Martin Luther King Research Paper

Martin Luther King, Jr. first stepped into the national spotlight in late 1955 when he led the African American’s in the Montgomery, Alabama’s bus boycott (Biography.com Editors). King experienced racism in his earlier years of life and claimed he had always wanted to do something to make the world a fairer place for African Americans (Col). On the night Rosa Parks, a colored woman, was arrested for violating the Montgomery city code by not giving her seat to a white man, King met with the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other civil rights activists from the area so arrangements could be made for a citywide bus boycott (Biography.com Editors). In this meeting, he was elected to lead and be the official

Having all these qualities made King believe he was the man for the job as well. In the first speech, he gave to this group he said they had no other motive but to protest, for he believed colored people had handled the situation with an amazing patience and should not take a violent approach at all. He ended this speech with, “But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.” The colored people of this community trekked to their homes through the snow, struggled to get to work when there were scorching temperatures, took harsh verbal abuse, and were attacked violently for 382 days. He had an innovative and skillful way of persuasively speaking to the protestors and put a jolt of energy into the fight against the struggle Montgomery was facing. Thanks to the suffering financial state of the city’s bus lines due to the boycott led by King and the Supreme Court’s ruling that “separate is never equal” in the Brown vs. Board of Education case, the United States Supreme Court ruled segregation of seating on city buses unconstitutional in November of 1956 (Biography.com

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on his hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. Because of King’s tragic death, the “I Have a Dream” speech returned to the forefront of public memory with his legacy. His death also caused great shock, violence, and controversy to spread in African American communities across the nation (History.com Staff, “Martin Luther King Jr Assassination”). Because of the violent outbreaks, more than two thousand people were injured, twenty thousand people were arrested, and the damages are estimated to be three hundred eighty-five dollars today (Risen). Because of this national mourning, President Lyndon B. Johnson called upon congress to pass the civil rights legislation so it could be sent to the House of Representatives for debate. It was only a week after King’s assassination that President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 making it the last significant achievement written by the legislative branch in the civil rights era. Even after his death, King’s life’s work inspired the supporters of the Civil Rights Movement to persevere through the struggle for equality with him as their leader spirit (History.com Staff, “Martin Luther King Jr