Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a prominent civil rights champion and pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, was arrested in August 1963 for participating in a peaceful march in Birmingham, Alabama to protest segregation and other injustices faced by African-Americans at the time. Segregation was a scheme that was part of the Jim Crow Laws of the southern United States that provided African-Americans with “separate but equal” services that kept them racially separated from whites. Even though the “separate but equal” provision established in the case Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896 was struck down in an overwhelming way (9-0) by the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka of 1954, the southern tier of states hung stubbornly onto the practice. Regarding charges leveled in Birmingham, Dr. King was officially charged with “parading without a permit” but that was not the root of the reason he was charged. In this case, Dr. King was charged to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest. During his incarceration, Dr. King penned a letter to a group of eight white southern religious leaders which was a response to a public statement of concern and caution they issued. Dr. King made the point in the letter that laws are made by men and sometimes those laws are not just or fair to all people, and, when this is the case, the laws must be challenged by nonviolent protest. While Martin Luther King Jr. was a devout believer in obeying the laws of God and man, his opposition to segregation and injustice against Blacks was equally strong.

King tried to relate to his fellow clergymen that every precaution had been taken by the Southern Christian Leader’s Coalition (SCLC) to ensure that all protests would be conducted in a peaceful and nonviolent manner, even noting that the march in Birmingham had already been postponed twice, once because of the elections in March, and the second time when a runoff election was necessary before a new government could be chosen. Dr. King went on to explain to his fellow men of the cloth that in any nonviolent campaign, there were four basic steps; collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action. Initially, injustice must be studied to make sure that it is actively occurring. The next step is to sit down with all the parties involved and try to come up with a mutually agreeable solution to the perceived injustice, and, in the case that this step fails, take steps to move on to self-purification prior to initiating direct action.

In the case of Birmingham, Dr. King believed that a moment had been reached in the history of the African-American community in the United States where Blacks had waited long enough to stand up and demand the basic civil and God-given rights to which they were entitled using the methods of nonviolent resistance. Dr. King explained that the movement for Blacks to achieve basic human rights had been going on for some 350 years and that they had suffered in silence always being told to “wait” for their turn to enjoy the freedoms which others took for granted. Dr. King argued that this "wait has almost always meant never" and that “it has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration”

Dr. King also made the point that his fellow clergymen were correct in their suggestion that dialogue and negotiation were much preferred to direct action. However, he also pointed out the fact that the SCLC had attempted to enter into good faith dialogue with the city fathers of Birmingham before resorting to direct action but political leaders consistently refused their requests. Dr. King had reasoned that because Birmingham was probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States, had an ugly record of police brutality, tolerated unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts, and had more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches than in any other city in this nation, that this would be the most opportune place to hold a protest march. The reactions across the nation to his nonviolent style and rhetoric, in the end, lead to a major victory for the Civil Rights Movement in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Ironically, the tactics which Dr. King abhorred, senseless violence in support of a cause, was what was involved in his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968.

In a ringing contradiction to Dr. King’s nonviolent protests, there exists today a group which claims to be nonviolent but is really a movement that prides itself on provoking violence. This group is known as Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter gets its name and its impetus from the belief that too many African-Americans are the victims of police abuse and shootings. Per the writings of Alec Harrington, “the Black Lives Matter movement is centered around calls for violence against police with chants such as the ones used by those in New York City in 2014 of ‘What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!’” Whereas Dr. King’s movement “prided themselves on dressing up to show respect” (Harrington), protesters involved in Black Lives Matter protests “are dressed as thugs with clothing that shows no respect” and often show up with “no shirts and bandanas over their faces” (Harrington). Additionally, whereas Dr. King’s followers’ ultimate goal was to find solutions to the problems of the African-American community, Black Lives Matter protesters have no interest in working with the police to find solutions to their grievances, preferring to ratchet up the tension by threatening tactics and rhetoric. It must be noted at this juncture, that Black Lives Matter is the total antithesis to what Dr. King was trying to accomplish in the 1960’s and that if Dr. King were still alive, he would be an active protester against Black Lives Matter as much as he was against the Ku Klux Klan. Dr. King would likely try to appeal to the leaders of Black Lives Matter to channel their energies into trying to work with police rather than to provoke confrontation with them.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a visionary when it came to knowing the correct way to carry out informed, nonviolent, peaceful, protests to effect civil rights for the Black community. Standing in stark contrast to his effective methods of protest, is the modern face of so-called nonviolent protests, Black Lives Matter. It is blatantly obvious that Dr. King, if he were alive today, would be using his style of nonviolent intervention to assist Black Lives Matter in understanding that violence only begets violence in political discourse and that peaceful direct action to bring about change is a much more effective way of convincing people to see your way of thinking. Finally, as Harrington noted, “’All Lives Matter’ may not be an organized group or movement, but it is still an important statement of unity” and would not such an organization be a fitting tribute to the father of nonviolent resistance in America, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?



Works Cited

Harrington, Alec. "Do Black Lives Matter to Black Lives Matter?" University Wire, Mar 05, 2017, ProQuest Central, Accessed March 25, 2017.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Atlantic Monthly; August 1963; The Negro Is Your Brother; Volume 212, No. 2; pages 78 – 88.