Who Was Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and death.

The civil rights movement was a struggle for racial equality and social justice in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the abolition of enslavement almost a century ago, Black Americans continued to face racism and violence, particularly in the South, where Jim Crow laws legitimized racial discrimination. These laws enforced racial segregation in public spaces. Disenfranchised and marginalized at all levels of society, Black people were often excluded from education or attended poorly equipped schools and limited job opportunities, often working as domestic workers and laborers. In the postwar US, however, Black people’s developing race consciousness helped incite grassroots initiatives and activist groups that sparked the civil rights movement.

In the South, acts of civil disobedience like sit-ins, boycotts, marches, and mass protests highlighted the issues of racial oppression and discrimination nationally. The political actions of activists Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and many others challenged Jim Crow laws and the lack of voting rights for African Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister and the founder and head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), emerged as a leader and emblematic figure in the struggle. King supported direct action and nonviolent resistance as the movement’s main political strategies. The movement’s highest achievements include the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on race, gender, nationality, and religion, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

Despite those successes, the South’s implementation of civil rights laws encountered delays, while violence and persecution against activists intensified. King’s insistence on nonviolent protest differed from the approach of Malcolm X, another emblematic civil rights leader. Instead of nonviolence, Malcolm X proclaimed Black people’s right to self-defense against racial violence by any means. After the assassinations of these two leaders (Malcolm X’s in 1965 and King’s in 1968), the movement experienced a shift in its strategy. The Black Power movement emerged, continuing the struggle for justice into the 1970s. Malcolm X’s values and ideology were highly influential in this movement. By the late 1960s, increasing police violence against Black people and constant intimidation of civil rights leaders incited race riots in several Northern cities, expanding the racial conflict beyond the South. Beyond the issue of integration, Black Power emphasized self-determination, racial pride, and cultural and economic independence for Black people. However, King had recognized and addressed the slow progress on civil rights and the necessity for change in the movement shortly before his assassination, so his philosophical approach to activism remained a powerful influence.

Black Power sought radical change for the Black community, highlighting structural and systemic racism. The Black Panther Party, a revolutionary and militant group that emerged as a prominent organization, challenged police brutality and organized social programs to educate and galvanize disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged Black people. The party acted to protect urban Black communities from police brutality, organizing armed patrols. The Black Power movement expanded the freedom struggle’s scope, allying with anticolonial revolutionary groups in Africa and Southeast Asia. By the late 1970s, Black Power activists became targets of FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) counterintelligence, which weakened the movement through intimidating tactics. Despite its decline, the movement’s legacy remains strong. Its emphasis on Black identity, self-reliance, and fighting systemic injustice inspired other racial groups to pursue justice and influenced later developments like the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.

Many texts document the civil rights movement, including King’s own works, such as the essay “Letter From Birmingham Jail” (1963), the book Where Do We Go From Here? (1967), and the speeches “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (1968) and “I Have a Dream” (published posthumously in 1973).