Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Civil Rights Movement

1968 Words4 Pages

Martin Luther King, Jr. lost his life trying to better the lives of African American people who, because of their skin color, didn’t have the same rights as white people in America. King was a man of integrity and passion with a vision of a desegregated society. He played a part in the Civil Rights Movements where he eventually went to jail because of his protesting, and he became involved in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. In the 1950s and 1960s, Blacks came along to fight against the social systems and public authorities that had taken their rights away. The Modern Civil Rights Movement began in the 1950s. In 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks took a seat on a bus in the first several rows for African Americans. Rosa …show more content…

The NAACP is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, organized in 1909 by Moorfield Storey, Mary White Ovington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination” (“NAACP”). In 1955, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat in the middle of the bus so a white man could sit there. Though the city's bus ordinance did give the drivers the authority to assign seats, it didn't specifically give them the authority to demand a passenger to give up a seat to anyone. Because she didn’t give up her seat, and because of her civil disobedience, she was arrested (“Rosa Parks Biography”). Rosa Parks was not the first woman to get arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested, Claudette Colvin, a 15-year old, was the first Montgomery bus passenger to be arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger (Parks was involved in raising defense funds for Colvin). Three other African-American women, Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith and Susie McDonald, also ran afoul of the bus segregation law prior to Rosa Parks. The four were plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case. In 1955, King was asked to serve as spokesman for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was a campaign by the African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama to force integration of the city’s bus lines (“About Dr. King”). Rosa Parks was chosen by King as the face for his campaign because of her good standing with the community, her employment and her marital status. While Rosa was in jail as a victim of Montgomery's racism, King was able to develop an effective response to her arrest that

Open Document