Photo: AFP via Getty Images.
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, as part of the March on Washington.
On Monday, January 20, we celebrate the birth of civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. although his actual date of birth is January 15. Most national holidays in the US get moved to a Monday to create a long weekend. The only two exceptions I can think of are July 4, Independence Day, and November 11, Veterans Day.
I want to tell readers from other countries about MLK Jr. And there are details that many Americans don’t know either. I, for one, had no idea he was originally named Michael! Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?
From Wikipedia: “Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
“A black church leader, King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw 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 was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his ‘I Have a Dream‘ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [now dismantled by the Supreme Court], and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who often responded violently.
“King was jailed several times. 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, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty 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. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was convicted of the assassination.” More.
On that April morning in 1968, I was driving to work in the same town where, three years later, there was an FBI office break-in that uncovered government malfeasance. I was listening to the radio, when I heard King had been assassinated. I was so sad. Scared, too, about what was happening to our country, because political assassinations seemed to be becoming a trend. Maybe we would always have to expect and somehow deal with them.
It was a turbulent time, with Americans against Americans with regard to the Vietnam War. I remember attending community discussions in which the personal vitriol took my breath away.
Nowadays, I try to remember that we got through that and can get through other things.
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