Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister who was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination, which most commonly affected African Americans.
A Black church leader, King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and was the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), leading the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helping organize nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, and helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement. There were dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who often responded violently. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
King was jailed several times. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of COINTELPRO from 1963. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. was a minister in rural Georgia, moved to Atlanta in 1893, and became pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the following year. Williams married Jennie Celeste Parks. He enrolled in Morehouse College to study for entry to the ministry. Michael Sr. and Alberta began dating in 1920, and married on November 25, 1926. Until Jennie's death in 1941, their home was on the second floor of Alberta's parents' home, where King was born. Michael Jr. had an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel King.
Shortly after marrying Alberta, King Sr. became assistant pastor of the Ebenezer church. Senior pastor Williams died in the spring of 1931 and that fall King Sr. took the role. With support from his wife, he raised attendance from six hundred to several thousand. He also visited sites in Germany that are associated with the Reformation leader Martin Luther. After returning home in August 1934, Michael Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King and his five-year-old son's name to Martin Luther King Jr. King had to attend a school for black children, Yonge Street Elementary School, while his playmate went to a separate school for white children only. Soon afterwards, the parents of the white boy stopped allowing King to play with their son, stating to him, "we are white, and you are colored". When King relayed this to his parents, they talked with him about the history of slavery and racism in America, which King would later say made him "determined to hate every white person". His parents instructed him that it was his Christian duty to love everyone.
Martin Jr. witnessed his father stand up against segregation and discrimination. Once, when stopped by a police officer who referred to Martin Sr. as "boy", Martin Sr. responded sharply that Martin Jr. was a boy but he was a man. When Martin Jr's father took him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to sit in the back. Martin Sr. refused, asserting "We'll either buy shoes sitting here or we won't buy any shoes at all", before leaving the store with Martin Jr. He told Martin Jr. afterward, "I don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it." In 1936, Martin Sr. led hundreds of African Americans in a civil rights march to the city hall in Atlanta to protest voting rights discrimination. Martin Jr. later remarked that Martin Sr. was "a real father" to him.
Martin Jr. memorized hymns and Bible verses by the time he was five years old. Beginning at six years old, he attended church events with his mother and sang hymns while she played piano. His favorite hymn was "I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus". King later became a member of the junior choir in his church. He enjoyed opera, and played the piano. King garnered a large vocabulary from reading dictionaries. He got into physical altercations with boys in his neighborhood, but oftentimes used his knowledge of words to stop or avoid fights. King showed a lack of interest in grammar and spelling, a trait that persisted throughout his life. In 1939, King sang as a member of his church choir dressed as a slave for the all-white audience at the Atlanta premiere of the film Gone with the Wind. In September 1940, at the age of 11, King was enrolled at the Atlanta University Laboratory School for the seventh grade. While there, King took violin and piano lessons and showed keen interest in history and English classes.
On May 18, 1941, when King had sneaked away from studying at home to watch a parade, he was informed that something had happened to his maternal grandmother. After returning home, he learned she had a heart attack and died while being transported to a hospital. He took her death very hard and believed that his deception in going to see the parade may have been responsible for God taking her. King again jumped out of a second-story window at his home but again survived. His father instructed him that Martin Jr. should not blame himself and that she had been called home to God as part of God's plan. Martin Jr. struggled with this. Shortly thereafter, Martin Sr. decided to move the family to a two-story brick home on a hill overlooking downtown Atlanta.
Adolescence
thumb|The high school that King attended was named after African-American educator [[Booker T. Washington.]]
As an adolescent, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the "racial humiliation" that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure. In 1942, when King was 13, he became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal. In the same year, King skipped the ninth grade and enrolled in Booker T. Washington High School, where he maintained a B-plus average. The high school was the only one in the city for African-American students.
Martin Jr. was brought up in a Baptist home; as he entered adolescence he began to question the literalist teachings preached at his father's church. At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school. Martin Jr. said that he found himself unable to identify with the emotional displays from congregants who were frequent at his church; he doubted if he would ever attain personal satisfaction from religion. He later said of this point in his life, "doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly." In his speech he stated, "black America still wears chains. The finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man." King was selected as the winner of the contest.
In the summer before King started at Morehouse, he boarded a train with his friend—Emmett "Weasel" Proctor—and a group of other Morehouse College students to work in Simsbury, Connecticut, at the tobacco farm of Cullman Brothers Tobacco. This was King's first trip into the integrated north. In a June 1944 letter to his father, King wrote about the differences that struck him: "On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to." On Friday evenings, the students visited downtown Simsbury to get milkshakes and watch movies, and on Saturdays they would travel to Hartford, Connecticut, to see theatre performances, shop, and eat in restaurants. King had concluded that the church offered the most assuring way to answer "an inner urge to serve humanity", and he made peace with the Baptist Church, as he believed he would be a "rational" minister with sermons that were "a respectful force for ideas, even social protest." King graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology in 1948, aged nineteen.
Religious education
alt=A large facade of a building|thumb|King received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from [[Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951 (pictured in 2009).]]
King enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, and took several courses at the University of Pennsylvania. At Crozer, King was elected president of the student body. At Penn, King took courses with William Fontaine, Penn's first African-American professor, and Elizabeth F. Flower, a professor of philosophy. King's father supported his decision to continue his education and made arrangements for King to work with J. Pius Barbour, a family friend and Crozer alumnus who pastored at Calvary Baptist Church in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania. King became known as one of the "Sons of Calvary", an honor he shared with William Augustus Jones Jr. and Samuel D. Proctor, who both went on to become well-known preachers.
King reproved another student for keeping beer in his room once, saying they shared responsibility as African Americans to bear "the burdens of the Negro race". For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbusch's "social gospel". In his third year at Crozer, King became romantically involved with Betty Moitz, the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who worked in the cafeteria. King planned to marry her, but friends, as well as King's father,
In 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University, In Boston, King befriended a small cadre of local ministers his age, and sometimes guest pastored at their churches, including Michael E. Haynes, associate pastor at Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury. The young men often held bull sessions in their apartments, discussing theology, sermon style, and social issues.
At the age of 25 in 1954, King was called as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King received his PhD on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation (initially supervised by Edgar S. Brightman and, upon the latter's death, by Lotan Harold DeWolf) titled A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. The committee found that the dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." A letter is now attached to the copy of King's dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources. Significant debate exists on how to interpret King's plagiarism.
Marriage and family
thumb|King is welcomed with a kiss from his wife, [[Coretta Scott King, after leaving court in Montgomery, AL, on March 22, 1956]]
thumb|King with his wife, Coretta Scott King, and daughter, [[Yolanda Denise King, in 1956]]
While studying at Boston University, King asked a friend from Atlanta named Mary Powell, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, if she knew any nice Southern girls. Powell spoke to fellow student Coretta Scott; Scott was not interested in dating preachers but eventually agreed to allow King to telephone her based on Powell's description and vouching. On their first call, King told Scott, "I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms," to which she replied: "You haven't even met me."
King married Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house, in Heiberger, Alabama. They had four children: Yolanda King (1955–2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (1961–2024), and Bernice King (b. 1963). King limited Coretta's role in the civil rights movement, expecting her to be a housewife and mother.
Activism and organizational leadership
Mary's Cafe Sit-In, 1950
On Sunday, June 11, 1950, King, classmate at Crozer Seminary and housemate Walter McCall, and their dates Doris Wilson and Pearl Smith attended church services in Merchantville. Afterwards they stopped at tavern Mary's Cafe in Maple Shade for beers. The foursome were left waiting without anyone approaching them for service, not unexpectedly. A friend's father and King and McCall's landlord Jesthroe Hunt had warned them Black people were not welcome at Mary's. King replied to the effect of maybe they needed to go, so they could start to go anywhere they wanted. The seminarians had opted for Mary's Cafe with full knowledge of its reputation. After waiting without service, McCall approached the bar.
McCall asked bartender and Mary's Cafe owner Ernest Nichols for packaged goods (beer for takeaway). Nichols refused, explaining he could not sell packaged goods on Sundays or any day after 10pm, by law. McCall then requested 4 glasses of beer to which Nichols answered "no beer, Mr! Today is Sunday”. Nichols would claim they sought him to violate New Jersey's blue law (a restriction common in South Jersey and Pennsylvania as a remnant of the influence of their Quakers roots). King and company met refusal with refusal, and remained in their seats as was their right per New Jersey's 1945 anti-discrimination law, which guaranteed non-discrimination by race in public accommodations. Nichols stomped out and returned with a gun standing outside firing into the air reportedly shouting "I'd kill for less".
Nichols was charged with disorderly conduct and violation of the anti-discrimination law. He was found guilty and fined $50, however the racial discrimination count was dismissed. In a statement submitted "in the spirit of assisting the Prosecutor" Patrick Duff, a South Jersey resident, discovered the police report detailing the events at Mary's after searching the archive at The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
In March 1955, Claudette Colvin—a black schoolgirl in Montgomery—refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in violation of Jim Crow laws, local laws in the Southern US that enforced racial segregation. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. These incidents led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which was urged and planned by Edgar Nixon and led by King. The other ministers asked him to take a leadership role because his relative newness to community leadership made it easier for him to speak out. King was hesitant but decided to do so if no one else wanted it.
The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested for traveling 30 mph in a 25 mph zone and jailed, which drew the attention of national media, and increased King's public stature. The controversy ended when the US District Court issued a ruling in Browder v. Gayle that prohibited racial segregation on Montgomery public buses. as well as the national organizing of the group In Friendship, founded by King allies Stanley Levison and Ella Baker. King led the SCLC until his death. The SCLC's 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was the first time King addressed a national audience.
left|thumb|163x163px|King in November 1962
Harry Wachtel joined King's legal advisor Clarence B. Jones in defending four ministers of the SCLC in the libel case Abernathy et al. v. Sullivan; the case was litigated about the newspaper advertisement "Heed Their Rising Voices". Wachtel founded a tax-exempt fund to cover the suit's expenses and assist the civil rights movement through more effective fundraising. King served as honorary president of this organization, named the "Gandhi Society for Human Rights". In 1962, King and the Gandhi Society produced a document that called on President Kennedy to issue an executive order to deliver a blow to segregation as a kind of Second Emancipation Proclamation. Kennedy did not execute the order. The FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, began tapping King's telephone line in the fall of 1963. Kennedy was concerned that public allegations of communists in the SCLC would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives. He warned King to discontinue these associations and felt compelled to issue the directive that authorized the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the civil rights movement and investigated the allegations of communist infiltration. When no evidence emerged to support this, the FBI used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years, as part of its COINTELPRO program, in attempts to force King out of his leadership position.
King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced most Americans that the civil rights movement was the most important political issue in the early 1960s.
King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into law with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The SCLC used tactics of nonviolent protest with success, by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities, who sometimes turned violent.
Survived knife attack, 1958
On September 20, 1958, King was signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein's department store in Harlem when Izola Curry—a mentally ill black woman who thought King was conspiring against her with communists—stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. King underwent surgery by Aubre de Lambert Maynard, Emil Naclerio and John W. V. Cordice; he remained hospitalized for weeks. Curry was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial. Accepting his doctor's advice, King, along with Coretta and Alabama State College history professor Lawrence D. Reddick, traveled to Europe, India and the Middle East from February to March 1959 to recuperate. Upon returning to Montgomery, King agreed with the SCLC board to fire executive director John Lee Tilley, but hired co-founder Bayard Rustin to manage press relations.
Atlanta sit-ins, prison sentence, and the 1960 elections
thumb|King led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later became co-pastor with his father at [[Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (pulpit and sanctuary pictured).]]
In December 1959, King announced his return to Atlanta at the request of the SCLC. In Atlanta, King served until his death as co-pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver expressed open hostility towards King's return and vowed to keep King under surveillance. On May 4, 1960, King drove writer Lillian Smith to Emory University when police stopped them. King was cited for "driving without a license" because he had not yet been issued a Georgia license. King's Alabama license was still valid, and Georgia law did not mandate any time limit for issuing a local license. King paid a fine but was unaware his lawyer agreed to a plea deal that included probation.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta Student Movement had been acting to desegregate businesses and public spaces, organizing the Atlanta sit-ins from March 1960 onwards. In August the movement asked King to participate in a mass October sit-in, timed to highlight how 1960's presidential election campaigns had ignored civil rights. The coordinated day of action took place on October 19. King participated in a sit-in at the restaurant inside Rich's, Atlanta's largest department store, and was among the many arrested. The authorities released everyone over the next few days, except King. Invoking his probationary plea deal, Judge J. Oscar Mitchell sentenced King on October 25 to four months of hard labor. Before dawn the next day, King was transported to Georgia State Prison.
The arrest and harsh sentence drew nationwide attention. Many feared for King's safety, as he started a sentence with people convicted of violent crimes, many white and hostile to his activism. Presidential candidates were asked to weigh in, at a time when parties were courting the support of Southern Whites and their political leadership including Governor Vandiver. Nixon, with whom King had a closer relationship before, declined to make a statement despite a visit from Jackie Robinson requesting his intervention. Nixon's opponent John F. Kennedy called the governor, enlisted his brother Robert to exert more pressure on state authorities, and, at the request of Sargent Shriver, called King's wife to offer his help. The pressure from Kennedy and others proved effective, and King was released two days later. King's father decided to openly endorse Kennedy's candidacy for the November 8 election which he narrowly won.
After the October 19 sit-ins and following unrest, a 30-day truce was declared in Atlanta for desegregation negotiations. However, negotiations failed and sit-ins and boycotts resumed for several months. On March 7, 1961, a group of Black elders including King notified student leaders that a deal had been reached: the city's lunch counters would desegregate in fall 1961, in conjunction with the court-mandated desegregation of schools. Many students were disappointed at the compromise. In a meeting on March 10 at Warren Memorial Methodist Church, the audience was hostile and frustrated. King gave an impassioned speech calling participants to resist the "cancerous disease of disunity", helping to calm tensions.
Rustin and King organized a civil rights march near the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. threatened to leak rumors of a false affair between Rustin and King to the press. King canceled the march and Rustin resigned from his position with the SCLC.
Albany Movement, 1961
The Albany Movement was a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. In December, King and the SCLC became involved. The movement mobilized thousands of citizens for a nonviolent attack on segregation in the city and attracted nationwide attention. When King first visited on December 15, 1961, he "had planned to stay a day or so and return home after giving counsel." The following day he was swept up in a mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators, and he declined bail until the city made concessions. According to King, "that agreement was dishonored and violated by the city" after he left. It was later acknowledged by the King Center that Billy Graham was the one who bailed King out.
After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible results, the movement began to deteriorate. King requested a halt to all demonstrations and a "Day of Penance" to promote nonviolence and maintain the moral high ground. Divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts. Though the Albany effort proved a key lesson in tactics for King and the civil rights movement, the national media was highly critical of King's role in the defeat, and the SCLC's lack of results contributed to a growing gulf between the organization and the more radical SNCC. After Albany, King sought to choose engagements for the SCLC in which he could control the circumstances, rather than entering into pre-existing situations.
Birmingham campaign, 1963
thumb| right | King was arrested in 1963 for protesting the treatment of black people in Birmingham.
thumb|Vice President [[Lyndon B. Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy with King, Benjamin Mays, and other civil rights leaders, June 22, 1963]]
In April 1963, the SCLC began a campaign against racial segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics, developed in part by Wyatt Tee Walker. Black people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC, occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that they considered unjust.
King's intent was to provoke mass arrests and "create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation." The campaign's early volunteers did not succeed in shutting down the city, or in drawing media attention to the police's actions. Over the concerns of an uncertain King, SCLC strategist James Bevel changed the course of the campaign by recruiting children and young adults to join the demonstrations. Newsweek called this strategy a Children's Crusade.
The Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, used high-pressure water jets and police dogs against protesters, including children. Footage of the police response was broadcast on national television, shocking many white Americans and consolidating black Americans behind the movement. Not all demonstrators were peaceful, despite the avowed intentions of the SCLC. In some cases, bystanders attacked the police, who responded with force. King and the SCLC were criticized for putting children in harm's way. But the campaign was a success: Connor lost his job, the "Jim Crow" signs came down, and public places became more open to blacks. King's reputation improved immensely. out of 29. From his cell, he composed the now-famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" that responds to calls to pursue legal channels for social change. The letter has been described as "one of the most important historical documents penned by a modern political prisoner". King argues that the crisis of racism is too urgent, and the current system too entrenched: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
March on Washington, 1963
thumb|Leaders of the March on Washington posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial
thumb|upright=.8|The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963)
King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were Roy Wilkins from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young, National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James L. Farmer Jr., Congress of Racial Equality.
Bayard Rustin's open homosexuality, support of socialism, and former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself, which King agreed to do. However, he did collaborate in the 1963 March on Washington, for which Rustin was the primary organizer. For King, this role was another which courted controversy, since he was a key figure who acceded to the wishes of President Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation. However, the organizers were firm the march would proceed. With the march going forward, the Kennedys decided it was important to ensure its success. President Kennedy was concerned the turnout would be less than 100,000 and enlisted the aid of additional church leaders and Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, to help mobilize demonstrators.
thumb|[[The March (1964 film)|The March, a 1964 documentary film produced by the United States Information Agency. King's speech has been redacted from this video because of the copyright held by King's estate.]]
The march originally was planned to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the southern US and place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the capital. Organizers intended to denounce the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks. The group acquiesced to presidential pressure, and the event ultimately took on a less strident tone. As a result, some civil rights activists felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X called it the "Farce on Washington", and the Nation of Islam forbade its members from attending.
thumb|King gave his most famous speech, "I Have a Dream", before the [[Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.]]
The march made specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public schools; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers (); and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee. Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.'s history.King said:
"I Have a Dream" came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of oratory. The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the agenda of reformers and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
New York City, 1964
thumb|upright=.7|King at a press conference in March 1964
On February 6, 1964, King delivered the inaugural speech of a lecture series initiated at the New School called "The American Race Crisis". In his remarks, King referred to a conversation he had recently had with Jawaharlal Nehru in which he compared the sad condition of many African Americans to that of India's untouchables. In his March 18, 1964, interview with Robert Penn Warren, King compared his activism to his father's, citing his training in non-violence as a key difference. He also discusses the next phase of the civil rights movement and integration.
St. Augustine, Florida, 1964
In March 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with Robert Hayling's then-controversial movement in St. Augustine, Florida. Hayling's group had been affiliated with the NAACP but was forced out of the organization for advocating armed self-defense alongside nonviolent tactics. However, the pacifist SCLC accepted them. King and the SCLC worked to bring white Northern activists to St. Augustine, including a delegation of rabbis and the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, all of whom were arrested. During June, the movement marched nightly through the city, "often facing counter demonstrations by the Klan, and provoking violence that garnered national media attention." Hundreds of the marchers were arrested and jailed. During this movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.
Biddeford, Maine, 1964
On May 7, 1964, King spoke at Saint Francis College's "The Negro and the Quest for Identity", in Biddeford, Maine. This was a symposium that brought together many civil rights leaders. King spoke about how "We must get rid of the idea of superior and inferior races," through nonviolent tactics.
Scripto strike in Atlanta, 1964
Starting in November 1964, King supported a labor strike by several hundred workers at the Scripto factory in Atlanta, just a few blocks from Ebenezer Baptist. Many of the strikers were congregants of his church, and the strike was supported by other civil rights leaders. A local judge issued an injunction that barred any gathering of three or more people affiliated with the SNCC, SCLC, DCVL, or any of 41 named civil rights leaders. This injunction temporarily halted civil rights activity until King defied it by speaking at Brown Chapel on January 2, 1965. During the 1965 march to Montgomery, Alabama, violence by state police and others against the peaceful marchers resulted in much publicity, which made racism in Alabama visible nationwide.
Acting on James Bevel's call for a march from Selma to Montgomery, Bevel and other SCLC members, in partial collaboration with SNCC, attempted to organize a march to the state's capital. The first attempt to march on March 7, 1965, at which King was not present, was aborted because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day has become known as Bloody Sunday and was a turning point in the effort to gain public support for the civil rights movement. It was the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King and Bevel's nonviolence strategy.
On March 5, King met with officials in the Johnson Administration to request an injunction against any prosecution of the demonstrators. He did not attend the march due to church duties, but later wrote, "If I had any idea that the state troopers would use the kind of brutality they did, I would have felt compelled to give up my church duties altogether to lead the line." Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused public outrage.
King next attempted to organize a march for March 9. The SCLC petitioned for an injunction in federal court against Alabama; this was denied and the judge issued an order blocking the march until after a hearing. Nonetheless, King led marchers on March 9 to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, then held a prayer session before turning the marchers around and asking them to disperse so as not to violate the court order. The unexpected ending of this second march aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, 1965. At the conclusion of the march on the steps of the state capitol, King delivered a speech that became known as "How Long, Not Long". King stated that equal rights for African Americans could not be far away, "because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" and "you shall reap what you sow".