He is still regarded mainly as the black leader of a movement for black equality.

Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929-1968), American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of the principal leaders of the American civil rights movement and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest. King’s Challenges to segregation and racial discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s helped convince many white Americans to support the cause of civil rights in the United States. After his assassination in 1968, King became a symbol of protest in the struggle for racial justice.

Especially in the South of the U.S. the law did very little to protect blacks. In fact, some laws, called segregation laws, often limited their freedom and discriminated against them. Such laws stated that blacks could not go to the same school with whites, that they had to use separate “colored only” rest rooms and drinking fountains, enter public places such as movie theatres and waiting rooms through separate ent

The movement that King led swept all that away. Its victory was so complete that event through those outrages took place within the living memory of the baby boomers, they seem like ancient history. And though this revolution was the product of two centuries of agitation by thousands upon thousands of courageous men and women, King was its culmination. It is impossible to think of the movement unfolding as it did without him at its helm. He was, as the cliché has it, the right man at the right time.

Wherever the freedom movement reached, King was there to give his people courage and spiritual guidance. Older protest groups like the Urban League and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) gave their support to the freedom movement. They were joined by newly formed groups like CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) and by SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee).

When King and Abernathy returned to Albany for sentencing in July 1962, they initiated more nonviolent protests, and they went to jail two more times. Though King viewed Albany as a failure, he had come that much closer to realizing his dream of nonviolent protest. He and the marchers had nearly filled the jails, even if they had not succeeded in changing local segregation policies. He now realized that he needed to rethink his strategy. The Albany movement had failed for lack of a clear plan and dissension among the organizations involved. King was determined that his next move would combine the philosophy he wanted to practice and the political lessons he had learned in Albany.

During the next few years, he would travel all over the world gathering support for the movement and learning as much as he could about nonviolent protest.

Thus he worked at developing a comprehensive plan for realizing his dreams of effective nonviolent protest.

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