compare how Hitler had discriminated against the Jews to how the African-Americans were discriminated against and how it was illegal and that he would have stood up for them as well. The Letter from Birmingham Jail is one of the most famous documents from the civil rights

In the court case Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896 ruled facilities are separate but equal and this remained under Jim Crow laws for the school system until 1954 when Linda brown was not allowed to attend a local elementary school because she was African-American. This case among others were taken to the Supreme Court and the “separate but equal” With the argument that segregated schools violated the fourteenth Amendment of the U.S constitution. Therefore, in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education that schools would not be segregated anymore.“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education 1954) after this ruling there was no longer segregated schools. This was a very big step for the African American communities. Even though the Supreme Court ruled that there was no longer segregated schools there still was violence against African-Americans. This ruling angered many whites and some schools even appealed