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- In Focus: Martin Luther King Jr. Day
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
- Southern Christian Leadership Conference
- Greensboro Sit-In
- Letter from Birmingham Jail
- 1963 March on Washington
- Selma March
- Date: August 28, 1963
- Date: May 17, 1957
- Date: December 10, 1964
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This year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, on January 15, coincides with the late civil rights leader’s birthday. Had he lived, King would be turning 95 years old. Days after his 1968 assassination, a campaign for a holiday in King’s honor began. U.S. Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan first proposed a bill on April 8, 1968, but the first vot...
King’s first leadership role within the Civil Rights Movement was during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956. The 381-day protest integrated the Alabama city’s public transit in one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history. The effort began on December 1, 1955, when 42-year-old Rosa Parksboarded th...
Flush with victory, African American civil rights leaders recognized the need for a national organization to help coordinate their efforts. In January 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, and 60 ministers and civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conferenceto harness the moral authority and organizing power of Black churches. The...
By 1960, King was gaining national exposure. He returned to Atlanta to become co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church but also continued his civil rights efforts. His next activist campaign was the student-led Greensboro Sit-In movement. In February 1960, a group of Black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began sitting at raciall...
In the spring of 1963, King organized a demonstration in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. With entire families in attendance, city police turned dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators. King was jailed, along with large numbers of his supporters. The event drew nationwide attention. However, King was personally criticized by Black and white clergy alike ...
By the end of the Birmingham campaign, King and his supporters were making plans for a massive demonstration on the nation’s capital composed of multiple organizations, all asking for peaceful change. The demonstration was the brainchild of labor leader A. Philip Randolph and King’s one-time mentor Bayard Rustin. On August 28, 1963, the historic Ma...
Continuing to focus on voting rights, King, the SCLC, SNCC, and local organizers planned to march peacefully from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital, Montgomery. Led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, demonstrators set out on March 7, 1965. But the Selma march quickly turned violent as police with nightsticks and tear gas met the demonstrators a...
King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington. Standing at the Lincoln Memorial, he emphasized his belief that someday all men could be brothers to the 250,000-strong crowd.
Six years before he told the world of his dream, King stood at the same Lincoln Memorial steps as the final speaker of the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. Dismayed by the ongoing obstacles to registering Black voters, King urged leaders from various backgrounds—Republican and Democrat, Black and white—to work together in the name of justice.
Speaking at the University of Oslo in Norway, King pondered why he was receiving the Nobel Prize when the battle for racial justice was far from over, before acknowledging that it was in recognition of the power of nonviolent resistance. He then compared the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement to the ground crew at an airport who do the unhe...
Learn about the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner who fought for racial justice and nonviolence. Explore his early years, education, speeches, activism, assassination and more.
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