Martin Luther King and civil rights

The story

Separate fountains

Imagine having to drink from a fountain marked “whites only”, while for you, a few metres away, there is another, older one, marked “coloured”. Imagine separate schools, buses with reserved seats, restaurants you cannot enter. Until sixty years ago, in many southern states of the United States, this was the law. It was called racial segregation, and it mostly affected African Americans, the descendants of Africans brought to the country as slaves. Slavery had ended in 1865, but the rules remained, known as the “Jim Crow laws”, which kept Black people separate and in worse conditions.

The bus in Montgomery

Things began to change with small acts of courage. On 1 December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a Black seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger, as local law required. She was arrested. The African Americans of the city decided to stop riding the buses. The boycott lasted 381 days: many walked for kilometres, or organised car-sharing. In the end, the Supreme Court declared segregation on buses illegal.

Leading the protest was a young Baptist minister of 26, Martin Luther King. He had been born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a minister, had studied theology and was a powerful speaker. He had learned from Gandhi, the Indian leader, that you can fight for justice without violence: with marches, prayers, strikes and peaceful refusals. When his house was hit by a bomb, he asked his supporters not to fight back.

Birmingham and the March on Washington

In 1963, in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, the police answered the protests of young people with fire hoses and dogs. The pictures, shown on television, shocked Americans and the world. King, who had been arrested, wrote a famous letter from jail to explain why it was no longer possible to wait. President John Kennedy, in a television speech in June, said it was a moral issue and promised a new law against discrimination.

To push Congress to pass it, the leaders of the movement organised a great “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”. It was prepared above all by Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph. On 28 August 1963 about 250,000 people, mostly Black but also many white, of every religion and age, gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the monument to the president who had abolished slavery. Singers, trade unionists, priests and a very young activist, John Lewis, who was 23, spoke.

King was the last to speak. After a prepared speech, the singer Mahalia Jackson, who was standing nearby, shouted to him: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” He put his papers aside and improvised: “I have a dream,” he said, repeating the phrase several times, “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.” He dreamed that his four children would one day live in a country where they would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. The speech lasted about sixteen to seventeen minutes and was shown on television.

The new laws

The march was an example of peaceful strength, and it brought results. In July 1964 President Lyndon Johnson, who had succeeded Kennedy after his assassination, signed the Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination on grounds of race, colour, religion and origin in public places, schools and workplaces. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act guaranteed the right to vote, which in many southern states Black people could not really exercise. In 1964 King received the Nobel Peace Prize, at 35: the youngest person to receive it up to then. On 4 April 1968 he was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, by a rifle shot. He was 39.