ORIGINAL MARTIN LUTHER KING EULOGY BENJAMIN MAYS DAISY ELLIOTT CIVIL RIGHTS For Sale

Mays, Benjamin.\"EULOGY OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. . .Atlanta, Georgia, April 9, 1968, Reprinted at theRequest of State Representative Mrs. Daisy Elliott\"[cover title].np, C1968. 8.5 x 5.5, stapled self wraps, unpag, a little worn and discolored else a nice item.Daisy Elliott was a State Rep in MichiganWhen Daisy Elliott, a soft-spoken legislator from Detroit who spent years fighting against racial bias and discrimination of all sorts, learned that her dream to enact a civil rights law would finally become a reality, she showed the world how change is possible: The Democrat embraced a Republican.
Elliott -- who authored and co-sponsored Michigan\'s landmark Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act in 1976 after finally obtaining bipartisan support and then insisting her Republican ally\'s name be included on the historic legislation -- has died. She was 98.Benjamin Elijah Mays was an American Baptist minister and American rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the American civil rights movement.‘MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’S UNFINISHED WORK ON EARTH MUST TRULY BE OUR OWN’Five days after King was assassinated, his “spiritual mentor” Benjamin Mays delivered a eulogy for his former student.
By Benjamin E. MaysKING ISSUESHAREEditor’s Note: Read The Atlantic’s special coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.Image above: King’s casket is carried into a funeral home in Atlanta the day after his death.
Benjamin Mays was the president of Morehouse College, in Atlanta, while Martin Luther King Jr. was a student there, and the two became friends. King considered Mays his “spiritual mentor” and “intellectual father.” Mays was 70 years old—no longer the college’s president but a civil-rights leader—when he delivered King’s eulogy, at Morehouse, on April 9, 1968. It was later published in Born to Rebel: An Autobiography, by the University of Georgia Press.
To be honored by being requested to give the eulogy at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is like being asked to eulogize a deceased son—so close and so precious was he to me. Our friendship goes back to his student days at Morehouse College. It is not an easy task; nevertheless, I accept it, with a sad heart, and with full knowledge of my inadequacy to do justice to this man. It was my desire that if I pre-deceased Dr. King he would pay tribute to me on my final day. It was his wish that if he pre-deceased me I would deliver the homily at his funeral. Fate has decreed that I eulogize him. I wish it might have been otherwise, for, after all, I am three score years and ten and Martin Luther is dead at thirty-nine.
Benjamin MaysBenjamin Mays (Larry Burrows / The Life Picture Collection / Getty)Although there are some who rejoice in his death, there are millions across the length and breadth of this world who are smitten with grief that this friend of mankind—all mankind—has been cut down in the flower of his youth. So multitudes here and in foreign lands, queens, kings, heads of governments, the clergy of the world, and the common man every-where are praying that God will be with the family, the American people, and the President of the United States in this tragic hour. We hope that this universal concern will bring comfort to the family—for grief is like a heavy load: when shared it is easier to bear. We come today to help the family carry the load.
We have assembled here from every section of this great nation and from other parts of the world to give thanks to God that he gave to America, at this moment in history, Martin Luther King Jr. Truly God is no respecter of persons. How strange! God called the grandson of a slave on his father’s side, and the grandson of a man born during the Civil War on his mother’s side, and said to him: Martin Luther, speak to America about war and peace; about social justice and racial discrimination; about its obligation to the poor; and about nonviolence as a way of perfecting social change in a world of brutality and war.
Here was a man who believed with all of his might that the pursuit of violence at any time is ethically and morally wrong; that God and the moral weight of the universe are against it; that violence is self-defeating; and that only love and forgiveness can break the vicious circle of revenge. He believed that nonviolence would prove effective in the abolition of in-justice in politics, in economics, in education, and in race relations. He was convinced also that people could not be moved to abolish voluntarily the in-humanity of man to man by mere persuasion and pleading, but that they could be moved to do so by dramatizing the evil through massive nonviolent resistance. He believed that nonviolent direct action was necessary to supplement the nonviolent victories won in federal courts. He believed that the nonviolent approach to solving social problems would ultimately prove to be redemptive.
I make bold to assert that it took more courage for King to practice nonviolence than it took for his assassin to fire the fatal shot.Out of this conviction, history records the marches in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, and other cities. He gave people an ethical and moral way to engage in activities designed to perfect social change without bloodshed and violence; and when violence did erupt it was that which is potential in any protest which aims to uproot deeply entrenched wrongs. No reasonable person would deny that the activities and the personality of Martin Luther King Jr. contributed largely to the success of the student sit-in movements in abolishing segregation in downtown establishments; and that his activities contributed mightily to the passage of the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.
Martin Luther King Jr. believed in a united America. He believed that the walls of separation brought on by legal and de facto segregation, and discrimination based on race and color, could be eradicated. As he said in his [Lincoln Memorial] address: “I have a dream!”FROM OUR KING ISSUECheck out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.
See MoreHe had faith in his country. He died striving to desegregate and integrate America to the end that this great nation of ours, born in revolution and blood, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created free and equal, will truly become the lighthouse of freedom where none will be denied because his skin is black and none favored because his eyes are blue; where our nation will be militarily strong but perpetually at peace; economically secure but just; learned but wise; where the poorest—the garbage collectors—will have bread enough and to spare; where no one will be poorly housed; each educated up to his capacity; and where the richest will understand the meaning of empathy. This was his dream, and the end toward which he strove. As he and his followers so often sang: “We shall overcome someday; black and white together.”
Let it be thoroughly understood that our deceased brother did not embrace nonviolence out of fear or cowardice. Moral courage was one of his noblest virtues. As Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British Empire without a sword and won, Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the inter-racial wrongs of his country without a gun. And he had the faith to believe that he would win the battle for social justice. I make bold to assert that it took more courage for King to practice non-violence than it took for his assassin to fire the fatal shot. The assassin is a coward: he committed his dastardly deed and fled. When Martin Luther disobeyed an unjust law, he accepted the consequences of his actions. He never ran away and he never begged for mercy. He returned to the Birmingham Jail to serve his time.
Perhaps he was more courageous than soldiers who fight and die on the battlefield. There is an element of compulsion in their dying. But when Martin Luther faced death again and again, and finally embraced it, there was no pressure. He was acting on an inner compulsion that drove him on. More courageous than those who advocate violence as a way out, for they carry weapons of destruction for defense. But Martin Luther faced the dogs, the police, jail, heavy criticism, and finally death, and he never carried a gun, not even a knife, to defend himself. He had only his faith in a just God to rely on; and the belief that “thrice is he armed that hath his quarrels just.” The faith that Browning writes about when he said: “One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, / Never doubted clouds would break, / Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, / Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, / Sleep to wake.”
Coupled with moral courage was Martin Luther King Jr.’s capacity to love people. Though deeply committed to a program of freedom for Negroes, he had love and concern for all kinds of peoples. He drew no distinction between the high and the low; none between the rich and the poor. He believed especially that he was sent to champion the cause of the man farthest down. He would probably say that if death had to come, I am sure there was no greater cause to die for than fighting to get a just wage for garbage collectors. He was supra-class, and supra--culture. He belonged to the world and mankind. Now he belongs to posterity.
But there is a dichotomy in all this. This man was loved by some and hated by others. If any man knew the meaning of suffering, King knew. House bombed; living day by day for thirteen years under constant threats of death; maliciously accused of being a Communist; falsely accused of being in-sincere and seeking the limelight for his own glory; stabbed by a member of his own race; slugged in a hotel lobby; jailed thirty times; occasionally deeply hurt because friends betrayed him—and yet this man had no bitterness in his heart; no rancor in his soul; no revenge in his mind; and he went up and down the length and breadth of this world preaching non-violence and the redemptive power of love. He believed with all of his heart, mind, and soul that the way to peace and brotherhood is through nonviolence, love, and suffering. He was severely criticized for his opposition to the war in Vietnam. It must be said, however, that one could hardly expect a prophet of Dr. King’s commitments to advocate nonviolence at home and violence in Vietnam. Nonviolence to King was total commitment not only in solving the problems of race in the United States, but the problems of the world.
Surely this man was called of God to do this work. If Amos and Micah were prophets in the eighth century, b.c., Martin Luther King Jr. was a prophet in the twentieth century. If Isaiah was called of God to prophesy in his day, Martin Luther was called of God to prophesy in his time. If Hosea was sent to preach love and forgiveness centuries ago, Martin Luther was sent to expound the doctrine of nonviolence and forgiveness in the third quarter of the twentieth century. If Jesus was called to preach the Gospel to the poor, Martin Luther King Jr. fits that designation. If a prophet is one who does not seek popular causes to espouse, but rather the causes he thinks are right, Martin Luther qualified on that score.
No! He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time. Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else’s time. Jesus had to respond to the call of God in the first century, a.d., and not in the twentieth century. He had but one life to live. He couldn’t wait. How long do you think Jesus would have had to wait for the constituted authorities to accept him? Twenty-five years? A hundred years? A thousand? He died at thirty-three. He couldn’t wait. Paul, Galileo, Copernicus, Martin Luther the Protestant reformer, Gandhi, and Nehru couldn’t wait for another time. They had to act in their lifetimes. No man is ahead of his time. Abraham, leaving his country in the obedience to God’s call; Moses leading a rebellious people to the Promised Land; Jesus dying on a cross; Galileo on his knees recanting; Lincoln dying of an assassin’s bullet; Woodrow Wilson crusading for a League of Nations; Martin Luther King Jr. dying fighting for justice for garbage collectors—-none of these men were ahead of their time. With them the time was always ripe to do that which was right and that which needed to be done.
King\'s funeral procession in AtlantaMourners follow their slain leader through the streets of Atlanta. (Hulton Archive / Getty)Too bad, you say, that Martin Luther King Jr. died so young. I feel that way, too. But, as I have said many times before, it isn’t how long one lives, but how well. It’s what one accomplishes for mankind that matters. Jesus died at thirty-three; Joan of Arc at nineteen … [Paul Laurence] Dunbar before thirty-five; John Fitzgerald Kennedy at forty-six; William Rainey Harper at forty-nine; and Martin Luther King Jr. at thirty-nine.
We all pray that the assassin will be apprehended and brought to justice. But, make no mistake, the American people are in part responsible for Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. The assassin heard enough condemnation of King and of Negroes to feel that he had public support. He knew that millions hated King.
The Memphis officials must bear some of the guilt for Martin Luther’s assassi-nation. The strike should have been settled several weeks ago. The lowest paid men in our society should not have to strike for a more just wage. A century after Emancipation, and after the enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, it should not have been necessary for Martin Luther King Jr. to stage marches in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, and go to jail thirty times trying to achieve for his people those rights which people of lighter hue get by virtue of their being born white. We, too, are guilty of murder. It is time for the American people to repent and make democracy equally applicable to all Americans. What can we do? We, and not the assassin, represent America at its best. We have the power—not the prejudiced, not the assassin—to make things right.
RECOMMENDED READING\'In a Nonviolent Movement, Unmerited Suffering Is Redemptive,\' by Hank Willis Thomas (2015–2016)The Chasm Between Racial Optimism and RealityJEFFREY GOLDBERGIllustration: A collage of photos of Bollywood stars and Narendra ModiThe War on BollywoodAATISH TASEERPhoto: Prime Minister Boris Johnson seated, with a superimposed reflection through glass, 10 Downing Street, May 2021The Minister of ChaosTOM MCTAGUEIf we love Martin Luther King Jr. and respect him, as this crowd surely testifies, let us see to it that he did not die in vain; let us see to it that we do not dishonor his name by trying to solve our problems through rioting in the streets. Violence was foreign to his nature. He warned that continued riots could produce a Fascist state. But let us see to it also that the conditions that cause riots are promptly removed, as the President of the United States is trying to get us to do. Let black and white alike search their hearts; and if there be prejudice in our hearts against any racial or ethnic group, let us exterminate it and let us pray, as Martin Luther King Jr. would pray if he could: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. If we do this, Martin Luther King Jr. will have died a redemptive death from which all mankind will benefit.
I close by saying to you what Martin Luther King Jr. believed: If physical death was the price he had to pay to rid America of prejudice and injustice, nothing could be more redemptive. And to paraphrase the words of the immortal John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.’s unfinished work on earth must truly be our own.
Even as a child, civil rights leader Benjamin Elijah Mays sensed that education would be his salvation. Some of his earliest prayers were for the schooling that would allow him to escape the social and economic oppression of his life in rural South Carolina.
That faith in education put him at odds with his father, Hezekiah Mays, a tenant farmer who narrowly survived a run-in with a mob of white men during the Phoenix election riot of 1898, when Benjamin was four. The elder Mays cared only about his son’s ability to work. But Benjamin Mays’ mother, Louvenia, supported his educational goals. “My mother never went to school a day in her life, but she prayed that God would help me in my ambition,” Mays, AM’25, PhD’35, recalled later.
Louvenia took her son’s place in the cotton fields, freeing Mays to leave his hometown of Epworth in 1911 for the equivalent of high school at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. He paid his train fare with a ten-dollar bill that Hezekiah threw at him in anger as he left.
Mays validated his mother’s intuition. As an eminent scholar trained at the Divinity School, a Baptist minister, a dean at Howard University, and president of Morehouse College from 1940 to 1967, Mays helped to bend the arc of American history away from the segregation and mob injustice that seared his memory. He achieved such stature as a preacher and a teacher that he became Martin Luther King Jr.’s intellectual and spiritual conscience.
Intellectual formationMays enrolled at the Divinity School in 1920 after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Bates College in Maine. Chicago was famous for liberal theology, which appealed to Mays in spite of his orthodox religious upbringing. “I went to the University of Chicago because I like their philosophy, that if you can interpret anything in the Bible you need to know the political, social and economic conditions in which it was written,” he said, according to Benjamin Elijah Mays: Schoolmaster of the Movement, a new biography by University of Kansas professor Randal Maurice Jelks.
After less than a year at the Divinity School, Mays and his wife, Ellen Harvin, left Chicago so he could teach at Morehouse College. While there, he became an ordained minister at Shiloh Baptist Church. A blissful three-year period ended in tragedy when Mays’ wife and their baby died in childbirth.
The next year, Mays returned to Chicago to complete his master’s degree. He interrupted his doctoral work to teach at South Carolina State, where he met and fell in love with Sadie Gray, PhB’24, AM’31, his second wife.
Off and on, Mays spent 14 years at UChicago, where he studied with Shirley Jackson Case and Shailer Matthews, two of the most noted theologians of his time. He was also influenced by the work of Carter G. Woodson, PhD’1908, another of the forty-five African-Americans to receive a PhD from the University of Chicago before 1943—the most of any American university in that era.
For much of that time, he worked on an innovative dissertation that would ultimately become his second book, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature. Mays’ research brought together both theological texts as well as contemporary literature in a way that was unusual for the time. “He was doing interdisciplinary studies long before we were using that term,” Jelks notes.
Mentor to the Civil Rights movementMays considered himself a spiritual and intellectual leader, a voice for his people, but always of them. He wrote columns for black newspapers—the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier. “He thinks that ordinary black folk can know what he’s talking about,” Jelks said in a lecture at the Divinity School in November 2011. “That he can translate to them this great historical moment.”
He had firsthand experience to relate. In 1936, the year after he received his doctorate in Chicago, Mays traveled to India and interviewed Gandhi. His principles of nonviolence, echoing the gospel of love that Mays considered Christianity’s only constant, provided a rhetorical bridge from the pulpit to the public square. “Long before Martin Luther King is thinking about it—he ain’t even born,” Jelks said, Mays began to shape the ideas that would define the civil rights movement in the United States.
As president of Morehouse College, Mays became forever intertwined with King, who was a student there in the 1940s. King, only in his mid-20s when he became the nation’s most famous civil rights leader, relied heavily on Mays’s leadership example. “He also needed Mays for spiritual support as he faced the burden of being perceived as the personification of black America’s hopes and dreams,” Jelks writes. “It was Mays who held the job as King’s consigliere over the next fourteen years as the death threats against him grew more ominous and the public battles more dangerous.”
Those battles also grew more fruitful in the cause of freedom. Where they were won, victories could be traced to the social theology Mays had advocated for decades. But casualties continued to mount, so the war raged on against the forces of discrimination and, increasingly, within the civil rights movement itself. “Some activists viewed nonviolent strategies as being unrealistic in light of the outright terror that had been organized against them,” Jelks writes.
Mays suffered the toll of that violence; on April 4, 1968, it killed King, his “spiritual son.” But when called upon to deliver the eulogy for the man he had hoped would give his own, Mays held firm to his belief in the futility of retribution.
Inside Ebenezer Baptist Church he urged an audience of mostly white dignitaries—the black members were left to stand outside in sweltering Atlanta heat—not to “dishonor [King’s] name by trying to solve our problems through rioting in the streets.” If they could turn their sorrow into hope for the future and use their outrage to invigorate a peaceful climb to the mountaintop, “Martin Luther King Jr. will have died a redemptive death from which all mankind will benefit.”When Daisy Elliott, a soft-spoken legislator from Detroit who spent years fighting against racial bias and discrimination of all sorts, learned that her dream to enact a civil rights law would finally become a reality, she showed the world how change is possible: The Democrat embraced a Republican.
Elliott -- who authored and co-sponsored Michigan\'s landmark Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act in 1976 after finally obtaining bipartisan support and then insisting her Republican ally\'s name be included on the historic legislation -- has died. She was 98.
\"God love her, she spent a lot of years trying to get that through. It was not an easy task. I have great respect for her,\" said Elliot\'s Republican co-sponsor, Mel Larsen, who recalled how gracious Elliott was when she learned the bill was finally getting signed into law in 1976.
\"She came over and said, \'Mel, they want to put my name on it. And I said, \'Only if they put your name on it, too. is that OK with you?\' \" Larsen recalled Elliott telling him, noting he humbly accepted.
\"When you see all the un-cooperation and lack of bipartisan support that goes on today, that was a very wonderful thing she did,\" said Larsen, who is now retired and living in Birmingham. \"She was a grand lady ... She was so quiet and soft spoken and just went around getting things done. It was just fun to watch her.
Civil rights activist and former state Rep. Daisy ElliottAccording to family, Elliot died Tuesday.
\"We are heartbroken to share this news,\" said Badriyyah Sabree, Elliott\'s granddaughter, in a statement. \"Our family holds dear her legacy, which includes extraordinary contributions to the state of Michigan and the nation.\"
Elliott served as a member of the Michigan House of Representatives for 18 years and was a fierce advocate for workers, education, senior citizens, women and minorities. Elliott\'s most well-known accomplishment was authoring and co-sponsoring the historic Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, a landmark equality statute and what some have dubbed as the \"most comprehensive and inclusive civil rights law to date.\"
Officials select next Michigan civil rights chief
The act, written and passed in 1976, banned discrimination statewide in employment, housing, and public accommodations based on religion, race, national origin, age, sex, and other factors.
“Daisy Elliott stands as one of the greatest civil rights leaders this state has ever produced,” said Arthur Horwitz, chairman of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. “All of us who strive to make Michigan a more just and equitable place are indebted to her for her courage and foresight.”
It was Elliott who, through her stature, paved the way for the creation of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. Elliott also proposed that Michigan create an intermediate appellate court, that eventually resulted in the establishment of the Michigan Court of Appeals
“Daisy Elliott could have chosen an easier path,” said Agustin Arbulu, Director of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. “But instead, she became a trailblazer, a leader and a voice who will be remembered for her steadfast focus on what is right, in spite of the tremendous obstacles she faced.”
The case of Rafaela Ortiz helped spotlight the cruelty, Rep. Daisy Elliot and social services director John Dempsey are among those trying.Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan commended Elliott for having the courage to speak out against discrimination, for championing the civil rights of all, and for making Detroit her home.
\"She stood up for what was right. Even though it wasn\'t necessarily the popular thing to do at the time, she did it because it was the right thing to do,\" Duggan said in a statement. \" We are proud that such a champion chose to call Detroit her home. Our thoughts are with her family.\"
Lawmakers fail LGBT in Mich., who deserve civil rights
Former state representative and civil rights activist Daisy Elliott has died at age 98.Elliott\'s family wants the world to not only remember Elliott, but to follow in her footsteps and continue her work to promote equality for all.
\"While we mourn the loss of this marvelous woman, we also celebrate her extraordinary life and hope that it serves as an example to people around the world to selflessly work to ensure all people are provided rights to full legal, social, and economic equality,\" Sabree said. \"For those who want to honor our beloved Daisy, please honor her example as a champion of the people and with a commitment to the dignity and unique value of every human being. Help erase the ills of our society that maintain the false realities of racial inferiority and/or superiority.\"
Benjamin Elijah Mays (August 1, 1894 – March 28, 1984) was an American Baptist minister and American rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the American civil rights movement. Mays taught and mentored many influential activists, including Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, and Donn Clendenon, among others. His rhetoric and intellectual pursuits focused on Black self-determination. Mays\' commitment to social justice through nonviolence and civil resistance were cultivated from his youth through the lessons imbibed from his parents and eldest sister. The peak of his public influence coincided with his nearly three-decade tenure as the sixth president of Morehouse College, a historically black institution of higher learning, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Mays was born in the Jim Crow South on a repurposed cotton plantation to freed sharecroppers. He traveled North to attend Bates College and the University of Chicago from where he began his career in activism as a pastor in Georgia\'s Shiloh Baptist Church. After a brief career as a professor, he was appointed the founding Dean of the School of Religion at Howard University in 1934 which elevated him to national prominence as a proponent of the New Negro movement. Six years later, Mays was tapped to lead Morehouse out of its financial insecurity. Over his tenure from 1940 to 1967, the college\'s financial endowment doubled, enrollment quadrupled, and it became academically competitive. By the 1960s, Mays established the college as a feeder school for \"African-American firsts\" in the United States.
Due to college\'s small student body, Mays personally mentored many students, most notably King; the two first met in 1944. King was known as Mays\' \"spiritual son\" and Mays his \"intellectual father.\" After King\'s \"I Have A Dream\" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Mays gave the benediction. Five years later, upon King\'s assassination and death, Mays delivered the eulogy where he described King in his \"No Man is Ahead of His Time\" speech. Mays stepped down from the Morehouse presidency in 1967 continuing to work as a leader in the African American community through national social tours. He presided over the Atlanta Board of Education from 1969 to 1978, where he initiated the racial desegregation of Atlanta.
Mays\' contributions to the civil rights movement have had him credited as the \"movement\'s intellectual conscience\" or alternatively the \"Dean [or Schoolmaster] of the Movement\".[1][2] Historian Lawrence Carter described Mays as \"one of the most significant figures in American history\".[3][4] Memorials include hundreds of streets, buildings, statues, awards, scholarships, grants, and fellowships named in his honor. Numerous efforts have been brought forward to posthumously award Mays the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as feature him on a U.S. postage stamp. Mays has, since 1995, been entombed on the campus of Morehouse, with his wife, Sadie Gray, after an initial burial in Augusta.Contents1 Early life1.1 Early life and ancestry1.2 Early education1.3 Marriages2 Early academic career2.1 Howard University3 Morehouse College, 1940–19673.1 Early years3.2 Financial planning3.3 Effects of World War II3.4 Recognition3.5 Jackie Robinson3.6 Roles in the White House3.7 Final years4 Connection to Martin Luther King Jr.4.1 \"No man is ahead of his time\" speech5 After Morehouse, 1967–19815.1 Social tours and advocacy5.2 Atlanta board presidency6 Death and legacy6.1 Sites and honors6.2 Medal of Freedom effort7 See also8 References9 Further reading10 External linksEarly lifeEarly life and ancestryBenjamin Elijah Mays was born on August 1, 1894 in Epworth, South Carolina, in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina, the youngest of eight children.[5] His mother, Louvenia Carter Mays, and father, Hezekiah Mays, were born into slavery on Virginia and South Carolina plantations, respectively.[6] Both were freed in their later lives with the passage of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.[7] Mays\' father often hit him, his siblings and Louvenia growing up, expressing anger about how he was treated by his master.[8] The \"Mays\" family name was derived from their slaver and owner\'s name, Henry Hazel Mays; he owned 14 slaves in the same area.[9] Hezekiah worked as a cotton sharecropper to generate income for his family.[10]
Mays was told to be cautious of white people and exhibit black pride whenever possible growing up.[8] Mays\' older sister, Susie, began to teach him how to read before his formal schooling commenced, which gave him a year\'s growth in reading compared to the other students in his primary schools. School officials cited him as \"destined for greatness.\"[11] Growing up, he went by the nickname \"Bennie\" and was inspired by Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Thomas E. Miller.[12] The Bible was influential to young Mays because he could see his name (of Biblical origins) mentioned frequently, instilling a feeling of empowerment within.[13] During this time, Benjamin Tillman rose to power in South Carolina which saw to the redoubling of lynching and segregation in Mays\' neighborhood.[14] Throughout his tenure as governor, 18 black men were lynched and dozens were hurt in the 1876 shoot-off.[15] On November 8, 1898, members of the Phoenix Riot–a white suprematist mob–rode up on horses to the Mays household, a repurposed cotton plantation. They drew their guns at Mays\' father and told him to remove his hat and bow down to them.[16] The event would stay with Mays throughout his life.[16] A year later, white mobs and Ku Klux Klan members searched his house in search of relatives after local newspapers announced that cotton prices had plummeted.[17]
Early education
Mays traveled to Maine to study at Bates College when he was 23.In 1911, he was enrolled at the Brick House School in Epworth, a Baptist-sponsored school.[18] He then transferred to the High School Department of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. He graduated in 1916, aged 22 as its valedictorian.[19] In high school, teachers often let Mays instruct parts of the mathematics curriculum to students in exchange for extra credit.[20] He won awards for debate and mathematics.[21] A teacher at the school had told Mays to seek graduate school at the University of Chicago as he thought the school would best nurture Mays\' intellect.[21] However, before attending graduate school Mays needed to seek an undergraduate education. His relatives and teachers forced him to attend a Baptist university–the Virginia Union University. He grew weary of the violence against blacks in Virginia so he sought the guidance of his academic advisors at Virginia Union.[22] They advised him to look into schools in the North as they were typically seen as more prestigious, challenging, and prominent than those of the South.[22]
Four professors at the university had attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and urged Mays to apply.[23] However, its exacting standards prohibited him from attending. After a year more in Richmond, Mays elevated his grades to the top of his class and wrote personally to Bates president George Colby Chase. Chase granted him a full financial aid package and boarding upon hearing his story and reviewing his academic background.[24] Virginia Union\'s president warned him that studies at Bates would be \"too hard for a colored boy\" and that he should stay in Virginia.[25] Mays ignored his warnings and enrolled in 1917, aged 23.[25] While at Bates he felt pressure to compete with \"Yankees at the Yankee level\" which drove him to dedicate him to his studies.[26] He would write in a diary: \"Yankee superiority was the gauntlet thrown down. I had to pick it up.\"[27] Working to midnight weekly and arising at 4 AM, Mays excelled at Greek, mathematics, and speech.[28] Although he would experience little racism in college, upon seeing The Birth of a Nation in a local cinema, the crowd cheered for the white slaver which frightened Mays.[29] In college, he was captain of the debate team, played on the football team and served as the Class Day Speaker. He graduated with departmental honors with a B.A. in 1920. Contrary to popular writing and official college records, Mays never received Phi Beta Kappa; his attendance of a \"high school school from the South\" disqualified him.[30]
MarriagesShortly after graduation, he married his first wife, Ellen Edith Harvin, in August 1920 in Newport News, Virginia.[31] The two met when Mays was still in South Carolina and wrote to each other frequently. She was a home economics teacher at a local college before she died after a brief illness two years after they married at age 28.[32] He met his second wife, Sadie Gray, while working at South Carolina State College. After months of courtship, they married on August 9, 1926.[32] Mays kept private the details of his relationship with his second wife; he burned the majority of letters and correspondence between them.[33]
Early academic career
Mays studied at the University of Chicago after receiving his B.A. from Bates; he received a M.A. in 1925 and PhD. in 1935.On January 3, 1921, he then entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student, earning an M.A. in 1925. Early on in his academic career he decided to join Omega Psi Phi, a national fraternity for colored men.[34] This organization was known for pooling resources and information among its members so Mays viewed it with great interest. Mays viewed it as \"a mountain top from which he could see above and beyond\".[34] In 1924, upon hearing news that there was to be a fraternity meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, Mays traveled by train. However, his decision to travel first class from Birmingham to St. Louis was indirectly against the Jim Crow laws.[34] The ticket salesman only sold Mays a ticket when he lied about who it was for.[34] While riding to St. Louis, the Pullman warned Mays that he was risking his life by sitting in first class and that he should get off at the next stop.[34] Shortly after, three white men, guns drawn, escorted Mays into a car in the back known as the \"Jim Crow car\".[35] He eventually made it to the Omega Psi Phi meeting, where he spoke of his experience.[35]
To finance his time in university, Mays worked as a Pullman Porter, a railway assistant.[36] Much of the money he had earned growing up was spent financing his time at Bates, on Christmas Day 1921, Mays held only $45 dollars ($587 in 2018 USD).[37] Mays began labor organizing to increase his wage, which was seen negatively by the Porter managers. Although he legally established a labor group for Pullman Porters, he was fired from his job for \"attracting too much attention to labor rights.\"[37] His time at the University of Chicago was marked by segregation. He was asked to sit at the colored area in the dining halls and was only allowed to use certain rooms for reading.[38] Mays tolerated the segregation with the mindset that he was \"only there to get a degree, to convince another brilliant set of Yankees that he could do their work.\"[38] Although he was licensed to preach in 1919, he was officially ordained a Baptist minister in 1921.[38] During this time he encountered John Hope, the current president of Morehouse College. Hope spoke to Mays about the lack of \"a fine education for the colored in Atlanta\".[37] Mays traveled to Atlanta in 1921 and served as a pastor at the Shiloh Baptist Church until 1923.[39] In March 1925, Mays was award an M.A. in religious studies from the university.[40] Upon receiving his master\'s degree, he wrote to the pastorate with his intention of resigning to pursue a doctorate in the coming years.[41] However, due to his financial status, he took up a teaching position instructing English at South Carolina State College from 1925 to 1926.[42] Mays left his teaching position after routinely clashing with other faculty over grade inflation and academic standards.[43]
From 1928 to 1930, he worked as the national student secretary of the Young Men\'s Christian Association (YMCA).[43] A couple of months later, he was asked to serve as the director of Study of Black Churches in the United States by the Institute of Social and Religious Research of New York.[44] In 1932, Mays returned to the University of Chicago with the intent of completing a Ph.D. in line with what was asked by the Institute of Social and Religious Research of New York.[40] After some deliberation between fields of studies he could pursue a doctorate in, he eventually decided to study religion and not mathematics or philosophy.[41] Mays also worked as a student assistant to Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago and President of the National Baptist Convention.[32] In 1933, he wrote his first book with Joseph Nicholson, The Negro\'s Church. It was the first sociological study of the black church in the United States and was submitted to the university faculty as his dissertation in 1935.[45] Historian John Herbert Roper estimates that Mays was one of 20 African Americans to earn a doctorate during that year.[46]
Howard University
Mays worked at Howard University from 1934 to 1940.Shortly after receiving his doctorate, he was called by the presidents of multiple universities to lead their religion departments.[47] Mays chose to accept a position at Howard University in Washington as its dean of religious studies.[48] He was instructed to build up the department and establish a reputation for well-trained ministers.[48] Mays first renovated its library and secured loans from the federal government to expand it.[49] His second objective was to separate the federally-funded portions of Howard University from the new school of religion. At the time, the university was partially funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior which prohibited funding to religious enterprises.[50] After he successfully removed the School of Religion from the auspices of the federal government he was tasked with securing funding from wealthy donors from the North.[51]
Mays secured a multi-million dollar package from donors by 1930, and was averaging yearly contributions of $750,000 during the Great Depression.[51] The expanding Department of the Interior under Franklin D. Roosevelt, coupled with Mays\' fundraising led to unprecedented growth at the university.[52] Salaries for professors increased, new dorms were built and refurbished, the library Mays had been developing was completed, and new lecture halls were established.[52] In 1938, he published his second book, The Negro\'s God as Reflected in His Literature. In 1939, he secured a large collection of theology books for his new library which prompted the American Association of Theological Schools to accredit the new School of Religion.[53] During this time Mays developed a reputation for exacting standards and elitism.[54] He was a vocal opponent of the notion that black men are inherently more violent than their white counterparts in universities.[55] He was a vocal proponent of the New Negro movement and frequently lectured about its foundlings and applications.[56]
In January 1940, Mays was secretly approached by, John Hervey Wheeler, a trustee of Morehouse College, to see if he was interested in an upcoming search for the college\'s next president.[57] Wheeler told Mays that the school had a tough time with getting tuition payments out of the students, growing their endowment, and establishing national prominence.[58] Mays expressed interest in the position but Wheeler cautioned him about the odds of him actually being offered the job.[58] On March 10, 1940, Mays was offered the presidency of Morehouse by its trustees; he moved to Atlanta shortly after.[58] When Mays left Howard University, he was honored with the renaming of the newly constructed home of the divinity school to \"Benjamin Mays Hall.\"[32]
Meeting with GandhiIn 1936–37, Mays traveled to Mysore, India, where, at the urging of Howard Thurman, a fellow professor at Howard, he spoke at some length with Mahatma Gandhi.[56] The two spoke for an hour and a half about the realities and powers of militant pacifism which he used to shape his civil rights ideology and practice.[59] Mays asked Gandhi about the influence nonviolence had in his life and what his personal thoughts were on the caste system in India.[60] Gandhi told Mays that there was never an instance where violence was acceptable especially that which was undertaken in retaliation.[60] He was told that \"one must pay the price for protest, even with one\'s life\".[60] In response to the caste system. Gandhi believed that there those with darker skin were not inherently untouchable but labeled it a \"necessary economic injustice\".[61]
Morehouse College, 1940–1967Early years
Mays as the 6th president of Morehouse College.Mays was offered the presidency on March 10 and inaugurated the sixth president on August 1, 1940.[62] Upon his assumption of the presidency, the school was in severe financial distress.[62] In his first speech to an incoming freshman class in 1940, he said, \"If Morehouse is to continue to be great; it must continue to produce outstanding personalities.\"[63] Mays set out to improve the training of Morehouse men, increase enrollment, grow its endowment, and collect tuition payments.[62]
Many associated with the college referenced him as a \"builder of men.\"[32] To improve the training of Morehouse men, Mays set out to advance a new curriculum based on the New Negro movement.[64] He specifically wished to increase the training of black physicians, ministers and lawyers.[64] Although Morehouse College was not a medical, law, or ministry school, it was a feeder institution into them so Mays took the preparation of his students into these schools seriously.[64]
Financial planningDuring his first three months nothing was planned to be or currently being constructed on campus.[62] Mays had inherited \"mountains of uncollected student bills\" which served as a threat to the liquidity of the college.[62] In 1933, Morehouse was doing so poorly financially that it had allowed Atlanta University to take over its financial direction and budget. He earned a reputation for being a penny-pincher and demanded tuition fees on time, which earned him the nickname \"Buck Bennie;\" the student newspaper occasionally ran headlines such as \"Buck Bennie Rides Again,\" during the first couple of years of his Morehouse presidency.[44] However, he often helped students pay their bills by offering work or finding it around campus. He would write to the employers of the college\'s graduates to ask them how the recent grads were doing as a way to measure the Morehouse education.[44] Within two years of his presidency, Mays was so successful that he was able to regain control of Morehouse\'s finances.[65]
Effects of World War IISoon after primary advancements were made with the college, World War II broke out and many students were drafted for military service. The Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Morehouse approached Mays and requested the school be shut down for the remainder of the war, which prompted Mays to lash out and reject his proposition publicly. Mays counter-proposal was to open the school to younger students who were ineligible to be drafted. He moved to improve the academic quality of the students by lowering admissions rates, and reforming the academic platform. College faculty often were encouraged to befriend students and provided them with guidance in a tumultuous social scene at the time.[32]
RecognitionThe introduction to his speech compilation at Morehouse notes him with the following:
In physical stature Mays stood six feet tall, but appeared taller because of his erect posture--a habit he developed during his youth to walk around with dignity and pride; he weighted approximately 180 pounds and had a full head of iron-grey air with a contrasting dark complexion. His distinctive physical appearance commented his towering intellectual stature. When Mays walked into a room, eyes were likely to focus in his direction. His mere physical presence attracted attention.[44]
He received an honorary doctorate and the \"Alumnus of the Year\" Award from Bates College in 1947 and the University of Chicago in 1949, respectively.[66] Although he was a college president, he was not allowed to vote in the 1950s until he was 52 years old.[44] Pulpit, a magazine focusing on black religious preachers, ranked him among the top 20 preachers in America in 1954. The same year he was one of the \"Top Ten Most Powerful Negros\" in the nation according to black magazine, Our World.[44]
Jackie RobinsonIn 1966, as president, Mays was invited to sit at an Atlanta Braves baseball game as a guest-of-honor by Jackie Robinson when the sports franchise moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta. Robinson invited Mays because of his efforts to integrate the baseball team in Atlanta. Robinson said of Mays: \"When we first moved here it was the first team of major league caliber to ever move this far south to play baseball. And of course [Mays] was one of the guys, one of the persons really that made things a lot easier for myself and some of the other black ball players.\"[67]
Roles in the White House
Jimmy Carter, with Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Sr, and Mays
Mays (right of Robert F. Kennedy) at the White HouseAs president he was in great demand as a public speaker. He met hundreds of national and international leaders and served as a trusted advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. He was appointed by President Truman to the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth. When Pope John XXIII died in 1963, President Kennedy sent Mays and his Vice President to represent the United States at the funeral in Rome, Italy.[68] During the Kennedy administration, southern members of the Senate blocked Mays\' appointment to the United States Civil Rights Commission by accusing him of being a Communist. Mays denied the charges.[69] His relationship with President Jimmy Carter was marked with \"warmth\" and \"hospitality.\" Carter visited Mays\' home in Atlanta, and Mays in turn campaigned for Carter during his 1976 and 1980 presidential runs. Carter wrote to Mays on a monthly basis during his presidency asking him about \"humans rights, international affairs, and discrimination.\"[44]
Final yearsMays wanted to hire more teachers, and to pay those teachers a better salary. To do that, Mays sought to be more strict in the collection of student fees, and wanted to increase Morehouse\'s endowment from $1,114,000. He more than quadrupled the endowment that he inherited by the end of his 27-year tenure.[65][70] Over Mays\' twenty-seven years leading Morehouse, the enrollment increased 169%, from 238 to almost a thousand students and furthered the motivation for graduates to pursue graduate studies.[44]
Connection to Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. considered Mays his \"spiritual father\".Mays first became associated with Martin Luther King Jr. during his time as a student at Morehouse College.[1] While King was a student from 1944 to 1948 he often went to Morehouse\'s chapel to hear Mays preach. After the sermons, King would run up to Mays and engage with him about the ideas he presented often following him into his office, hours after the sermon ended.[44] He was also a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.\'s father, Martin Luther King Sr. and often participated with him religious organizations in Atlanta. Mays dined at the King\'s homes every so often and spoke with the young Martin Luther King Jr. about his career prospects and ambitions. His mother, Alberta Williams King said Mays was a \"great influence on Martin Luther King Jr.,\" \"[an] example of what kind of minister Martin could become,\" and \"possessor of great moral principles.\"[44]
While King was only his 20s, Mays helped him assume the responsibility of his actions in the civil rights rallies in which he participated. King needed Mays \"for spiritual support as he faced the burden of being perceived as the personification of black America\'s hopes and dreams, it was Mays who held the job as King\'s consigliere over the next fourteen years as the death threats against him grew more ominous and the public battles more dangerous.\"[1]
After King gained national attention as a consequence of his 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, he began to refer to Mays as his \"spiritual and intellectual mentor\", which enhanced the friendship they had and prompted Mays to be more involved with King\'s civil rights endeavors. Mays revered him as his \"spiritual son\".[1] Mays gave the benediction at the close of the official program of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his \"I Have a Dream\" speech in 1963.[71][72]
\"No man is ahead of his time\" speechFurther information on Mays\' eulogy for King: Funeral of Martin Luther King Jr.External audioaudio icon No Man Is Ahead of His Time - Dr. Benjamin E. Mays delivers Dr. King\'s Eulogy Mount Zion Progressive Missionary Baptist Church, April 9, 1968The two developed a close relationship that continued until King\'s assassination by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968.[73] King and Mays promised each other that whoever outlived the other would deliver the eulogy at the other\'s funeral.[74][75]
On April 9, 1968, Mays delivered a eulogy that would later be known as the \"No Man is Ahead of His Time\" speech.[74] He noted King\'s time in history to an estimated 150,000 mourners[74] by stating in his most famous passage:
If Jesus was called to preach the Gospel to the poor, Martin Luther was called to give dignity to the common man. If a prophet is one who interprets in clear and intelligible language the will of God, Martin Luther King Jr. fits that designation. If a prophet is one who does not seek popular causes to espouse, but rather the causes he thinks are right, Martin Luther qualified on that score. No! He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time. Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else\'s time. Jesus had to respond to the call of God in the first century A.D., and not in the 20th century. He had but one life to live. He couldn\'t wait.[74]
The speech was well received by the attendants of the funeral and the American populate.[76] It was later hailed as \"a masterpiece of twentieth century oratory.\"[44] After the death of King, Mays drew controversy when his sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church urged an audience of mostly white people, \"not to dishonor [King\'s] name by trying to solve our problems through rioting in the streets. If they could turn their sorrow into hope for the future and use their outrage to invigorate a peaceful climb to the mountaintop, Martin Luther King Jr. will have died a redemptive death from which all mankind will benefit.\"[1]
After Morehouse, 1967–1981Social tours and advocacy
Mays, during his social tours, was honored at the South Carolina State House in 1978.Mays began teaching again, and served as a private advisor to the president of Michigan State University and went on to publish Disturbed About Man, a collection of his sermons at Morehouse College. His publications described his early life in South Carolina and the racial tensions he had to overcome. During this time he began to give speeches and commencement addresses at various intuitions to spread both religious and racial tolerance. He ended his social tours in the early 1980s, giving a total of 250 commencement addresses at colleges, universities, and schools. In 1978, the U.S. Department of Education granted him the Distinguished Educator Award and the South Carolina State House hung a commissioned portrait of him in its chamber.[77] These awards from South Carolina were deeply appreciated by Mays as he left the state in fear of his life and this he loved. During the social transformation of the South in the 1970s, Mays\' legacy in his birthplace was solidified and he took on the title of \"native son\".[44][78][79]
Atlanta board presidencyAt age seventy-five, Mays was elected president of the Atlanta Public Schools Board of Education, where he supervised the peaceful desegregation of Atlanta\'s public schools as a consequence of the 1970 federal court order. Members of the board argued that since the bussing was not a part of their system they did not have to create one for desegregation; however, the idea was shot down by Mays, who cited the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education Supreme Court decision.[77] It was during this time that Mays ordered the city to create bus routes to cater to African-American neighborhoods. The board did not support the decision and asked the Georgia\'s Attorney General, Arthur K. Bolton, for a review of the case. Bolton brought the city government together with the board and with Mays created what was known as the Atlanta Compromise Plan.[77]
His \"commanding and demanding personality\" was largely credited for the exponential levels of desegregation in Atlanta.[32] The Atlanta Compromise Plan prompted Mays to advocate for the administration of the plan to be \"colorless\", that is to say, black and white students were transported on the same routes, in the same buses. This was named the \"Majority to Minority\" volunteer plan, better known as the \"M to M\" plan. The plan also allowed each student whose race was in the majority at a school to transfer to a school where they would be in the minority race; this was advantageous to the black populace of Atlanta. The program was later known as the \"Volunteer Transfer Program\" or VTP, and was ministered by the federal courts and the board. On July 28, 1974, Mays signed the alignment order declaring that the Atlanta School System was unitary.[77]
On July 1, 1973, Mays appointed Alonzo Crim as the first African-American superintendent of schools, which was met with backlash from the other board members and city officials. He used his power and influence in Atlanta to shield Crim from the criticism and allowed him the opportunity to run the school system.[77] During the later part of his tenure he greatly expanded the jurisdiction of the board, and upon his retirement in 1981 Mays was honored by the naming of a street. Near the end of his tenure, the board voted to name a newly constructed school after Mays; Mays High School was constructed on February 10, 1985, and was open to students of all races. He retired from the board in 1981.[32] The Atlanta Board of Education had a rule against naming buildings after people unless they had been deceased for two years; they waived it for Mays; he visited the school frequently when it was being built.[77] He is widely credited as the most influential figure in the desegregation of Atlanta, Georgia.[32]
Death and legacy
A statue of Mays sits feet away from his memorial on the grounds of Morehouse College.Benjamin Mays died on March 28, 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia. He was initially buried at South-View Cemetery, but in May 1995 his body was entombed on the campus of Morehouse College along with his wife Sadie.[80][81] Morehouse College established the Benjamin E. Mays Scholarship shortly after his death.[66]
Boston University professor Lawrence Carter described Mays as \"one of the most significant figures in American history.\"[67] Andrew Young said of Mays: \"if there hadn\'t of been [sic] a Benjamin Mays there would not have been a Martin Luther King Jr. He was very much a product of Dr. Mays religious thinking.\"[82][83][84] He was known to Dillard University president Samuel DuBois Cook as \"[one of the] great architects of the civil rights movement. Not only in training individuals but in writing his books, leadership in churches, as a pastor, college president. He set the standard. And he was uncompromising.\"[67] In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Benjamin Mays on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[85]
Sites and honorsIn his home state of South Carolina he was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame in 1984.[86] His childhood home was relocated from Epworth to Greenwood, SC and is listed as a State Historic Site by the government of South Carolina,[87] and was referred to as an \"education icon\" by the South Carolina Radio Network in 2011.[88] Upon his death Mays was designated Phi Beta Kappa, Delta Sigma Rho, Delta Theta Chi, Omega Psi Phi.[86]
Nationally, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1982.[89][90] He was elected to the Schomburg Honor Roll of Race Relations along with \"only a dozen major leaders to be so honored.\"[91] In 2011, Wiliams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, introduced the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship at Williams College.[69] The National School Boards Association created the Benjamin Elijah Mays Lifetime Achievement Award for \"an individual who—during his or her lifetime—has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to the educational needs of urban school children through his or her service as a local school board member.\"[92] Due to his stature in academia he was frequently awarded honorary degreess from universities. He was awarded 40 of them during his lifetime[93] and as of February 2018, he has received 56 honorary degrees.[32]
Bates College\'s highest alumni distinction is known as the Benjamin E. Mays Medal and is reserved for \"the alumna or alumnus who has performed distinguished service to the larger (worldwide) community and been deemed a graduate of outstanding accomplishment.\" The inaugural winner was Mays himself.[94] The college established the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professorship in 1985.[77]
Mays has been the subject or inspiration of memorials, and the eponym of hundreds of buildings, schools, streets, halls, awards, grants, scholarships, fellowships, and statues. Although he through his life had been appreciative of all of them, he \"[was] reported to have said he was moved most deeply when a small black church in Ninety Six, South Carolina, renamed itself Mays United Methodist Church.[95] There are numerous memorials to Mays in the United States, E. Mays High School, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.Benjamin E. Mays Drive in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.Benjamin E. Mays Archives in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.Benjamin E. Mays National Memorial in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.The Statue of Benjamin E. Mays at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.Benjamin Mays Hall of Howard University, in Washington, D.C., U.S.Benjamin Mays Center of Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine, U.S.Benjamin E. Mays International Magnet School, in St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.Mays House Museum, in Greenwood, South Carolina, U.S.Benjamin Mays Historic Site, in Greenwood, South Carolina, U.S.Dr Benjamin E. Mays Elementary School in Greenwood, South Carolina, U.S.[99]Mays United Methodist Church, in Ninety Six, South Carolina, U.S.Mays Crossroads on Highway 171 in Ninety Six, South Carolina, U.S.Benjamin E. Mays Elementary Academy, in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.Benjamin E. Mays High School in Pacolet, South Carolina, U.S.Medal of Freedom effortAfter Mays stepped down from the Atlanta Board of Education presidency in 1981, a petition was sent to the desk of U.S. President Ronald Reagan requesting that Mays be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but it was turned down. Georgian representative John Lewis proposed a bill in January 1993 that would commemorate Mays on a federal stamp and requested that Mays be given the Medal of Freedom posthumously. The request was sent to U.S. President Bill Clinton but his time as president ended before he could address the request. A request was sent once again to U.S. President George Bush by Georgian representatives Max Cleland and Zell Miller which passed both houses of Congress but has yet to be signed by a U.S. president.[100] The petition was sent once more in 2012 to U.S. President Barack Obama, yet failed to be awarded.[101]
The Life of Benjamin Elijah Mays
Benjamin Elijah Mays was born the youngest of eight children in the community of Epworth inSE Greenwood County on August 1, 1894. A son of former slaves, Mays’ childhood played a key role in shaping the monumental figure that he would become. His earliest memory was of a white mob that approached his family’s home on horseback with guns drawn, forcing his father to remove his hat and bow before them repeatedly. The mob was associated with the Phoenix Riot which began in Greenwood on November 8, 1898. The atmosphere of hate, lynching, violence and forced segregation made a lasting impression on Mays, and his child-hood on his family’s tenant farm became the defining period of his life. It was then that he realized he wanted something better for his life. He developed an insatiable desire to get an education.
After attending the Brick house School in Epworth and two years at the Baptist-sponsored school in McCormick, Mays left Epworth to attend the High School Department at SC State College in Orangeburg, SC. He graduated as Class Valedictorian at the age of 22 in 1916. After a year at the African-American College of Richmond Union university in Virginia, he realized his dream of competing with Northern whites and enrolled at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. The Bates experience was liberating for Mays. Here he developed his first white friends and was treated with respect. He was captain of the debate team and played on the football team. He was named an honor student his sophomore year and graduated with honors in 1920.
Shortly after graduating from Bates, he married Ellen Harvin whom he had met at State College during high school. Mays accepted a position at Morehouse College in Atlanta to teach higher math in 1920 {Mays completed his Masters Degree in 1925 at the University of Chicago.} and to pastor Shiloh Baptist Church. His wife died in 1923 following an operation in an Atlanta hospital. In 1925, Mays taught English at SC State College and met his second wife there, Sadie Mays. They married in 1926 and moved to Tampa to serve with the Tampa Urban League. In 1928 Mays served as National Student Secretary of the YMCA in Atlanta he took leave to conduct a national study of African-American churches from 1928 to 1930. In 1933, he wrote his first book was published, The Negro\'s Church. From 1934 to 1940, Mays served as Dean of Religion at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1935, Mays completed his work and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Religion from the University of Chicago.
It was as President of Morehouse College that Mays achieved his widest scope of influence in civil rights and education. Mays became president of Morehouse in 1940 when the college was at its lowest point since its founding in 1867. The Great Depression had taken its toll, and when the US entered WW II in 1941, the college lost over half of its students to the war. In addition to low student enrollment, the college was suffering from under-qualified professors. As president, Mays established a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, increased the number of faculty holding PhD’s to fifty percent, and increased enrollment. In 1944, because of the early admissions program established by Mays, Martin Luther King was admitted to the college at age 15 as were other gifted high school eleventh graders.The legendary President of Morehouse College influenced the lives of thousands of students over his long 27 year tenure. Perhaps the most significant relationship that he developed was with Martin Luther King Jr. Mays became both a spiritual and emotional mentor to King, and Dr. King admitted that he was led to the ministry because of the influence of Dr. Mays especially during his famous Tuesday morning chapel sermons to the students. Dr. Mays became so close to Dr. King that later in life he referred to King “as a son.”Dr. Mays was a great supporter of King’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement and its policy of non-violence. Indeed, Dr. King was imbued with the non-violent approach by the teaching of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays who had discussed nonviolence with Mahatma Ghandi for 90 minutes during a world tour of the YMCA on December 31, 1936.
During Dr. Mays’ presidency of Morehouse College, he met hundreds of national and international leaders. He served as a trusted advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and later to President Carter. In 1950, Mays was appointed by President Truman to the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1963, President Kennedy appointed Dr. Mays and Vice President Johnson to represent the US at the funeral in Rome, Italy of Pope Paul 23rd. During Dr. Mays’ long tenure as President of Morehouse, he traveled, and spoke, and wrote extensively about the evils of segregation and lynching in the South. It was Mays’ famous sermon in Evanston, Illinois in 1954 at the 2nd Assembly of the world Council of Churches that internationalized the Civil Rights Movement.After Dr. Mays retired from Morehouse College in 1967, he did not ‘retire.’ In 1969, he was elected to the Atlanta Board of Education, and three months later was elected by the board to serve as its first African-American board president. He served in this position from 1969 to 1981, just three years before his death in 1984. In every facet of Mays’ career, he excelled and was held in the highest regard as an educator and community leader. In recognition of his influence in education and racial equality, Mays received more than 65 honors and awards from state, national, and international organizations and served as a member, representative, and official of more than 18 national and international organizations. He also delivered addresses to more than 250 colleges and universities in the United States, and was awarded 56 honorary doctorate degrees by US and foreign colleges and universities. In 1974, Dr. Mays was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Lander University in his home town of Greenwood, SC.
In 1981, Mays returned to Epworth, his childhood home, to be honored by the local community. A nearby intersection was renamed Mays Crossroads in his honor and a stone monument was placed nearby to honor his life and great achievements. The event was attended by family and friends including Coretta Scott King and dignitaries from the state. Mays had been honored the year before by becoming only the second African-American to have his portrait hung in the South Carolina State House. Mays died on March 28, 1984, four months short of his 90th birthday.Even 26 years after his death, there is a resurgence of interest in the life of Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, this giant and revered figure in American history. In January of 2010, he was the guest speaker’s topic of speech at the Martin Luther King celebrations at Bates College. In Aug 2010, Ambassador Andrew Young unveiled his fascinating documentary film on Dr. Mays’ life (Change In the Wind), which focuses on his secret relationship with Gone With the Wind author, Margaret Mitchell. On September 15, 2010, ambassador Young conducted a leadership seminar about Dr. Mays life at Morehouse College.
Mays’ birthplace remains as stark physical evidence of his early life and is a reminder of the struggle that he experienced and the restrictions placed on him simply because of his race. No other building survives that is so closely associated with Mays’ life. The Mays Site also provides visual testimony to the agricultural significance of the tenant farming system and its social and economic limitations of the many blacks as well as whites who labored in the period after Reconstruction. South Carolina’s African-American heritage has often been ignored by scholars and preservationists and, as a result, historic buildings and sites associated with these leaders are being lost at an alarming rate. In order to halt the destruction of this part of our state’s history, immediate action needs to be taken to ensure preservation. It is important that we work to preserve this important part of African-American history.
“The birthplace of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays is one of the most significant sites associated with the African - American community in South Carolina. Too often, places associated with African-American culture and history are overlooked and, as a result, a majority of them have been lost over time. The rehabilitation of the Mays\' birthplace will be a benchmark for the preservation of African-American sites across the State.”Perhaps best known as the longtime president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Benjamin Mays was a distinguished African American minister, educator, scholar, and social activist. He was also a significant mentor to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and was among the most articulate and outspoken critics of segregation before the rise of the modern civil rights movement in the United States. Mays also filled leadership roles in several significant national and international organizations, among them the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the International Young Men\'s Christian Association (YMCA), the World Council of Churches, the United Negro College Fund, the National Baptist Convention, the Urban League, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and the Peace Corps Advisory Committee.EducationBenjamin Elijah Mays was born on August 1, 1894 or 1895 in a rural area outside Ninety-Six, South Carolina. He was the youngest of eight children born to Louvenia Carter and Hezekiah Mays, tenant farmers and freedpeople. A consistent theme in Mays\'s boyhood and early adulthood was his quest for education against overwhelming odds. He refused to be limited by the widespread poverty and racism of his place of birth. After some struggle he gained acceptance to Bates College in Maine. After completing his B.A. there in 1920, Mays entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student, earning an M.A. in 1925 and a Ph.D. in the School of Religion in 1935.Career and AccomplishmentsMays\'s education at Chicago was interrupted several times, first by stints as a teacher at Morehouse and at South Carolina State College. During his tenure at the latter, he met his future wife, Sadie Gray. They were married forBenjamin MaysBenjamin Maysforty-three years, from 1926 until her death in 1969. Mays\'s work for the Urban League and the YMCA similarly postponed his doctoral efforts. In 1933, with coauthor Joseph Nicholson, Mays published a groundbreaking study entitled The Negro\'s Church, which describes the unique origins and character of this central African American institution, offering a critique of some of its problematic clerical practices.Less than a year before completing his dissertation at Chicago in the spring of 1935, Mays accepted a position as dean of the School of Religion at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Mays distinguished himself as an effective administrator, elevating the Howard program to legitimacy and distinction among schools of religion. During his tenure there, Mays also traveled a great deal, which would become a consistent aspect of his career. Perhaps the most significant of these travels was a trip in 1936 to India, where he spoke at some length with Mahatma Gandhi, anticipating an exchange of ideas that would come to fruition during the civil rights movement some years later. Mays also continued his scholarly efforts. In 1938 he published The Negro\'s God, as Reflected in His Literature, a study of the image and concept of God in African American Christianity.In 1940 Mays became the president of Morehouse College. There he rose to national prominence, enjoying great influence on key events in U.S. history. His most famous student at Morehouse was Martin Luther King Jr. During King\'s years as an undergraduate at Morehouse in the mid-1940s, the two developed a close relationship that continued until King\'s death in 1968. Mays\'s unwavering emphasis on two ideas in particular—the dignity of all human beings and the incompatibility of American democratic ideals with American social practices—became vital strains in the language of King and the civil rights movement. AlthoughBenjamin MaysBenjamin MaysMays\'s essays and sermons throughout his years at Morehouse related these ideas, their clearest explication came in his book Seeking to Be a Christian in Race Relations, published in 1957.As an administrator at Morehouse, Mays expanded and streamlined the structure of the institution and enhanced its academic reputation. He was a highly successful fund-raiser, securing the needed financial support for Morehouse to pursue its educational goals. Beyond such practical concerns, Mays left a legacy of prominent Morehouse graduates and lent the college his own inimitable style, characterized by rigor and enthusiasm for the Morehouse mission.After his retirement in 1967 from Morehouse, Mays remained active in several social and political organizations of prominence and was in demand as a speaker and lecturer. As the school board\'s first Black chair, he oversaw the desegregation of the Atlanta public schools between 1970 and 1981. He also published two autobiographies in these years, Born to Rebel (1971) and Lord, the People Have Driven Me On (1981). He died in 1984.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman 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.
King participated in and led marches for blacks\' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights.[1] King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous \"I Have a Dream\" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were several dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities, who sometimes turned violent.[2] Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI\'s COINTELPRO from 1963, forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital affairs and reported on them to government officials, and, in 1964, mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.[3]
On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War.
In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People\'s Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the holiday was enacted at the federal level by legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and the most populous county in Washington State was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.Contents1 Early life and education1.1 Birth1.2 Early childhood1.3 Adolescence1.4 Morehouse College2 Religious education, ministry, marriage and family2.1 Crozer Theological Seminary2.2 Boston University2.3 Marriage and family3 Activism and organizational leadership3.1 Montgomery bus boycott, 19553.2 Southern Christian Leadership Conference3.2.1 The Common Society3.3 Survived knife attack, 19583.4 Atlanta sit-ins, prison sentence, and the 1960 elections3.5 Albany Movement, 19613.6 Birmingham campaign, 19633.7 March on Washington, 19633.7.1 I (We) Have a Dream3.8 St. Augustine, Florida, 19643.9 offerdeford, Maine, 19643.10 New York City, 19643.11 Selma voting rights movement and \"Bloody Sunday\", 19653.12 Chicago open housing movement, 19663.13 Opposition to the Vietnam War3.13.1 Correspondence with Thích Nhất Hạnh3.14 Poor People\'s Campaign, 19684 Assassination and aftermath4.1 Aftermath4.2 Allegations of conspiracy5 Legacy5.1 South Africa5.2 United Kingdom5.3 United States5.3.1 Martin Luther King Jr. Day6 Veneration7 Ideas, influences, and political stances7.1 Christianity7.1.1 The Measure of a Man7.2 Nonviolence7.3 Criticism within the movement7.4 Activism and involvement with Native Americans7.5 Politics7.6 Compensation7.7 Family planning7.8 Television7.9 Israel7.10 Homosexuality8 State surveillance and coercion8.1 FBI surveillance and wiretapping8.2 NSA monitoring of King\'s communications8.3 Allegations of communism8.4 CIA surveillance8.5 Allegations of adultery8.6 Police observation during the assassination9 Awards and recognition9.1 Five-dollar bill10 Works11 See also12 References12.1 Notes12.2 Citations12.3 Sources12.4 Further reading13 External linksEarly life and educationBirthKing was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second of three children to Michael King and Alberta King (née Williams).[4][5][6] King\'s mother named him Michael, which was entered onto the birth certificate by the attending physician.[7] King\'s older sister is Christine King Farris and his younger brother was Alfred Daniel \"A.D.\" King.[8] King\'s maternal grandfather Adam Daniel Williams,[9] who was a minister in rural Georgia, moved to Atlanta in 1893,[6] and became pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the following year.[10] Williams was of African-Irish descent.[11][12][13] Williams married Jennie Celeste Parks, who gave birth to King\'s mother, Alberta.[6] King\'s father was born to sharecroppers, James Albert and Delia King of Stockbridge, Georgia.[5][6] In his adolescent years, King Sr. left his parents\' farm and walked to Atlanta where he attained a high school education.[14][15][16] King Sr. then enrolled in Morehouse College and studied to enter the ministry.[16] King Sr. and Alberta began dating in 1920, and married on November 25, 1926.[17][18] Until Jennie\'s death in 1941, they lived together on the second floor of her parent\'s two-story Victorian house, where King was born.[7][17][18][19]
Shortly after marrying Alberta, King Sr. became assistant pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.[18] Adam Daniel Williams died of a stroke in the spring of 1931.[18] That fall, King\'s father took over the role of pastor at the church, where he would in time raise the attendance from six hundred to several thousand.[18][6] In 1934, the church sent King Sr. on a multinational trip to Rome, Tunisia, Egypt, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, then Berlin for the meeting of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA).[20] The trip ended with visits to sites in Berlin associated with the Reformation leader, Martin Luther.[20] While there, Michael King Sr. witnessed the rise of Nazism.[20] In reaction, the BWA conference issued a resolution which stated, \"This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.\"[21] He returned home in August 1934, and in that same year began referring to himself as Martin Luther King, and his son as Martin Luther King Jr.[20][22][17] King\'s birth certificate was altered to read \"Martin Luther King Jr.\" on July 23, 1957, when he was 28 years old.[20][21][23]
Early childhood
King\'s childhood home in Atlanta, GeorgiaAt his childhood home, King and his two siblings would read aloud the Bible as instructed by their father.[24] After dinners there, King\'s grandmother Jennie, who he affectionately referred to as \"Mama\", would tell lively stories from the Bible to her grandchildren.[24] King\'s father would regularly use whippings to discipline his children.[25] At times, King Sr. would also have his children whip each other.[25] King\'s father later remarked, \"[King] was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him. He\'d stand there, and the tears would run down, and he\'d never cry.\"[26] Once when King witnessed his brother A.D. emotionally upset his sister Christine, he took a telephone and knocked out A.D. with it.[25][27] When he and his brother were playing at their home, A.D. slid from a banister and hit into their grandmother, Jennie, causing her to fall down unresponsive.[28][27] King, believing her dead, blamed himself and attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.[29][27] Upon hearing that his grandmother was alive, King rose and left the ground where he had fallen.[29]
King became friends with a white boy whose father owned a business across the street from his family\'s home.[30] In September 1935, when the boys were about six years old, they started school.[30][31] King had to attend a school for black children, Younge Street Elementary School,[30][32] while his close playmate went to a separate school for white children only.[30][32] 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\".[30][33] When King relayed the happenings to his parents, they had a long discussion with him about the history of slavery and racism in America.[30][34] Upon learning of the hatred, violence and oppression that black people had faced in the U.S., King would later state that he was \"determined to hate every white person\".[30] His parents instructed him that it was his Christian duty to love everyone.[34]
King witnessed his father stand up against segregation and various forms of discrimination.[35] Once, when stopped by a police officer who referred to King Sr. as \"boy\", King\'s father responded sharply that King was a boy but he was a man.[35] When King\'s father took him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to sit in the back.[36] King\'s father refused, stating \"we\'ll either buy shoes sitting here or we won\'t buy any shoes at all\", before taking King and leaving the store.[15] He told King afterward, \"I don\'t care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.\"[15] In 1936, King\'s father led hundreds of African Americans in a civil rights march to the city hall in Atlanta, to protest voting rights discrimination.[25] King later remarked that King Sr. was \"a real father\" to him.[37]
King memorized and sang hymns, and stated verses from the Bible, by the time he was five years old.[29] Over the next year, he began to go to church events with his mother and sing hymns while she played piano.[29] His favorite hymn to sing was \"I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus\"; he moved attendees with his singing.[29] King later became a member of the junior choir in his church.[38] King enjoyed opera, and played the piano.[39] As he grew up, King garnered a large vocabulary from reading dictionaries and consistently used his expanding lexicon.[27] He got into physical altercations with boys in his neighborhood, but oftentimes used his knowledge of words to stymie fights.[27][39] King showed a lack of interest in grammar and spelling, a trait which he carried throughout his life.[39] In 1939, King sang as a member of his church choir in slave costume, for the all-white audience at the Atlanta premiere of the film Gone with the Wind.[40][41] In September 1940, at the age of 12, King was enrolled at the Atlanta University Laboratory School for the seventh grade.[42][43] While there, King took violin and piano lessons, and showed keen interest in his history and English classes.[42]
On May 18, 1941, when King had snuck away from studying at home to watch a parade, King was informed that something had happened to his maternal grandmother.[37] Upon returning home, he found out that she had suffered a heart attack and died while being transported to a hospital.[19] He took the death very hard and believed that his deception of going to see the parade may have been responsible for God taking her.[19] King jumped out of a second-story window at his home, but again survived an attempt to kill himself.[19][26][27] His father instructed him in his bedroom that King should not blame himself for her death, and that she had been called home to God as part of God\'s plan which could not be changed.[19][44] King struggled with this, and could not fully believe that his parents knew where his grandmother had gone.[19] Shortly thereafter, King\'s father decided to move the family to a two-story brick home on a hill that overlooked downtown Atlanta.[19]The high school that King attended was named after African-American educator Booker T. Washington.AdolescenceIn his adolescent years, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the \"racial humiliation\" that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure in the segregated South.[45] In 1942, when King was 13 years old, he became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal.[46] That year, King skipped the ninth grade and was enrolled in Booker T. Washington High School, where he maintained a B-plus average.[44][47] The high school was the only one in the city for African-American students.[18] It had been formed after local black leaders, including King\'s grandfather (Williams), urged the city government of Atlanta to create it.[18]
While King was brought up in a Baptist home, King grew skeptical of some of Christianity\'s claims as he entered adolescence.[48] He began to question the literalist teachings preached at his father\'s church.[49] At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school.[50][49] King has stated, he found himself unable to identify with the emotional displays and gestures from congregants frequent at his church, and doubted if he would ever attain personal satisfaction from religion.[51][49] He later stated of this point in his life, \"doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.\"[52][50][49]
In high school, King became known for his public-speaking ability, with a voice which had grown into an orotund baritone.[53][47] He proceeded to join the school\'s debate team.[53][47] King continued to be most drawn to history and English,[47] and choose English and sociology to be his main subjects while at the school.[54] King maintained an abundant vocabulary.[47] But, he relied on his sister, Christine, to help him with his spelling, while King assisted her with math.[47] They studied in this manner routinely until Christine\'s graduation from high school.[47] King also developed an interest in fashion, commonly adorning himself in well polished patent leather shoes and tweed suits, which gained him the nickname \"Tweed\" or \"Tweedie\" among his friends.[55][56][57][58] He further grew a liking for flirting with girls and dancing.[57][56][59] His brother A. D. later remarked, \"He kept flitting from chick to chick, and I decided I couldn\'t keep up with him. Especially since he was crazy about dances, and just about the best jitterbug in town.\"[56]
On April 13, 1944, in his junior year, King gave his first public speech during an oratorical contest, sponsored by the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World in Dublin, Georgia.[60][56][61][62] In his speech he stated, \"black America still wears chains. The finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man. Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar.\"[63][60] King was selected as the winner of the contest.[60][56] On the ride home to Atlanta by bus, he and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so that white passenger could sit down.[56][64] The driver of the bus called King a \"black son-of-a-bitch\".[56] King initially refused but complied after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did not follow the directions of the driver.[64] As all the seats were occupied, he and his teacher were forced to stand on the rest of the drive back to Atlanta.[56] Later King wrote of the incident, saying \"That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.\"[64]
Morehouse CollegeDuring King\'s junior year in high school, Morehouse College—an all-male historically black college which King\'s father and maternal grandfather had attended[65][66]—began accepting high school juniors who passed the school\'s entrance examination.[56][67][64] As World War II was underway many black college students had been enlisted in the war, decreasing the numbers of students at Morehouse College.[56][67] So, the university aimed to increase their student numbers by allowing junior high school students to apply.[56][67][64] In 1944, at the age of 15, King passed the entrance examination and was enrolled at the university for the school season that autumn.[a][56][67][65][68]
In the summer before King started his freshman year 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 (a cigar business).[69][70] This was King\'s first trip outside of the segregated south into the integrated north.[71][72] In a June 1944 letter to his father King wrote about the differences that struck him between the two parts of the country, \"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 any where we want to.\"[71] The students worked at the farm to be able to provide for their educational costs at Morehouse College, as the farm had partnered with the college to allot their salaries towards the university\'s tuition, housing, and other fees.[69][70] On weekdays King and the other students worked in the fields, picking tobacco from 7:00am till at least 5:00pm, enduring temperatures above 100°F, to earn roughly USD$4 per day.[70][71] On Friday evenings, King and the other 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.[70][72] While each Sunday they would go to Hartford to attend church services, at a church filled with white congregants.[70] King wrote to his parents about the lack of segregation in Connecticut, relaying how he was amazed they could go to the \"one of the finest restaurants in Hartford\" and that \"Negroes and whites go to the same church\".[70][73][71]
He played freshman football there. The summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, the 18-year-old King chose to enter the ministry. Throughout his time in college, King studied under the mentorship of its president, Baptist minister Benjamin Mays, who he would later credit with being his \"spiritual mentor.\"[74] King had concluded that the church offered the most assuring way to answer \"an inner urge to serve humanity.\" His \"inner urge\" had begun developing, 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.\"[75] King graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in sociology in 1948, aged nineteen.[76]
Religious education, ministry, marriage and familyCrozer Theological SeminaryA large facade of a buildingKing received a Bachelor of Divinity degree at Crozer Theological Seminary (pictured in 2009).King enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania.[77][78] King\'s father fully supported his decision to continue his education and made arrangements for King to work with J. Pius Barbour, a family friend who pastored at Calvary Baptist Church in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania.[79] 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 in the black church.[80]
While attending Crozer, King was joined by Walter McCall, a former classmate at Morehouse.[81] At Crozer, King was elected president of the student body.[82] The African-American students of Crozer for the most part conducted their social activity on Edwards Street. King became fond of the street because a classmate had an aunt who prepared collard greens for them, which they both relished.[83]
King once reproved another student for keeping beer in his room, saying they had 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.\"[82] In his third year at Crozer, King became romantically involved with the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who worked as a cook in the cafeteria. The woman had been involved with a professor prior to her relationship with King. King planned to marry her, but friends advised against it, saying that an interracial marriage would provoke animosity from both blacks and whites, potentially damaging his chances of ever pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he could not endure his mother\'s pain over the marriage and broke the relationship off six months later. He continued to have lingering feelings toward the woman he left; one friend was quoted as saying, \"He never recovered.\"[82] King graduated with a B.Div. degree in 1951.[77]
Boston UniversitySee also: Martin Luther King Jr. authorship issuesIn 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University.[84] While pursuing doctoral studies, King worked as an assistant minister at Boston\'s historic Twelfth Baptist Church with William Hunter Hester. Hester was an old friend of King\'s father and was an important influence on King.[85] In Boston, King befriended a small cadre of local ministers his age, and sometimes guest pastored at their churches, including the Reverend Michael Haynes, associate pastor at Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury (and younger brother of jazz drummer Roy Haynes). The young men often held bull sessions in their various apartments, discussing theology, sermon style, and social issues.
King attended philosophy classes at Harvard University as an audit student in 1952 and 1953.[86]
At the age of 25 in 1954, King was called as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.[87] King received his Ph.D. degree 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.[88][84]
An academic inquiry in October 1991 concluded that portions of his doctoral dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. However, \"[d]espite its finding, the committee said that \'no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King\'s doctoral degree,\' an action that the panel said would serve no purpose.\"[89][84][90] 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 held in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.[91] Significant debate exists on how to interpret King\'s plagiarism.[92]
Marriage and familyWhile studying at Boston University, he asked a friend from Atlanta named Mary Powell, who was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, if she knew any nice Southern girls. Powell asked fellow student Coretta Scott if she was interested in meeting a Southern friend studying divinity. Scott was not interested in dating preachers but eventually agreed to allow Martin to telephone her based on Powell\'s description and vouching. On their first phone call, King told Scott \"I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms,\" to which she replied, \"You haven\'t even met me.\" They went out for dates in his green Chevy. After the second date, King was certain Scott possessed the qualities he sought in a wife. She had been an activist at Antioch in undergrad, where Carol and Rod Serling were schoolmates.
King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents\' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama.[93] They became the parents of four children: Yolanda King (1955–2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (b. 1961), and Bernice King (b. 1963).[94] During their marriage, King limited Coretta\'s role in the civil rights movement, expecting her to be a housewife and mother.[95]
In December 1959, after being based in Montgomery for five years, King announced his return to Atlanta at the request of the SCLC.[96] In Atlanta, King served until his death as co-pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and helped expand the Civil Rights Movement across the South.
Activism and organizational leadershipMontgomery bus boycott, 1955Main articles: Montgomery bus boycott and Jim Crow laws § Public arena
Rosa Parks with King (left), 1955In March 1955, Claudette Colvin—a fifteen-year-old 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 United States that enforced racial segregation. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; E. D. Nixon and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue because the incident involved a minor.[97]
Nine months later on December 1, 1955, a similar incident occurred when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus.[98] The two incidents led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which was urged and planned by Nixon and led by King.[99] King was in his twenties, and had just taken up his clerical role. The other ministers asked him to take a leadership role simply because his relative newness to community leadership made it easier for him to speak out. King was hesitant about taking the role, but decided to do so if no one else wanted the role.[100]
The boycott lasted for 385 days,[101] and the situation became so tense that King\'s house was bombed.[102] King was arrested and jailed during this campaign, which overnight drew the attention of national media, and greatly increased King\'s public stature. The controversy ended when the United States District Court issued a ruling in Browder v. Gayle that prohibited racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses.[103] Blacks resumed riding the buses again, and were able to sit in the front with full legal authorization.[1][100]
King\'s role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.[104]
Southern Christian Leadership ConferenceIn 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform. The group was inspired by the crusades of evangelist Billy Graham, who befriended King,[105] as well as the national organizing of the group In Friendship, founded by King allies Stanley Levison and Ella Baker.[106] King led the SCLC until his death.[107] The SCLC\'s 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was the first time King addressed a national audience.[108] Other civil rights leaders involved in the SCLC with King included: James Bevel, Allen Johnson, Curtis W. Harris, Walter E. Fauntroy, C. T. Vivian, Andrew Young, The Freedom Singers, Cleveland Robinson, Randolph Blackwell, Annie Bell Robinson Devine, Charles Kenzie Steele, Alfred Daniel Williams King, Benjamin Hooks, Aaron Henry and Bayard Rustin.[109]
The Common SocietyHarry Wachtel joined King\'s legal advisor Clarence B. Jones in defending four ministers of the SCLC in the libel case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan; the case was litigated in reference to the newspaper advertisement \"Heed Their Rising Voices\". Wachtel founded a tax-exempt fund to cover the suit\'s expenses and assist the nonviolent civil rights movement through a more effective means of fundraising. This organization was named the \"Gandhi Society for Human Rights.\" King served as honorary president for the group. He was displeased with the pace that President Kennedy was using to address the issue of segregation. In 1962, King and the Gandhi Society produced a document that called on the President to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln and issue an executive order to deliver a blow for civil rights as a kind of Second Emancipation Proclamation. Kennedy did not execute the order.[110]
The FBI was under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy when it began tapping King\'s telephone line in the fall of 1963.[111] 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 later felt compelled to issue the written directive that authorized the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders.[112] 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 in attempts to force King out of his leadership position in the COINTELPRO program.[3]
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 and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the civil rights movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.[113][114]
King organized and led marches for blacks\' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights.[1] Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.[115][116]
The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with great 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.[2]
Survived knife attack, 1958On September 20, 1958, King was signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein\'s department store in Harlem[117] when he narrowly escaped death. Izola Curry—a mentally ill black woman who thought that King was conspiring against her with communists—stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener, which nearly impinged on the aorta. King received first aid by police officers Al Howard and Philip Romano.[118] King underwent emergency surgery with three doctors: Aubre de Lambert Maynard, Emil Naclerio and John W. V. Cordice; he remained hospitalized for several weeks. Curry was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.[119][120]
Atlanta sit-ins, prison sentence, and the 1960 electionsGeorgia governor Ernest Vandiver expressed open hostility towards King\'s return to his hometown in late 1959. He claimed that \"wherever M. L. King, Jr., has been there has followed in his wake a wave of crimes\", and vowed to keep King under surveillance.[121] On May 4, 1960, several months after his return, 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.[122] King paid a fine but was apparently unaware that his lawyer agreed to a plea deal that also included a probationary sentence.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta Student Movement had been acting to desegregate businesses and public spaces in the city, 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 campaign 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 that day. The authorities released everyone over the next few days, except for 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 taken from his county jail cell and transported to a maximum-security state prison.[where?][123]
The arrest and harsh sentence drew nationwide attention. Many feared for King\'s safety, as he started a prison sentence with people convicted of violent crimes, many of them White and hostile to his activism.[124] Both Presidential candidates were asked to weigh in, at a time when both parties were courting the support of Southern Whites and their political leadership including Governor Vandiver. Nixon, with whom King had a closer relationship prior to the sit-in, declined to make a statement despite a personal visit from Jackie Robinson requesting his intervention. Nixon\'s opponent John F. Kennedy called the governor (a Democrat) directly, enlisted his brother Robert to exert more pressure on state authorities, and also, at the personal request of Sargent Shriver, made a phone call to King\'s wife to express his sympathy and 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.[125]
After the October 19 sit-ins and following unrest, a 30-day truce was declared in Atlanta for desegregation negotiations. However, the negotiations failed and sit-ins and boycotts resumed in full swing 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.[126][127] Many students were disappointed at the compromise. In a large meeting March 10 at Warren Memorial Methodist Church, the audience was hostile and frustrated towards the elders and the compromise. King then gave an impassioned speech calling participants to resist the \"cancerous disease of disunity,\" and helping to calm tensions.[128]
Albany Movement, 1961Main article: Albany MovementThe 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 broad-front nonviolent attack on every aspect of segregation within 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.\"[129] 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 town.[129]
King returned in July 1962 and was given the option of forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine (equivalent to $1,500 in 2020); he chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett discreetly arranged for King\'s fine to be paid and ordered his release. \"We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools ... ejected from churches ... and thrown into jail ... But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail.\"[130] It was later acknowledged by the King Center that Billy Graham was the one who bailed King out of jail during this time.[131]
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.[132] Though the Albany effort proved a key lesson in tactics for King and the national civil rights movement,[133] 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.[134]Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy with King, Benjamin Mays, and other civil rights leaders, June 22, 1963Birmingham campaign, 1963Main article: Birmingham campaign
King was arrested in 1963 for protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham.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.\"[135] 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 in the demonstrations.[136] Newsweek called this strategy a Children\'s Crusade.[137][138]
During the protests, 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 news and dominated the nation\'s attention, shocking many white Americans and consolidating black Americans behind the movement.[139] Not all of the 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.[137]
King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign—his 13th arrest[140] out of 29.[141] From his cell, he composed the now-famous \"Letter from Birmingham Jail\" that responds to calls on the movement 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\".[142] 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.\"[143] He points out that the Boston Tea Party, a celebrated act of rebellion in the American colonies, was illegal civil disobedience, and that, conversely, \"everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was \'legal\'.\"[143] Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, arranged for $160,000 to bail out King and his fellow protestors.[144]
\"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro\'s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen\'s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to \"order\" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: \"I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action\"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man\'s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a \"more convenient season.\"
—Martin Luther King Jr.[143]File:Bezoek ds Martin Luther King-selectionclip.ogvMartin Luther King Jr. speaking in an interview in the Netherlands, 1964March on Washington, 1963Main article: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Leaders of the March on Washington posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial
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., of the Congress of Racial Equality.[145]
Bayard Rustin\'s open homosexuality, support of socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin,[146] which King agreed to do.[147] However, he did collaborate in the 1963 March on Washington, for which Rustin was the primary logistical and strategic organizer.[148][149] For King, this role was another which courted controversy, since he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of United States President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march.[150][151]
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 that the march would proceed.[152] With the march going forward, the Kennedys decided it was important to work to ensure its success. President Kennedy was concerned the turnout would be less than 100,000. Therefore, he enlisted the aid of additional church leaders and Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, to help mobilize demonstrators for the cause.[153]
File:The March (1964 film).webmThe 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 conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the southern U.S. and an opportunity to place organizers\' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation\'s 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 influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone.[154] 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 the march.[154][155]King gave his most famous speech, \"I Have a Dream\", before the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.I Have a DreamMENU0:0030-second sample from \"I Have a Dream\" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963Problems playing this file? See media help.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 (equivalent to $17 in 2020); and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee.[156][157][158] Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success.[159] More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.\'s history.[159]
I (We) Have a DreamMain article: I Have a DreamKing delivered a 17-minute speech, later known as \"I Have a Dream\". In the speech\'s most famous passage – in which he departed from his prepared text, possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted behind him, \"Tell them about the dream!\"[160][161] – King said:[162]
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: \"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.\"
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
\"I Have a Dream\" came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory.[163] The March, and especially King\'s speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the agenda of reformers in the United States and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[164][165]
The original typewritten copy of the speech, including King\'s handwritten notes on it, was discovered in 1984 to be in the hands of George Raveling, the first African-American basketball coach of the University of Iowa. In 1963, Raveling, then 26 years old, was standing near the podium, and immediately after the oration, impulsively asked King if he could have his copy of the speech, and he got it.[166]
St. Augustine, Florida, 1964Main article: St. Augustine movementIn 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.[167][168] 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.[169][170] 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 the course of this movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.[171]
offerdeford, Maine, 1964On May 7, 1964, King spoke at Saint Francis College\'s \"The Negro and the Quest for Identity,\" in offerdeford, Maine. This was a symposium that brought many civil rights leaders together such as Dorothy Day and Roy Wilkins.[172][173] King spoke about how \"We must get rid of the idea of superior and inferior races,\" through nonviolent tactics.[174]
New York City, 1964On February 6, 1964, King delivered the inaugural speech of a lecture series initiated at the New School called \"The American Race Crisis.\" No audio record of his speech has been found, but in August 2013, almost 50 years later, the school discovered an audiotape with 15 minutes of a question-and-answer session that followed King\'s address. In these 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.[175] In his March 18,1964 interview by 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.[176]
Selma voting rights movement and \"Bloody Sunday\", 1965Main article: Selma to Montgomery marches
The civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965In December 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, where the SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months.[177] 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.[178] 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 major 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.[52]
On March 5, King met with officials in the Johnson Administration in order to request an injunction against any prosecution of the demonstrators. He did not attend the march due to church duties, but he 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.\"[179] Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused national public outrage.[180]
King next attempted to organize a march for March 9. The SCLC petitioned for an injunction in federal court against the State of 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 short 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.[181] Meanwhile, on March 11 King cried at the news of Johnson supporting a voting rights bill on television in Marie Foster\'s living room.[182] The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, 1965.[183][184] 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.\" In it, 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\".[b][185][186][187]
Chicago open housing movement, 1966Main article: Chicago Freedom Movement
King stands behind President Johnson as he signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.In 1966, after several successes in the south, King, Bevel, and others in the civil rights organizations took the movement to the North, with Chicago as their first destination. King and Ralph Abernathy, both from the middle class, moved into a building at 1550 S. Hamlin Avenue, in the slums of North Lawndale[188] on Chicago\'s West Side, as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor.[189]
The SCLC formed a coalition with CCCO, Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an organization founded by Albert Raby, and the combined organizations\' efforts were fostered under the aegis of the Chicago Freedom Movement.[190] During that spring, several white couple/black couple tests of real estate offices uncovered racial steering: discriminatory processing of housing requests by couples who were exact matches in income, background, number of children, and other attributes.[191] Several larger marches were planned and executed: in Bogan, Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park, Evergreen Park (a suburb southwest of Chicago), Gage Park, Marquette Park, and others.[190][192][193]President Lyndon B. Johnson meeting with King in the White House Cabinet Room, 1966King later stated and Abernathy wrote that the movement received a worse reception in Chicago than in the South. Marches, especially the one through Marquette Park on August 5, 1966, were met by thrown bottles and screaming throngs. Rioting seemed very possible.[194][195] King\'s beliefs militated against his staging a violent event, and he negotiated an agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley to cancel a march in order to avoid the violence that he feared would result.[196] King was hit by a brick during one march, but continued to lead marches in the face of personal danger.[197]
When King and his allies returned to the South, they left Jesse Jackson, a seminary student who had previously joined the movement in the South, in charge of their organization.[198] Jackson continued their struggle for civil rights by organizing the Operation Breadbasket movement that targeted chain stores that did not deal fairly with blacks.[199]
A 1967 CIA document declassified in 2017 downplayed King\'s role in the \"black militant situation\" in Chicago, with a source stating that King \"sought at least constructive, positive projects.\"[200]
Opposition to the Vietnam WarThe black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced
–Martin Luther King Jr.[201]We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power... this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.
—Martin Luther King Jr.[202]See also: Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam WarExternal audioaudio icon You can listen to the speech, \"Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam\", by Martin Luther King here.King was long opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War,[203] but at first avoided the topic in public speeches in order to avoid the interference with civil rights goals that criticism of President Johnson\'s policies might have created.[203] At the urging of SCLC\'s former Director of Direct Action and now the head of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, James Bevel, and inspired by the outspokenness of Muhammad Ali,[204] King eventually agreed to publicly oppose the war as opposition was growing among the American public.[203]
During an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church—exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled \"Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.\"[205] He spoke strongly against the U.S.\'s role in the war, arguing that the U.S. was in Vietnam \"to occupy it as an American colony\"[206] and calling the U.S. government \"the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.\"[207] He connected the war with economic injustice, arguing that the country needed serious moral change:
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: \"This is not just.\"[208]
King opposed the Vietnam War because it took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare at home. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. He summed up this aspect by saying, \"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.\"[208] He stated that North Vietnam \"did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands\",[209] and accused the U.S. of having killed a million Vietnamese, \"mostly children.\"[210] King also criticized American opposition to North Vietnam\'s land reforms.[211]
King\'s opposition cost him significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, Billy Graham,[212] union leaders and powerful publishers.[213] \"The press is being stacked against me\", King said,[214] complaining of what he described as a double standard that applauded his nonviolence at home, but deplored it when applied \"toward little brown Vietnamese children.\"[215] Life magazine called the speech \"demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi\",[208] and The Washington Post declared that King had \"diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.\"[215][216]King speaking to an anti-Vietnam war rally at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, April 27, 1967The \"Beyond Vietnam\" speech reflected King\'s evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with which he was affiliated.[217][218] King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation, and more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice.[219] He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for social democracy and democratic socialism.[220][221]
In a 1952 letter to Coretta Scott, he said: \"I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic ...\"[222] In one speech, he stated that \"something is wrong with capitalism\" and claimed, \"There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.\"[223] King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected \"traditional capitalism\", he rejected communism because of its \"materialistic interpretation of history\" that denied religion, its \"ethical relativism\", and its \"political totalitarianism.\"[224]
King stated in \"Beyond Vietnam\" that \"true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar ... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.\"[225] King quoted a United States official who said that from Vietnam to Latin America, the country was \"on the wrong side of a world revolution.\"[225] King condemned America\'s \"alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America\", and said that the U.S. should support \"the shirtless and barefoot people\" in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution.[225]
King\'s stance on Vietnam encouraged Allard K. Lowenstein, William Sloane Coffin and Norman Thomas, with the support of anti-war Democrats, to attempt to persuade King to run against President Johnson in the 1968 United States presidential election. King contemplated but ultimately decided against the proposal on the grounds that he felt uneasy with politics and considered himself better suited for his morally unambiguous role as an activist.[226]
On April 15, 1967, King participated and spoke at an anti-war march from Manhattan\'s Central Park to the United Nations. The march was organized by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and initiated by its chairman, James Bevel. At the U.N. King brought up issues of civil rights and the draft:
I have not urged a mechanical fusion of the civil rights and peace movements. There are people who have come to see the moral imperative of equality, but who cannot yet see the moral imperative of world brotherhood. I would like to see the fervor of the civil-rights movement imbued into the peace movement to instill it with greater strength. And I believe everyone has a duty to be in both the civil-rights and peace movements. But for those who presently choose but one, I would hope they will finally come to see the moral roots common to both.[227]
Seeing an opportunity to unite civil rights activists and anti-war activists,[204] Bevel convinced King to become even more active in the anti-war effort.[204] Despite his growing public opposition towards the Vietnam War, King was not fond of the hippie culture which developed from the anti-war movement.[228] In his 1967 Massey Lecture, King stated:
The importance of the hippies is not in their unconventional behavior, but in the fact that hundreds of thousands of young people, in turning to a flight from reality, are expressing a profoundly discrediting view on the society they emerge from.[228]
On January 13, 1968 (the day after President Johnson\'s State of the Union Address), King called for a large march on Washington against \"one of history\'s most cruel and senseless wars.\"[229][230]
We need to make clear in this political year, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the president of the United States, that we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killings of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self-determination in Southeast Asia.[229][230]
Correspondence with Thích Nhất HạnhThích Nhất Hạnh was an influential Vietnamese Buddhist who taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He had written a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 entitled: \"In Search of the Enemy of Man\". It was during his 1966 stay in the US that Nhất Hạnh met with King and urged him to publicly denounce the Vietnam War.[231] In 1967, King gave a famous speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, his first to publicly question the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.[232] Later that year, King nominated Nhất Hạnh for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize. In his nomination, King said, \"I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of [this prize] than this gentle monk from Vietnam. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity\".[233]
Poor People\'s Campaign, 1968Main article: Poor People\'s CampaignRows of tentsA shantytown established in Washington, D. C. to protest economic conditions as a part of the Poor People\'s CampaignIn 1968, King and the SCLC organized the \"Poor People\'s Campaign\" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble \"a multiracial army of the poor\" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an \"economic bill of rights\" for poor Americans.[234][235]
The campaign was preceded by King\'s final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? which laid out his view of how to address social issues and poverty. King quoted from Henry George and George\'s book, Progress and Poverty, particularly in support of a guaranteed basic income.[236][237][238] The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C., demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States.
King and the SCLC called on the government to invest in rebuilding America\'s cities. He felt that Congress had shown \"hostility to the poor\" by spending \"military funds with alacrity and generosity.\" He contrasted this with the situation faced by poor Americans, claiming that Congress had merely provided \"poverty funds with miserliness.\"[235] His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of \"racism, poverty, militarism and materialism\", and argued that \"reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.\"[239]
The Poor People\'s Campaign was controversial even within the civil rights movement. Rustin resigned from the march, stating that the goals of the campaign were too broad, that its demands were unrealizable, and that he thought that these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.[240]
Assassination and aftermathMain article: Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
The Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated, is now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum.I\'ve Been to the MountaintopMENU0:00Final 30 seconds of \"I\'ve Been to the Mountaintop\" speech by Martin Luther King Jr.Problems playing this file? See media help.On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the black sanitary public works employees, who were represented by AFSCME Local 1733. The workers had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. In one incident, black street repairmen received pay for two hours when they were sent home because of bad weather, but white employees were paid for the full day.[241][242][243]
On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his \"I\'ve Been to the Mountaintop\" address[244] at Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. King\'s flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane.[245] In the prophetic peroration of the last speech of his life, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:
And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don\'t know what will happen now. We\'ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn\'t matter with me now. Because I\'ve been to the mountaintop. And I don\'t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I\'m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God\'s will. And He\'s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I\'ve looked over. And I\'ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I\'m happy, tonight. I\'m not worried about anything. I\'m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.[246]
King was booked in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel (owned by Walter Bailey) in Memphis. Ralph Abernathy, who was present at the assassination, testified to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed at Room 306 so often that it was known as the \"King-Abernathy suite.\"[247] According to Jesse Jackson, who was present, King\'s last words on the balcony before his assassination were spoken to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was attending: \"Ben, make sure you play \'Take My Hand, Precious Lord\' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.\"[248]
King was fatally shot by James Earl Ray at 6:01 p.m., Thursday, April 4, 1968, as he stood on the motel\'s second-floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder.[249][250] Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor.[251] Jackson stated after the shooting that he cradled King\'s head as King lay on the balcony, but this account was disputed by other colleagues of King; Jackson later changed his statement to say that he had \"reached out\" for King.[252]
After emergency chest surgery, King died at St. Joseph\'s Hospital at 7:05 p.m.[253] According to biographer Taylor Branch, King\'s autopsy revealed that though only 39 years old, he \"had the heart of a 60 year old\", which Branch attributed to the stress of 13 years in the civil rights movement.[254] King is buried within Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.[255]
AftermathFurther information: King assassination riotsJackson standing onstage in a long white dressKing\'s friend Mahalia Jackson (seen here in 1964) sang at his funeral.The assassination led to a nationwide wave of race riots in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities.[256][257][258] Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King\'s death. He gave a short, improvised speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and urging them to continue King\'s ideal of nonviolence.[259] The following day, he delivered a prepared response in Cleveland.[260] James Farmer Jr. and other civil rights leaders also called for non-violent action, while the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for a more forceful response.[261] The city of Memphis quickly settled the strike on terms favorable to the sanitation workers.[262]
The plan to set up a shantytown in Washington, D.C., was carried out soon after the April 4 assassination. Criticism of King\'s plan was subdued in the wake of his death, and the SCLC received an unprecedented wave of donations for the purpose of carrying it out. The campaign officially began in Memphis, on May 2, at the hotel where King was murdered.[263] Thousands of demonstrators arrived on the National Mall and stayed for six weeks, establishing a camp they called \"Resurrection City.\"[264]
President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to quell the riots by making several telephone calls to civil rights leaders, mayors and governors across the United States and told politicians that they should warn the police against the unwarranted use of force.[258] But his efforts didn\'t work out: \"I\'m not getting through,\" Johnson told his aides. \"They\'re all holing up like generals in a dugout getting ready to watch a war.\"[258] Johnson declared April 7 a national day of mourning for the civil rights leader.[265] Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended King\'s funeral on behalf of the President, as there were fears that Johnson\'s presence might incite protests and perhaps violence.[266] At his widow\'s request, King\'s last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church was played at the funeral,[267] a recording of his \"Drum Major\" sermon, given on February 4, 1968. In that sermon, King made a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to \"feed the hungry\", \"clothe the naked\", \"be right on the [Vietnam] war question\", and \"love and serve humanity.\"[268] His good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, \"Take My Hand, Precious Lord\", at the funeral.[269] The assassination helped to spur the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.[258]
Two months after King\'s death, James Earl Ray—who was on the loose from a previous prison escape—was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave England on a false Canadian passport. He was using the alias Ramon George Sneyd on his way to white-ruled Rhodesia.[270] Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King\'s murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, though he recanted this confession three days later.[271] On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray pleaded guilty to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty. He was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.[271][272] Ray later claimed a man he met in Montreal, Quebec, with the alias \"Raoul\" was involved and that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy.[273][274] He spent the remainder of his life attempting, unsuccessfully, to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.[272] Ray died in 1998 at age 70.[275]
Allegations of conspiracyMain article: Martin Luther King Jr. assassination conspiracy theories
The sarcophagus of Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, GeorgiaRay\'s lawyers maintained he was a scapegoat similar to the way that John F. Kennedy\'s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is seen by conspiracy theorists.[276] Supporters of this assertion said that Ray\'s confession was given under pressure and that he had been threatened with the death penalty.[272][277] They admitted that Ray was a thief and burglar, but claimed that he had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon.[274] However, prison records in different U.S. cities have shown that he was incarcerated on numerous occasions for charges of armed robbery.[278] In a 2008 interview with CNN, Jerry Ray, the younger brother of James Earl Ray, claimed that James was smart and was sometimes able to get away with armed robbery. Jerry Ray said that he had assisted his brother on one such robbery. \"I never been with nobody as bold as he is,\" Jerry said. \"He just walked in and put that gun on somebody, it was just like it\'s an everyday thing.\"[278]
Those suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point to the two successive ballistics tests which proved that a rifle similar to Ray\'s Remington Gamemaster had been the murder weapon. Those tests did not implicate Ray\'s specific rifle.[272][279] Witnesses near King at the moment of his death said that the shot came from another location. They said that it came from behind thick shrubbery near the boarding house—which had been cut away in the days following the assassination—and not from the boarding house window.[280] However, Ray\'s fingerprints were found on various objects (a rifle, a pair of binoculars, articles of clothing, a newspaper) that were left in the bathroom where it was determined the gunfire came from.[278] An examination of the rifle containing Ray\'s fingerprints determined that at least one shot was fired from the firearm at the time of the assassination.[278]
In 1997, King\'s son Dexter Scott King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray\'s efforts to obtain a new trial.[281]
Two years later, King\'s widow Coretta Scott King and the couple\'s children won a wrongful death claim against Loyd Jowers and \"other unknown co-conspirators.\" Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King\'s assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found in favor of the King family, finding Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King and that government agencies were party to the assassination.[282][283] William F. Pepper represented the King family in the trial.[284]
In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice completed the investigation into Jowers\' claims but did not find evidence to support allegations about conspiracy. The investigation report recommended no further investigation unless some new reliable facts are presented.[285] A sister of Jowers admitted that he had fabricated the story so he could make $300,000 from selling the story, and she in turn corroborated his story in order to get some money to pay her income tax.[286][287]
In 2002, The New York Times reported that a church minister, Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson—not James Earl Ray—assassinated King. He stated, \"It wasn\'t a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way.\" Wilson provided no evidence to back up his claims.[288]
King researchers David Garrow and Gerald Posner disagreed with William F. Pepper\'s claims that the government killed King.[289] In 2003, Pepper published a book about the long investigation and trial, as well as his representation of James Earl Ray in his offer for a trial, laying out the evidence and criticizing other accounts.[290][291] King\'s friend and colleague, James Bevel, also disputed the argument that Ray acted alone, stating, \"There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man.\"[292] In 2004, Jesse Jackson stated:
The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. And within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. ... I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray.[293]
LegacySee also: Memorials to Martin Luther King Jr. and List of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. statue over the west entrance of Westminster Abbey, installed in 1998South AfricaSee also: Black Consciousness MovementKing\'s legacy includes influences on the Black Consciousness Movement and civil rights movement in South Africa.[294][295] King\'s work was cited by, and served as, an inspiration for South African leader Albert Lutuli, who fought for racial justice in his country and was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.[296]
United KingdomSee also: Northern Ireland civil rights movementKing influenced Irish politician and activist John Hume. Hume, the former leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, cited King\'s legacy as quintessential to the Northern Irish civil rights movement and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, calling him \"one of my great heroes of the century.\"[297][298][299]
In the United Kingdom, The Northumbria and Newcastle Universities Martin Luther King Peace Committee[300] exists to honor King\'s legacy, as represented by his final visit to the UK to receive an honorary degree from Newcastle University in 1967.[301][302] The Peace Committee operates out of the chaplaincies of the city\'s two universities, Northumbria and Newcastle, both of which remain centres for the study of Martin Luther King and the US civil rights movement. Inspired by King\'s vision, it undertakes a range of activities across the UK as it seeks to \"build cultures of peace.\"
In 2017, Newcastle University unveiled a bronze statue of King to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his honorary doctorate ceremony.[303] The Students Union also voted to rename their bar Luthers.[304]
United States
Banner at the 2012 Republican National ConventionKing has become a national icon in the history of American liberalism and American progressivism.[305] His main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in the U.S. Just days after King\'s assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968.[306] Title VIII of the Act, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, prohibited discrimination in housing and housing-related transactions on the basis of race, religion, or national origin (later expanded to include sex, familial status, and disability). This legislation was seen as a tribute to King\'s struggle in his final years to combat residential discrimination in the U.S.[306] The day following King\'s assassination, school teacher Jane Elliott conducted her first \"Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes\" exercise with her class of elementary school students in Riceville, Iowa. Her purpose was to help them understand King\'s death as it related to racism, something they little understood as they lived in a predominantly white community.[307]
King\'s wife Coretta Scott King followed in her husband\'s footsteps and was active in matters of social justice and civil rights until her death in 2006. The same year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, she established the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to preserving his legacy and the work of championing nonviolent conflict resolution and tolerance worldwide.[308] Their son, Dexter King, serves as the center\'s chairman.[309][310] Daughter Yolanda King, who died in 2007, was a motivational speaker, author and founder of Higher Ground Productions, an organization specializing in diversity training.[311]
Even within the King family, members disagree about his religious and political views about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. King\'s widow Coretta publicly said that she believed her husband would have supported gay rights.[312] However, his youngest child, Bernice King, has said publicly that he would have been opposed to gay marriage.[313]
On February 4, 1968, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, in speaking about how he wished to be remembered after his death, King stated:
I\'d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I\'d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.
I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. And I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major. Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won\'t have any money to leave behind. I won\'t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.[261][314]
Martin Luther King Jr. was among hundreds of artists whose material was destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.[315]
Martin Luther King Jr. DayMain article: Martin Luther King Jr. DayBeginning in 1971, cities such as St. Louis, Missouri, and states established annual holidays to honor King.[316] At the White House Rose Garden on November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it is called Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Following President George H. W. Bush\'s 1992 proclamation, the holiday is observed on the third Monday of January each year, near the time of King\'s birthday.[317][318] On January 17, 2000, for the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all fifty U.S. states.[319] Arizona (1992), New Hampshire (1999) and Utah (2000) were the last three states to recognize the holiday. Utah previously celebrated the holiday at the same time but under the name Human Rights Day.[320]
VenerationMartin Luther King of GeorgiaPastor and MartyrHonored in Holy Christian Orthodox ChurchEpiscopal Church (United States)Evangelical Lutheran Church in AmericaCanonized 9 September 2016, The Christian Cathedral by Timothy Paul BaymonFeast 4 April15 January (Episcopalian and Lutheran)Martin Luther King Jr.[321] was canonized[322] by Archbishop Timothy Paul of the Holy Christian Orthodox Church[323] (not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church)[324] on 9 September 2016[325] in the Christian Cathedral in Springfield, Massachusetts,[326] his feast day is April 4, the date of his assassination. King is honored[327] with a Lesser Feast on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America[328] on April 4[329] or January 15.[330] The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commemorates King liturgically on the anniversary of his birth, January 15.[331]
Ideas, influences, and political stancesChristianity
King at the 1963 Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C.As a Christian minister, King\'s main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses. King\'s faith was strongly based in Jesus\' commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God above all, and loving your enemies, praying for them and blessing them. His nonviolent thought was also based in the injunction to turn the other cheek in the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus\' teaching of putting the sword back into its place (Matthew 26:52).[332] In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King urged action consistent with what he describes as Jesus\' \"extremist\" love, and also quoted numerous other Christian pacifist authors, which was very usual for him. In another sermon, he stated:
Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don\'t plan to run for any political office. I don\'t plan to do anything but remain a preacher. And what I\'m doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man.[333][334]
King\'s private writings show that he rejected biblical literalism; he described the Bible as \"mythological,\" doubted that Jesus was born of a virgin and did not believe that the story of Jonah and the whale was true.[335]
The Measure of a ManIn 1959, King published a short book called The Measure of a Man, which contained his sermons \"What is Man?\" and \"The Dimensions of a Complete Life\". The sermons argued for man\'s need for God\'s love and criticized the racial injustices of Western civilization.[336]
NonviolenceA close-up of RustinKing worked alongside Quakers such as Bayard Rustin to develop nonviolent tactics.World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Nonviolence is a good starting point. Those of us who believe in this method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the voices of violence, hatred, and emotion. We can very well set a mood of peace out of which a system of peace can be built.
—Martin Luther King Jr.[337]Veteran African-American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was King\'s first regular advisor on nonviolence.[338] King was also advised by the white activists Harris Wofford and Glenn Smiley.[339] Rustin and Smiley came from the Christian pacifist tradition, and Wofford and Rustin both studied Mahatma Gandhi\'s teachings. Rustin had applied nonviolence with the Journey of Reconciliation campaign in the 1940s,[340] and Wofford had been promoting Gandhism to Southern blacks since the early 1950s.[339]
King had initially known little about Gandhi and rarely used the term \"nonviolence\" during his early years of activism in the early 1950s. King initially believed in and practiced self-defense, even obtaining guns in his household as a means of defense against possible attackers. The pacifists guided King by showing him the alternative of nonviolent resistance, arguing that this would be a better means to accomplish his goals of civil rights than self-defense. King then vowed to no longer personally use arms.[341][342]
In the aftermath of the boycott, King wrote Stride Toward Freedom, which included the chapter Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. King outlined his understanding of nonviolence, which seeks to win an opponent to friendship, rather than to humiliate or defeat him. The chapter draws from an address by Wofford, with Rustin and Stanley Levison also providing guidance and ghostwriting.[343]
King was inspired by Gandhi and his success with nonviolent activism, and as a theology student, King described Gandhi as being one of the \"individuals who greatly reveal the working of the Spirit of God\".[344] King had \"for a long time ... wanted to take a trip to India.\"[345] With assistance from Harris Wofford, the American Friends Service Committee, and other supporters, he was able to fund the journey in April 1959.[346][347] The trip to India affected King, deepening his understanding of nonviolent resistance and his commitment to America\'s struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, \"Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.\"
King\'s admiration of Gandhi\'s nonviolence did not diminish in later years. He went so far as to hold up his example when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, hailing the \"successful precedent\" of using nonviolence \"in a magnificent way by Mohandas K. Gandhi to challenge the might of the British Empire ... He struggled only with the weapons of truth, soul force, non-injury and courage.\"[348]
Another influence for King\'s nonviolent method was Henry David Thoreau\'s essay On Civil Disobedience and its theme of refusing to cooperate with an evil system.[349] He also was greatly influenced by the works of Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich,[350] and said that Walter Rauschenbusch\'s Christianity and the Social Crisis left an \"indelible imprint\" on his thinking by giving him a theological grounding for his social concerns.[351][352] King was moved by Rauschenbusch\'s vision of Christians spreading social unrest in \"perpetual but friendly conflict\" with the state, simultaneously critiquing it and calling it to act as an instrument of justice.[353] However, he was apparently unaware of the American tradition of Christian pacifism exemplified by Adin Ballou and William Lloyd Garrison.[354] King frequently referred to Jesus\' Sermon on the Mount as central for his work.[352][355][356][357] King also sometimes used the concept of \"agape\" (brotherly Christian love).[358] However, after 1960, he ceased employing it in his writings.[359]
Even after renouncing his personal use of guns, King had a complex relationship with the phenomenon of self-defense in the movement. He publicly discouraged it as a widespread practice, but acknowledged that it was sometimes necessary.[360] Throughout his career King was frequently protected by other civil rights activists who carried arms, such as Colonel Stone Johnson,[361] Robert Hayling, and the Deacons for Defense and Justice.[362][363]
Criticism within the movementKing was criticized by other black leaders during the course of his participation in the civil rights movement. This included opposition by more militant thinkers such as Nation of Islam member Malcolm X.[364] Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founder Ella Baker regarded King as a charismatic media figure who lost touch with the grassroots of the movement[365] as he became close to elite figures like Nelson Rockefeller.[366] Stokely Carmichael, a protege of Baker\'s, became a black separatist and disagreed with King\'s plea for racial integration because he considered it an insult to a uniquely African-American culture.[367][368]
Activism and involvement with Native AmericansKing was an avid supporter of Native American rights. Native Americans were also active supporters of King\'s civil rights movement which included the active participation of Native Americans.[369] In fact, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) was patterned after the NAACP\'s Legal Defense and Education Fund.[370] The National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was especially supportive in King\'s campaigns especially the Poor People\'s Campaign in 1968.[371] In King\'s book Why We Can\'t Wait he writes:
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.[372]
King assisted Native American people in south Alabama in the late 1950s.[370] At that time the remaining Creek in Alabama were trying to completely desegregate schools in their area. The South had many egregious racial problems: In this case, light-complexioned Native children were allowed to ride school buses to previously all white schools, while dark-skinned Native children from the same band were barred from riding the same buses.[370] Tribal leaders, upon hearing of King\'s desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, contacted him for assistance. He promptly responded and through his intervention the problem was quickly resolved.[370]
In September 1959, King flew from Los Angeles, California, to Tucson, Arizona.[373] After giving a speech at the University of Arizona on the ideals of using nonviolent methods in creating social change. He put into words his belief that one must not use force in this struggle \"but match the violence of his opponents with his suffering.\"[373] King then went to Southside Presbyterian, a predominantly Native American church, and was fascinated by their photos. On the spur of the moment, King wanted to go to an Indian Reservation to meet the people so Reverend Casper Glenn took King to the Papago Indian Reservation.[373] At the reservation King met with all the tribal leaders, and others on the reservation then ate with them.[373] King then visited another Presbyterian church near the reservation, and preached there attracting a Native American crowd.[373] He later returned to Old Pueblo in March 1962 where he preached again to a Native American congregation, and then went on to give another speech at the University of Arizona.[373] King would continue to attract the attention of Native Americans throughout the civil rights movement. During the 1963 March on Washington there was a sizable Native American contingent, including many from South Dakota, and many from the Navajo nation.[370][374] Native Americans were also active participants in the Poor People\'s Campaign in 1968.[371]
King was a major inspiration along with the civil rights movement which inspired the Native American rights movement of the 1960s and many of its leaders.[370] John Echohawk a member of the Pawnee tribe and the executive director and one of the founders of the Native American Rights Fund stated:
Inspired by Dr. King, who was advancing the civil rights agenda of equality under the laws of this country, we thought that we could also use the laws to advance our Indianship, to live as tribes in our territories governed by our own laws under the principles of tribal sovereignty that had been with us ever since 1831. We believed that we could fight for a policy of self-determination that was consistent with U.S. law and that we could govern our own affairs, define our own ways and continue to survive in this society.[375]
PoliticsAs the leader of the SCLC, King maintained a policy of not publicly endorsing a U.S. political party or candidate: \"I feel someone must remain in the position of non-alignment, so that he can look objectively at both parties and be the conscience of both—not the servant or master of either.\"[376] In a 1958 interview, he expressed his view that neither party was perfect, saying, \"I don\'t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses ... And I\'m not inextricably bound to either party.\"[377] King did praise Democratic Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois as being the \"greatest of all senators\" because of his fierce advocacy for civil rights causes over the years.[378]
King critiqued both parties\' performance on promoting racial equality:
Actually, the Negro has been betrayed by both the Republican and the Democratic party. The Democrats have betrayed him by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed him by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of reactionary right-wing northern Republicans. And this coalition of southern Dixiecrats and right-wing reactionary northern Republicans defeats every bill and every move towards liberal legislation in the area of civil rights.[379]
Although King never publicly supported a political party or candidate for president, in a letter to a civil rights supporter in October 1956 he said that he had not decided whether he would vote for Adlai Stevenson II or Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 1956 presidential election, but that \"In the past, I always voted the Democratic ticket.\"[380] In his autobiography, King says that in 1960 he privately voted for Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy: \"I felt that Kennedy would make the best president. I never came out with an endorsement. My father did, but I never made one.\" King adds that he likely would have made an exception to his non-endorsement policy for a second Kennedy term, saying \"Had President Kennedy lived, I would probably have endorsed him in 1964.\"[381]
In 1964, King urged his supporters \"and all people of goodwill\" to vote against Republican Senator Barry Goldwater for president, saying that his election \"would be a tragedy, and certainly suicidal almost, for the nation and the world.\"[382]
King supported the ideals of social democracy and democratic socialism, although he was reluctant to speak directly of this support due to the anti-communist sentiment being projected throughout the United States at the time, and the association of socialism with communism. King believed that capitalism could not adequately provide the necessities of many American people, particularly the African-American community.[222]
CompensationSee also: Reparations for slavery debate in the United StatesKing stated that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of $50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups.[383]
He posited that \"the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils.\"[384] He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor, but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, \"It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races.\"[385]
Family planningOn being awarded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America\'s Margaret Sanger Award on May 5, 1966, King said:
Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims ...[386][387][third-party source needed]
TelevisionActress Nichelle Nichols planned to leave the science-fiction television series Star Trek in 1967 after its first season, wanting to return to musical theater.[388] She changed her mind after talking to King[389] who was a fan of the show. King explained that her character signified a future of greater racial harmony and cooperation.[390] King told Nichols, \"You are our image of where we\'re going, you\'re 300 years from now, and that means that\'s where we are and it takes place now. Keep doing what you\'re doing, you are our inspiration.\"[391] As Nichols recounted, \"Star Trek was one of the only shows that [King] and his wife Coretta would allow their little children to watch. And I thanked him and I told him I was leaving the show. All the smile came off his face. And he said, \'Don\'t you understand for the first time we\'re seen as we should be seen. You don\'t have a black role. You have an equal role.\'\"[388] For his part, the series\' creator, Gene Roddenberry, was deeply moved upon learning of King\'s support.[392]
IsraelKing believed Israel has a right to exist, saying \"Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect her right to exist, its territorial integrity and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. Israel is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security, and that security must be a reality.\"[393]
HomosexualityA boy once asked King about how he should deal with his homosexuality. King replied:[394][395]
Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired. Your reasons for adopting this habit have now been consciously suppressed or unconsciously repressed. Therefore, it is necessary to deal with this problem by getting back to some of the experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit. In order to do this I would suggest that you see a good psychiatrist who can assist you in bringing to the forefront of conscience all of those experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit. You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.
State surveillance and coercionFBI surveillance and wiretapping
Memo describing FBI attempts to disrupt the Poor People\'s Campaign with fraudulent claims about King‍—‌part of the COINTELPRO campaign against the anti-war and civil rights movementsFBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered surveillance of King, with the intent to undermine his power as a civil rights leader.[396][397] The Church Committee, a 1975 investigation by the U.S. Congress, found that \"From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to \'neutralize\' him as an effective civil rights leader.\"[398]
In the fall of 1963, the FBI received authorization from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to proceed with wiretapping of King\'s phone lines, purportedly due to his association with Stanley Levison.[399] The Bureau informed President John F. Kennedy. He and his brother unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison, a New York lawyer who had been involved with Communist Party USA.[400][401] Although Robert Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King\'s telephone lines \"on a trial basis, for a month or so\",[402] Hoover extended the clearance so his men were \"unshackled\" to look for evidence in any areas of King\'s life they deemed worthy.[112]
The Bureau placed wiretaps on the home and office phone lines of both Levison and King, and bugged King\'s rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country.[400][403] In 1967, Hoover listed the SCLC as a black nationalist hate group, with the instructions: \"No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups ... to insure [sic] the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited.\"[397][404]
NSA monitoring of King\'s communicationsIn a secret operation code-named \"Minaret\", the National Security Agency monitored the communications of leading Americans, including King, who were critical of the U.S. war in Vietnam.[405] A review by the NSA itself concluded that Minaret was \"disreputable if not outright illegal.\"[405]
Allegations of communismFor years, Hoover had been suspicious of potential influence of communists in social movements such as labor unions and civil rights.[406] Hoover directed the FBI to track King in 1957, and the SCLC when it was established.[3]
Due to the relationship between King and Stanley Levison, the FBI feared Levison was working as an \"agent of influence\" over King, in spite of its own reports in 1963 that Levison had left the Party and was no longer associated in business dealings with them.[407] Another King lieutenant, Jack O\'Dell, was also linked to the Communist Party by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).[408]
Despite the extensive surveillance conducted, by 1976 the FBI had acknowledged that it had not obtained any evidence that King himself or the SCLC were actually involved with any communist organizations.[398]
For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to communism. In a 1965 Playboy interview, he stated that \"there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.\"[409] He argued that Hoover was \"following the path of appeasement of political powers in the South\" and that his concern for communist infiltration of the civil rights movement was meant to \"aid and abet the salacious claims of southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements.\"[398] Hoover did not believe King\'s pledge of innocence and replied by saying that King was \"the most notorious liar in the country.\"[410] After King gave his \"I Have A Dream\" speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, the FBI described King as \"the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.\"[403] It alleged that he was \"knowingly, willingly and regularly cooperating with and taking guidance from communists.\"[411]
The attempts to prove that King was a communist was related to the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were content with the status quo, but had been stirred up by \"communists\" and \"outside agitators.\"[412] As context, the civil rights movement in 1950s and \'60s arose from activism within the black community dating back to before World War I. King said that \"the Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals—the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.\"[413]
CIA surveillanceCIA files declassified in 2017 revealed that the agency was investigating possible links between King and Communism after a Washington Post article dated November 4, 1964, claimed he was invited to the Soviet Union and that Ralph Abernathy, as spokesman for King, refused to comment on the source of the invitation.[414] Mail belonging to King and other civil rights activists was intercepted by the CIA program HTLINGUAL.[415]
Allegations of adultery
The only meeting of King and Malcolm X, outside the United States Senate chamber, March 26, 1964, during the Senate debates regarding the (eventual) Civil Rights Act of 1964.[416]The FBI having concluded that King was dangerous due to communist infiltration, attempts to discredit King began through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, attempted to demonstrate that he also had numerous extramarital affairs.[403] Lyndon B. Johnson once said that King was a \"hypocritical preacher\".[417]
In his 1989 autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Ralph Abernathy stated that King had a \"weakness for women\", although they \"all understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside of marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.\"[418] In a later interview, Abernathy said that he only wrote the term \"womanizing\", that he did not specifically say King had extramarital sex and that the infidelities King had were emotional rather than sexual.[419]
Abernathy criticized the media for sensationalizing the statements he wrote about King\'s affairs,[419] such as the allegation that he admitted in his book that King had a sexual affair the night before he was assassinated.[419] In his original wording, Abernathy had stated that he saw King coming out of his room with a woman when he awoke the next morning and later said that \"he may have been in there discussing and debating and trying to get her to go along with the movement, I don\'t know...the Sanitation Worker\'s Strike.\"[419]
In his 1986 book Bearing the Cross, David Garrow wrote about a number of extramarital affairs, including one woman King saw almost daily. According to Garrow, \"that relationship ... increasingly became the emotional centerpiece of King\'s life, but it did not eliminate the incidental couplings ... of King\'s travels.\" He alleged that King explained his extramarital affairs as \"a form of anxiety reduction.\" Garrow asserted that King\'s supposed promiscuity caused him \"painful and at times overwhelming guilt.\"[420] King\'s wife Coretta appeared to have accepted his affairs with equanimity, saying once that \"all that other business just doesn\'t have a place in the very high-level relationship we enjoyed.\"[421] Shortly after Bearing the Cross was released, civil rights author Howell Raines gave the book a positive review but opined that Garrow\'s allegations about King\'s sex life were \"sensational\" and stated that Garrow was \"amassing facts rather than analyzing them.\"[422]
The FBI distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King\'s family.[423] The bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he did not cease his civil rights work.[424] The FBI–King suicide letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part:The FBI–King suicide letter,[425] mailed anonymously by the FBIThe American public, the church organizations that have been helping—Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.[426]
The letter was accompanied by a tape recording—excerpted from FBI wiretaps—of several of King\'s extramarital liaisons.[427] King interpreted this package as an attempt to drive him to suicide,[428] although William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the time, argued that it may have only been intended to \"convince Dr. King to resign from the SCLC.\"[398] King refused to give in to the FBI\'s threats.[403]
In 1977, Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI\'s electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.[429]
In May 2019, FBI files emerged alleging that King \"looked on, laughed and offered advice\" as one of his friends raped a woman. His biographer, David Garrow, wrote that \"the suggestion... that he either actively tolerated or personally employed violence against any woman, even while drunk, poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible\".[430] These allegations sparked a heated debate among historians.[431] Clayborne Carson, Martin Luther King biographer and overseer of the Dr. King records at Stanford University states that he came to the opposite conclusion of Garrow saying \"None of this is new. Garrow is talking about a recently added summary of a transcript of a 1964 recording from the Willard Hotel that others, including Mrs. King, have said they did not hear Martin\'s voice on it. The added summary was four layers removed from the actual recording. This supposedly new information comes from an anonymous source in a single paragraph in an FBI report. You have to ask how could anyone conclude King looked at a rape from an audio recording in a room where he was not present.\"[432] Carson bases his position of Coretta Scott King\'s memoirs where she states \"I set up our reel-to-reel recorder and listened. I have read scores of reports talking about the scurrilous activities of my husband but once again, there was nothing at all incriminating on the tape. It was a social event with people laughing and telling dirty jokes. But I did not hear Martin\'s voice on it, and there was nothing about sex or anything else resembling the lies J. Edgar and the FBI were spreading.\" The tapes that could confirm or refute the allegation are scheduled to be declassified in 2027.[433]
Police observation during the assassinationA fire station was located across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the boarding house in which James Earl Ray was staying. Police officers were stationed in the fire station to keep King under surveillance.[434] Agents were watching King at the time he was shot.[435] Immediately following the shooting, officers rushed out of the station to the motel. Marrell McCollough, an undercover police officer, was the first person to administer first aid to King.[436] The antagonism between King and the FBI, the lack of an all points bulletin to find the killer, and the police presence nearby led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination.[437]
Awards and recognition
King showing his medallion, which he received from Mayor Wagner
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King ministered, was renamed Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in 1978.King was awarded at least fifty honorary degrees from colleges and universities.[438] On October 14, 1964, King became the (at the time) youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in the U.S.[439][440] In 1965, he was awarded the American Liberties Medallion by the American Jewish Committee for his \"exceptional advancement of the principles of human liberty.\"[438][441] In his acceptance remarks, King said, \"Freedom is one thing. You have it all or you are not free.\"[442]
In 1957, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.[443] Two years later, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.[444] In 1966, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America awarded King the Margaret Sanger Award for \"his courageous resistance to bigotry and his lifelong dedication to the advancement of social justice and human dignity.\"[445] Also in 1966, King was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[446] In November 1967 he made a 24-hour trip to the United Kingdom to receive an honorary degree from Newcastle University, being the first African-American to be so honored by Newcastle.[302] In a moving impromptu acceptance speech,[301] he said
There are three urgent and indeed great problems that we face not only in the United States of America but all over the world today. That is the problem of racism, the problem of poverty and the problem of war.
In addition to being nominated for three Grammy Awards, the civil rights leader posthumously won for Best Spoken Word Recording in 1971 for \"Why I Oppose The War In Vietnam\".[447]
In 1977, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was posthumously awarded to King by President Jimmy Carter. The citation read:
Martin Luther King Jr. was the conscience of his generation. He gazed upon the great wall of segregation and saw that the power of love could bring it down. From the pain and exhaustion of his fight to fulfill the promises of our founding fathers for our humblest citizens, he wrung his eloquent statement of his dream for America. He made our nation stronger because he made it better. His dream sustains us yet.[448]
King and his wife were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.[449]
King was second in Gallup\'s List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century.[450] In 1963, he was named Time Person of the Year, and in 2000, he was voted sixth in an online \"Person of the Century\" poll by the same magazine.[451] King placed third in the Greatest American contest conducted by the Discovery Channel and AOL.[452]
Five-dollar billOn April 20, 2016, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that the $5, $10, and $20 bills would all undergo redesign prior to 2020. Lew said that while Lincoln would remain on the front of the $5 bill, the reverse would be redesigned to depict various historical events that had occurred at the Lincoln Memorial. Among the planned designs are images from King\'s \"I Have a Dream\" speech and the 1939 concert by opera singer Marian Anderson.[453]
WorksStride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) ISBN 978-0-06-250490-6The Measure of a Man (1959) ISBN 978-0-8006-0877-4Strength to Love (1963) ISBN 978-0-8006-9740-2Why We Can\'t Wait (1964) ISBN 978-0-8070-0112-7Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) ISBN 978-0-8070-0571-2The Trumpet of Conscience (1968) ISBN 978-0-8070-0170-7A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (1986) ISBN 978-0-06-250931-4The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. (1998), ed. Clayborne Carson ISBN 978-0-446-67650-2\"All Labor Has Dignity\" (2011) ed. Michael Honey ISBN 978-0-8070-8600-1\"Thou, Dear God\": Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits. Collection of King\'s prayers. (2011), ed. Lewis Baldwin ISBN 978-0-8070-8603-2MLK: A Celebration in Word and Image (2011). Photographed by Bob Adelman, introduced by Charles Johnson ISBN 978-0-8070-0316-9
Daisy L. Elliott (November 26, 1917 – December 22, 2015), was an American politician and realtor from the State of Michigan.[1]Contents1 Early life2 Career3 Political career4 References5 External linksEarly lifeElliott was born Daisy Elizabeth Lenoir in Filbert, West Virginia, United States, and resided in Detroit, Michigan. She was a delegate to the 1961–1962 Michigan Constitutional Convention from Wayne County\'s 4th District, which resulted in Michigan\'s Constitution of 1963.[citation needed]
CareerA Democrat, she represented Wayne County\'s 4th District in the Michigan House of Representatives from 1963–64, Michigan\'s 22nd District, which replaced Wayne County\'s 4th District, from 1965–72, and Michigan\'s 8th District from 1973–78. She was an unsuccessful candidate in the primary for the Michigan Senate 5th District in 1978.[1] then regained her old seat in the Michigan House in 1980. In politics, Elliott was nothing if not persistent: she was defeated five times in the primaries for State Representative (the 1st District in 1950, the 11th District in 1954, and the 4th District in 1956, 1958 and 1960) before finally winning in 1962.
While serving in the Michigan State House of Representatives, she co-authored the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which passed in 1976.[2]
In April 1982, Elliott was arrested for possessing a stolen 1977 Cadillac.[3] She was defeated by Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick in the Democratic primary that year, and, after numerous appeals, had her conviction upheld in 1984.[4] She served sixty days in jail before being released in June 1985.[5]
Political careerShe was a member of Democratic Party, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), League of Women Voters, and Junior League.[1] She died on December 22, 2015, aged 98, at DMC Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit.[6][7] She is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery (Detroit, Michigan) near the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel.