Civil Rights Movement and the Ministry of Martin Luther King Jr.

The event

Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister from a family of Atlanta clergy who had studied both the Black church tradition of his upbringing and the philosophy of nonviolent resistance associated with Mohandas Gandhi, rose to national leadership of the American civil rights movement following the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, a successful campaign against racial segregation on the city's public buses organized after Rosa Parks's arrest.

Over the following decade, King and organizations including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King helped found and led, organized a series of major campaigns combining explicitly Christian moral appeal, disciplined nonviolent civil disobedience deliberately intended to expose the brutality of segregationist enforcement to national and international media attention, and sustained community organizing — most notably the 1963 Birmingham campaign, the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his widely celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech, and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

These campaigns, along with sustained political organizing and the shifting national conscience they helped produce, contributed directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing major forms of racial discrimination, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which dismantled many of the legal mechanisms Southern states had used to disenfranchise Black voters — landmark federal legislation that King and the movement's leaders regarded as the direct fruit of years of grounded, theologically articulated nonviolent struggle.

King's later activism increasingly connected the movement's concerns to broader critiques of economic inequality and, controversially even among some former allies, to outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, positions articulated forcefully in speeches and writings including his 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" address. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, while supporting a sanitation workers' strike, an event that provoked widespread national grief and unrest and cemented his standing as one of the twentieth century's most significant Christian moral leaders and one of the most consequential applications of Christian theological conviction to a modern social reform movement.

Other witnesses

• Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream" speech, 1963
• Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963
• Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 (full texts)

Further reading

• Letter from Birmingham Jail (King Institute, Stanford) — primary source
• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute