Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes
We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.
Martin Luther King Jr., 1929-1968, Clergyman & Civil Rights Leader, Nobel Peace Laureate, Statement to President Lyndon Johnson, 1964
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He was criticizing the other major Black leader of the time, Booker T. Washington. See {625803} for the kind of position that angered Du Bois.
Refusing induction into the armed forces during the Vietnam War:
He had written this text on a newspaper when he was jailed in Birmingham for violating a court order not to demonstrate. A common tactic of the Southern segregationists was to have local segregationist judges issue injunctions against civil rights demonstrations on the grounds that they would promote violence. These were generally unconstitutional, but King and others were jailed until the legal appeal could even be heard.
He was killed In the Spanish Civil War.
In the early 1950s, most of the South was racially segregated. Though hard to believe today, the Alabama law then required a Black man or woman to sit in the back of the bus. Rosa Parks, a black woman, sat in a seat in the middle of the bus and refused to give up her seat to a white man. She just quietly sat in her seat. She was arrested, and this triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 which was a major event in the Civil Rights struggle. Alabama was not the only state where this type of outrage occurred. The South at that time was relatively backward educationally, commercially, and legally and racial segregation was a huge problem in most of the South.
King and his associates along with a large number of students were arrested for protesting racial discrimination in Selma. The Chief of police was told that this is just what King wanted. His was a deliberate attempt to get publicity by arresting and prosecuting a group of ministers and school children. So Chief Baker told King that they were not under arrest. So King went outside the jail where many journalists had congregated, hastily called a press conference, and publicly admitted to deliberately drawing attention to the conditions.
The law enforcement officers were the ones who broke the law when they beat and brutalized the peaceful civil rights marchers. The “white niggers” refer to the white marchers including clergy.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an African American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. He was the son of early civil rights activist Martin Luther King Sr.
