The American Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the major goals of the American Civil Rights movement was to give all people, regardless of race, equal rights. In the United States, civil rights are supposed to be for all people. Throughout history, people have had to fight for their rights when others tried to deny them. Today, all people enjoy the benefits of civil rights advocates. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most important civil rights leaders and because of him, there are equal rights today.

Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired by numerous people. The one person he was most inspired by was Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired by Gandhi because of his ideas of nonviolent protesting. “‘It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I

took many actions to achieve civil rights. One of the most famous protests was the Montgomery Bus Boycott which started because Rosa Parks got on a bus in Montgomery and she was asked to give up her seat for a white person and when she refused, she got arrested. (www.biography.com). After she was arrested, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) met with Martin Luther King Jr. to talk about the bus boycott. The NAACP decided that Martin Luther King Jr. should be the leader of the civil rights movement because he was young, well-trained, and he had few enemies because he was new to the civil rights movement. (www.biography.com). When the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, King told his followers, "’First and foremost, we are American citizens. ... We are not here advocating violence. ... The only weapon that we have ... is the weapon of protest. ... The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right’” (Martin Luther King Jr.). This quote is important because Martin Luther King Jr. tells Americans that in the U.S., people have the ability to protest. After a tough 382 days, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, outlawed bus segregation. (www.biography.com). The Brown v. Board of Education helped civil rights because it outlawed segregated schools and also outlawed bus

and other civil rights advocates used. To start, sit-ins were a popular kind of protest. Sit-ins are when black students would sit at segregated lunch counters. If they were asked to leave the lunch counter, they wouldn’t move. Sometimes the people who asked them to move would call them names and throw stuff at them or hit them. Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged this because it was a form of nonviolent protest. Sit-ins were successful in 27 cities, meaning no segregated lunch counters. One sit-in he was involved in was on October 19, 1960, with 75 other students at a department store. (www.biography.com). King and 36 other students were arrested, but Atlanta eventually negotiated a truce and the charges were dropped.