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The movement Black lives matter based in the history of america and the colonisation in general. The slavery in the US and the triangle trade caused the first problems. Then the avalanche rolled on.
https://www.history.com/.amp/topics/black-history/slavery
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

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The American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships and iron-clad ships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively. The mobilization of civilian factories, mines, shipyards, banks, transportation and food supplies all foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World War I, World War II and subsequent conflicts.

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Triangular trade or triangle trade is trade between three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come. It has been used to offset trade imbalances between different regions.

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Racial segregation is the systematic separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Racial segregation can amount to the international crime of apartheid and a crime against humanity under the Statute of the International Criminal Court. Segregation can involve the spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by people of different races. Specifically, it may be applied to activities such as eating in restaurants, drinking from water fountains, using public toilets, attending schools, going to films, riding buses, renting or purchasing homes or renting hotel rooms.[1] In addition, segregation often allows close contact between members of different racial or ethnic groups in hierarchical situations, such as allowing a person of one race to work as a servant for a member of another race.

Segregation is defined by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance as "the act by which a (natural or legal) person separates other persons on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds without an objective and reasonable justification, in conformity with the proposed definition of discrimination. As a result, the voluntary act of separating oneself from other people on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds does not constitute segregation".[2] According to the UN Forum on Minority Issues, "The creation and development of classes and schools providing education in minority languages should not be considered impermissible segregation if the assignment to such classes and schools is of a voluntary nature."[3]

Racial segregation has generally been outlawed worldwide. In the United States, racial segregation was mandated by law in some states (see Jim Crow laws) and enforced along with anti-miscegenation laws (prohibitions against interracial marriage), until the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down racial segregationist laws throughout the United States.[4][5][6][7][8] However, racial segregation may exist de facto through social norms, even when there is no strong individual preference for it, as suggested by Thomas Schelling's models of segregation and subsequent work.[9] Segregation may be maintained by means ranging from discrimination in hiring and in the rental and sale of housing to certain races to vigilante violence (such as lynchings). Generally, a situation that arises when members of different races mutually prefer to associate and do business with members of their own race would usually be described as separation or de facto separation of the races rather than segregation.

Several laws which enforced racial segregation of foreigners from Chinese were passed by the Han Chinese during the Tang dynasty.[citation needed ] In 779, the Tang dynasty issued an edict which forced Uyghurs to wear their ethnic dress, stopped them from marrying Chinese females, and banned them from pretending to be Chinese.[11] In 836, when Lu Chun was appointed as governor of Canton, he was disgusted to find Chinese living with foreigners and intermarriage between Chinese and foreigners. Lu enforced separation, banning interracial marriages, and made it illegal for foreigners to own property. Lu Chun believed his principles were just and upright.[11] The 836 law specifically banned Chinese from forming relationships with "Dark peoples" or "People of colour", which was used to describe foreigners, such as " Iranians, Sogdians, Arabs, Indians, Malays, Sumatrans", among others.[12][13]

The Qing dynasty was founded not by Han Chinese, who form the majority of the Chinese population, but by Manchus, who are today an ethnic minority of China. The Manchus were keenly aware of their minority status, however, it was only later in the dynasty that they banned intermarriage.

Han defectors played a massive role in the Qing conquest of China. Han Chinese Generals of the Ming Dynasty who defected to the Manchu were often given women from the Imperial Aisin Gioro family in marriage while the ordinary soldiers who defected were given non-royal Manchu women as wives. The Manchu leader Nurhaci married one of his granddaughters to the Ming General Li Yongfang after he surrendered Fushun in Liaoning to the Manchu in 1618.[14][15] Jurchen (Manchu) women married most of the Han Chinese defectors in Liaodong.[16] Aisin Gioro women were married to the sons of the Han Chinese Generals Sun Sike (Sun Ssu-k'o), Geng Jimao (Keng Chi-mao), Shang Kexi (Shang K'o-hsi), and Wu Sangui (Wu San-kuei).[17]

A mass marriage of Han Chinese officers and officials to Manchu women numbering 1,000 couples was arranged by Prince Yoto and Hongtaiji in 1632 to promote harmony between the two ethnic groups.[14]

The Qing differentiated between Han Bannermen and ordinary Han civilians. Han Bannermen were made out of Han Chinese who defected to the Qing up to 1644 and joined the Eight Banners, giving them social and legal privileges in addition to being acculturated to Manchu culture. So many Han defected to the Qing and swelled the ranks of the Eight Banners that ethnic Manchus became a minority within the Banners, making up only 16% in 1648, with Han Bannermen dominating at 75%.[19][20][21] It was this multi-ethnic force in which Manchus were only a minority, which conquered China for the Qing.[22]

It was Han Chinese Bannermen who were responsible for the successful Qing conquest of China, they made up the majority of governors in the early Qing and were the ones who governed and administered China after the conquest, stabilizing Qing rule.[23] Han Bannermen dominated the post of governor-general in the time of the Shunzhi and Kangxi Emperors, and also the post of governors, largely excluding ordinary Han civilians from the posts.[24]

To promote ethnic harmony, a 1648 decree from the Manchu Shunzhi Emperor allowed Han Chinese civilian men to marry Manchu women from the Banners with the permission of the Board of Revenue if they were registered daughters of officials or commoners or the permission of their banner company captain if they were unregistered commoners, it was only later in the dynasty that these policies allowing intermarriage were done away with.[25][26]

The Qing implemented a policy of segregation between the Bannermen of the Eight Banners (Manchu Bannermen, Mongol Bannermen, Han Bannermen) and Han Chinese civilians[when? ]. This ethnic segregation had cultural and economic reasons: intermarriage was forbidden to keep up the Manchu heritage and minimize sinicization. Han Chinese civilians and Mongol civilians were banned from settling in Manchuria.[27] Han civilians and Mongol civilians were banned from crossing into each other's lands. Ordinary Mongol civilians in Inner Mongolia were banned from even crossing into other Mongol Banners. (A banner in Inner Mongolia was an administrative division and not related to the Mongol Bannermen in the Eight Banners)

These restrictions did not apply Han Bannermen, who were settled in Manchuria by the Qing. Han bannermen were differentiated from Han civilians by the Qing and treated differently.

The Qing Dynasty started colonizing Manchuria with Han Chinese later on in the dynasty's rule, but the Manchu area was still separated from modern-day Inner Mongolia by the Outer Willow Palisade, which kept the Manchu and the Mongols in the area separate.

The policy of segregation applied directly to the banner garrisons, most of which occupied a separate walled zone within the cities in which they were stationed. Manchu Bannermen, Han Bannermen, and Mongol Bannermen were separated from the Han civilian population. While the Manchus followed the governmental structure of the preceding Ming dynasty, their ethnic policy dictated that appointments were split between Manchu noblemen and Han Chinese civilian officials who had passed the highest levels of the state examinations, and because of the small number of Manchus, this insured that a large fraction of them would be government officials.

Though there were no specific laws imposing racial segregation and barring Black people from establishments frequented by Whites, de facto segregation operated in most areas. For example, initially, the city centres were reserved to the White population only, while the Black population was organised in cités indigènes (indigenous neighbourhoods called 'le belge'). Hospitals, department stores, and other facilities were often reserved for either Whites or Blacks.

The Black population in the cities could not leave their houses from 21:00 to 04:00. This type of segregation began to disappear gradually only in the 1950s, but even then the Congolese remained or felt treated in many respects as second-rate citizens (for instance in political and legal terms).

From 1952, and even more so after the triumphant visit of King Baudouin to the colony in 1955, Governor-General Léon Pétillon (1952-1958) worked to create a "Belgian-Congolese community", in which Black and White people were to be treated as equals.[28] Regardless, anti-miscegenation laws remained in place, and between 1959 and 1962 thousands of mixed-race Congolese children were forcibly deported from the Congo by the Belgian government and the Catholic Church and taken to Belgium.[29]

Following its conquest of Ottoman controlled Algeria in 1830, for well over a century, France maintained colonial rule in the territory which has been described as "quasi- apartheid".[30] The colonial law of 1865 allowed Arab and Berber Algerians to apply for French citizenship only if they abandoned their Muslim identity; Azzedine Haddour argues that this established "the formal structures of a political apartheid".[31] Camille Bonora-Waisman writes that "in contrast with the Moroccan and Tunisian protectorates", this "colonial apartheid society" was unique to Algeria.[32]

This "internal system of apartheid" met with considerable resistance from the Muslims affected by it, and is cited as one of the causes of the 1954 insurrection and ensuing independence war.[33]

One highly publicised legal battle occurred in 1960 involving the opening of a new theatre that was to be open to all races; the proposed unsegregated public toilets at the newly built Reps Theatre in 1959 caused an argument called "The Battle of the Toilets".

Jews in Europe were generally forced, by decree or by informal pressure, to live in highly segregated ghettos and shtetls.[35] In 1204, the papacy required Jews to segregate themselves from Christians and it also required them to wear distinctive clothing.[36] Forced segregation of Jews spread throughout Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries.[37] In the Russian Empire, Jews were restricted to the so-called Pale of Settlement, the Western frontier of the Russian Empire which roughly corresponds to the modern-day countries of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine.[38] By the early 20th century, the majority of Europe's Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement.

From the beginning of the 15th century, Jewish populations in Morocco were confined to mellahs. In cities, a mellah was surrounded by a wall with a fortified gateway. In contrast, rural mellahs were separate villages whose sole inhabitants were Jews.[39]

In the middle of the 19th century, J. J. Benjamin wrote about the lives of Persian Jews:

...they are obliged to live in a separate part of town...; for they are considered as unclean creatures... Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity, and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mobs with stones and dirt... For the same reason, they are prohibited to go out when it rains; for it is said the rain would wash dirt off them, which would sully the feet of the Mussulmans... If a Jew is recognized as such in the streets, he is subjected to the greatest insults. The passers-by spit in his face, and sometimes beat him... unmercifully... If a Jew enters a shop for anything, he is forbidden to inspect the goods... Should his hand incautiously touch the goods, he must take them at any price the seller chooses to ask for them... Sometimes the Persians intrude into the dwellings of the Jews and take possession of whatever please them. Should the owner make the least opposition in defense of his property, he incurs the danger of atoning for it with his life... If... a Jew shows himself in the street during the three days of the Katel (Muharram)..., he is sure to be murdered.[40]

On 16 May 1940 in Norway, the Administrasjonsrådet asked the Rikskommisariatet why radio receivers had been confiscated from Jews in Norway.[41] That Administrasjonsrådet thereafter "quietly" accepted[41] racial segregation between Norwegian citizens, has been claimed by Tor Bomann-Larsen. Furthermore, he claimed that this segregation "created a precedent. 2 years later (with NS-styret in the ministries of Norway) Norwegian police arrested citizens at the addresses where radios had previously been confiscated from Jews.[41]

In 1938, under pressure from the Nazis, the fascist regime, which was led by Benito Mussolini, passed a series of racial laws which instituted an official segregationist policy in the Italian Empire, this policy was especially directed against Italian Jews. This policy enforced various segregationist norms, like the laws which banned Jews from teaching or studying in ordinary schools and universities, banned Jews from owning industries that were reputed to be very important to the nation, banned Jews from working as journalists, banned Jews from joining the military, and banned Jews from marrying non-Jews. As an immediate consequence of the introduction of the 'provvedimenti per la difesa della razza' (norms for the defence of the race), many of the best Italian scientists quit their jobs, and some of them also left Italy. Amongst these scientists were the internationally-known physicists Emilio Segrè, Enrico Fermi (whose wife was Jewish), Bruno Pontecorvo, Bruno Rossi, Tullio Levi-Civita, mathematicians Federigo Enriques and Guido Fubini and even the fascist propaganda director, art critic and journalist Margherita Sarfatti, who was one of Mussolini's mistresses. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who would successively win the Nobel Prize for Medicine, was forbidden to work at the university. Upon the passage of the racial law, Albert Einstein cancelled his honorary membership in the Accademia dei Lincei.

After 1943, when Northern Italy was occupied by the Nazis, Italian Jews were rounded up and became victims of the Holocaust.

German praise for America's system of institutional racism, which was expressed in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s.[42] The U.S. was the global leader of codified racism, and its race laws fascinated the Germans.[42] The National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934-35, edited by Hitler's lawyer Hans Frank, contains a pivotal essay by Herbert Kier on the recommendations for race legislation which devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation-from segregation, race based citizenship, immigration regulations, and anti-miscegenation.[42] This directly inspired the two principal Nuremberg Laws-the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law.[42] The ban on interracial marriage (anti-miscegenation) prohibited sexual relations and marriages between people classified as " Aryan" and "non-Aryan". Such relationships were called Rassenschande (race defilement). At first the laws were aimed primarily at Jews but were later extended to " Gypsies, Negroes".[43][44][45] Aryans found guilty could face incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp, while non-Aryans could face the death penalty.[46] To preserve the so-called purity of the German blood, after the war began, the Nazis extended the race defilement law to include all foreigners (non-Germans).[47]

Under the General Government of occupied Poland in 1940, the Nazis divided the population into different groups, each with different rights, food rations, allowed housing strips in the cities, public transportation, etc. In an effort to split the Polish people's identity, they attempted to establish ethnic divisions of Kashubians and Gorals ( Goralenvolk), based on these groups' alleged "Germanic component".

During the 1930s and 1940s, Jews in Nazi-controlled states were forced to wear something that identified them as Jewish, such as a yellow ribbon or a star of David, and along with Romas (Gypsies), they were subjected to discrimination by the racial laws. Jewish doctors were not allowed to treat Aryan patients and Jewish professors were not permitted to teach Aryan pupils. In addition, Jews were not allowed to use any form of public transportation, besides the ferry, and they were only allowed to shop in Jewish stores from 3-5 pm. After Kristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass"), the Jews were fined 1,000,000,000 ℛℳ for the damage which was done by Nazi troops and SS members.

Jews, Poles, and Roma were subjected to genocide as "undesirable" racial groups in The Holocaust. The Nazis established ghettos in order to confine Jews and sometimes, they confined Romas in tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe, turning them into de facto concentration camps. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of these ghettos, with 400,000 people. The Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000.[48]

Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for forced labour (in all, about 12 million forced laborers were employed in the German war economy inside Nazi Germany).[49][50] Although Nazi Germany also used forced laborers from Western Europe, Poles, along with other Eastern Europeans viewed as racially inferior,[51] were subject to deeper discriminatory measures. They were forced to wear a yellow with purple border and letter " P" (for Polen/Polish) cloth identifying tag sewn to their clothing, subjected to a curfew, and banned from public transportation.

While the treatment of factory workers or farm hands often varied depending on the individual employer, Polish laborers, as a rule, were compelled to work longer hours for lower wages than Western Europeans - in many cities, they were forced to live in segregated barracks behind barbed wire. Social relations with Germans outside work were forbidden, and sexual relations (Rassenschande or "racial defilement") were punishable by death.[52]

Racial segregation was widespread and deeply imbedded into the fabric of Canadian society prior to the Canadian constitution of 1982. Multiple court decisions, including one from the Supreme Court of Canada in 1939, upheld racial segregation as valid. The last black specifically segregated school closed in Ontario in 1965, while the last black specifically segregated school closed in Nova Scotia in 1983. The last racially segregated Indigenous school closed in 1996 in Saskatchewan. Canada has had multiple white only neighbourhoods and cities, white only public spaces, stores, universities, hospitals, employment, restaurants, theatres, sports arenas and universities. Though the coloured population of Canada was significantly less than the coloured population in the United States, severe restrictions on coloured people existed in all forms, particularly in immigration, employment access and mobility. Unlike in the United States, racial segregation in Canada applied to all non-whites and was historically enforced through laws, court decisions and social norms with a closed immigration system that barred virtually all non-whites from immigrating until 1962. Section 38 of the 1910 Immigration Act permitted the government to prohibit the entry of immigrants "belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada, or of immigrants of any specified class, occupation or character."[53]

In 1944, Ontario enacted the Racial Discrimination Act, which prohibited the publication or display, of any notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation on lands, premises, by newspaper or radio, that indicated racial discrimination. Ontario was the first province to do so, but the act was unenforceable due to the courts stating that this breached federal jurisdiction and that Ontario couldn't mandate laws based on race.

Historical examples:

Until 1870, Black people could not take an oath to gain the status of free men in New Brunswick. They were prohibited from practicing a trade or selling goods in the city of St John's, barred from fishing at Saint John Harbour, and could not live within the city limits unless they were employed as a servant or labourer.[53]

Black Canadians were racially segregated in primary schools by the mid-19th century. Ontario and Nova Scotia set up legally segregated schools to keep Black students separate from white students. Black students had to attend different schools or attend at different times. In some other provinces, white families enforced an informal segregation by blocking Black students from attending school. Activists from the Black community fought against segregation in schools. The last segregated school in Ontario closed its doors in 1965; the last one in Nova Scotia closed in 1983.[53]

Canadian universities, particularly medical schools, often rejected applications on the basis of race. This was notably the case of Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto, McGill University and Queen's University. Admitted coloured students and jews faced restrictions that white, christian students did not have. Only a few hospitals accepted coloured medical interns.[53]

There are many examples of land titles with restrictive covenant clauses used to prevent the sale or rental of property to non-whites. For example, a clause in Vancouver real estate deeds for entire neighbourhoods going back to at least 1928 and included as late as 1965 stated, "That the Grantee or his heirs, administrators, executor, successors or assigns will not sell to, agree to sell to, rent to, lease to, or permit or allow to occupy, the said lands and premises, or any part thereof, any person of the Chinese, Japanese or other Asiatic race or to any Indian or Negro." In the 1920s, city officials in Calgary, Alberta also codified restrictive covenants to prevent non-whites from purchasing homes outside of the boundaries of the railway yards. In Sarnia, Ontario, a 1946 property deed for a Lake Huron community of approximately 100 cottage lots specified that property could only be owned by whites of a particular background and could not be "transferred by sale, inheritance, gift, or otherwise, nor rented, licensed to or occupied by any person wholly or partly of negro, Asiatic, coloured, or Semetic [sic] blood..." These clauses were all upheld by court decisions, until the Canadian constitution came into effect.[53]

Racial segregation practices have also extended to many areas of employment in Canada. Black men and women in Quebec were historically relegated to the service sector - barbers, waiters, janitors, sleeping car porters, general labourers, domestic servants, waitresses, laundresses - regardless of their educational attainment. White business owners and even provincial and federal government agencies did not hire or promote Black people, with explicit rules preventing their employment

When the labour movement took hold in Canada near the end of the 19th century, workers began organizing and forming trade unions with the aim of improving the working conditions and quality of life for employees. However, Black workers were systematically denied membership to these unions, and worker's protection was reserved exclusively for whites.[53]

In Windsor, Ontario, the Palace Theatre maintained a "Crow's nest" for Black customers, in reference to Jim Crow segregation laws and practices.

In Montreal, the Loew's Windsor Theatre publicly announced that Black customers would have segregated seating in what they called a "Monkey cage," the upper balcony of the opera house.

Edmonton's city council passed an ordinance that barred Blacks from swimming in city pools after an outcry from the white public and the Edmonton Exhibition Association which opposed mixed bathing.

Skating rinks were also places of racial segregation, with non-white skating hours in multiple cities across the country. Harry Gairey Jr. and his white friend Donny Jubas went skating at an indoor ice rink in Toronto, but they were told that Harry could not get a ticket because they weren't allowed to sell tickets to coloured people.

The Prince Edward Hotel in Windsor, Ontario denied African American civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune a room in 1954 when she and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt were invited speakers at Emancipation Day in the city. Roosevelt was offered a room, but Bethune was denied due to her skin colour. In the end they both opted to lodge in Detroit, Michigan for the night instead.

Specific court cases:

Edmonton, Alberta: Lulu Anderson, a black woman, was denied admission to the Metropolitan Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta because of her skin colour. In November 1922, Anderson sued the theatre for refusing to sell her a ticket to watch a movie, but the provincial courts ruled in favour of the theatre owners.

Montreal, Quebec: On 11 July 1936, Fred Christie and another Black acquaintance Emile King, were refused service at the York Tavern in the Forum in Montreal after watching a boxing match. Christie sued for $200 and won in provincial court. Christie was awarded $25 and the tavern was ordered to pay his court costs. However, the tavern owners successfully appealed. Determined, Christie took his case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1939. They dismissed his case, arguing that private businesses were able discriminate based on race on their choosing. Few taverns in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and British Columbia allowed Black visitors, and those that did had designated tables or side rooms for Non-Whites.[53]

New Glasgow, Nova Scotia: In 1946, Viola Desmond, a black woman, challenged racial discrimination when she refused to leave the segregated Whites-only section of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Viola Desmond was arrested, jailed overnight and convicted without legal representation for an obscure tax offence as a result. Despite the efforts of the Nova Scotian Black community to assist her appeal, Viola Desmond was unable to remove the charges against her and went unpardoned in her lifetime.[53]

Indigenous peoples of Canada were treated in racially segregated hospitals called Indian hospitals or segregated wards in regular hospitals. Medical experimentation also occurred at these hospitals, frequently without consent, such as the testing of BCG vaccine on infants.[53] Treatment at other hospitals provided a better quality of care for patients as:

Hundreds of new hospitals offered settler communities modern health care, and created tremendous opportunities for nurses and doctors. Indian Health Services had difficulty finding medical professionals willing to work for low civil service wages in its overcrowded and poorly equipped Indian hospitals. In several communities, the Indian and local hospitals were literally side by side. Indian hospitals reflected and constructed racial inequality by making it seemingly natural that modernized hospitals would be "white" hospitals, and that Indigenous people were somehow less worthy of care. Under the expanded postwar Indian hospital system, the cost of care continued to be half that of surrounding community hospitals' rates, with dire consequences for Indigenous patients.[53]

In fifteenth-century north-east Germany, people of Wendish, i.e. Slavic, origin were not allowed to join some guilds.[54] According to Wilhelm Raabe, "down into the eighteenth century no German guild accepted a Wend."[55]

The apartheid system carried out by Afrikaner minority rule enacted a nationwide social policy "separate development" with the National Party victory in the 1948 general election, following the "colour bar"-discriminatory legislation dating back to the beginning of the Union of South Africa and the Boer republics before which, while repressive to Black South Africans along with other minorities, had not gone nearly so far.

Apartheid laws can be generally divided into following acts. Firstly, the Population Registration Act in 1950 classified residents in South Africa into four racial groups: "black", "white", " Coloured", and "Indian" and noted their racial identities on their identifications. Secondly, the Group Areas Act in 1950 assigned different regions according to different races. People were forced to live in their corresponding regions and the action of passing the boundaries without a permit was made illegal, extending pass laws that had already curtailed black movement. Thirdly, under the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act in 1953, amenities in public areas, like hospitals, universities and parks, were labeled separately according to particular races. In addition, the Bantu Education Act in 1953 segregated national education in South Africa as well. Additionally, the government of the time enforced the pass laws, which deprived Black South Africans of their right to travel freely within their own country. Under this system Black South Africans were severely restricted from urban areas, requiring authorisation from a white employer to enter.

Uprisings and protests against apartheid appeared immediately when apartheid arose. As early as 1949, the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANC) advocated the ending of apartheid and suggested fighting against racial segregation by various methods. During the following decades, hundreds of anti-apartheid actions occurred, including those of the Black Consciousness Movement, students' protests, labor strikes, and church group activism etc. In 1991, the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act was passed, repealing laws enforcing racial segregation, including the Group Areas Act.[56] In 1994, Nelson Mandela won in the first multiracial democratic election in South Africa. His success fulfilled the ending of apartheid in South African history.

After the passage of Jim Crow laws which segregated African Americans and Whites, the people who were negatively affected by those laws saw no progress in their quest for equality.[57] Racial segregation was not a new phenomenon, as illustrated by the fact that almost four million Blacks had been enslaved before the Civil War.[58][59] The laws which were passed segregated African Americans from Whites in order to enforce a system of white supremacy. Signs were used to show non Whites where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat.[59] For those places that were racially mixed, Blacks had to wait until all White customers were dealt with.[59] Rules were also enforced that restricted African Americans from entering white stores.[59] Segregated facilities extended from white only schools to white-only graveyards.[60]

After the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in America, racial discrimination became regulated by the so-called Jim Crow laws, which mandated strict segregation of the races. Though many of these laws were passed shortly after the Civil War ended, they only became formalized after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. The period that followed the Reconstruction era is known as the nadir of American race relations. The legislation (or in some states, such as Florida, the state constitutions) that mandated segregation lasted at least until a 1968 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed all forms of segregation.

While the U.S. Supreme Court majority in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case explicitly permitted " separate but equal" facilities (specifically, transportation facilities), Justice John Marshall Harlan, in his dissent, protested that the decision was an expression of white supremacy; he predicted that segregation would "stimulate aggressions ... upon the admitted rights of colored citizens", "arouse race hate", and "perpetuate a feeling of distrust between [the] races. Feelings between Whites and Blacks were so tense, even the jails were segregated."[61]

Elected in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson tolerated the extension of segregation throughout the federal government that was already underway.[62] In World War I, Blacks were drafted and served in the United States Army in segregated units. Black combat soldiers were often poorly trained and equipped, and new draftees were put on the front lines in dangerous missions.[63] The U.S. military was still heavily segregated in World War II. The air force and the marines had no Blacks enlisted in their ranks. There were Blacks in the Navy Seabees. The army had only five African-American officers.[64] In addition, no African-American would receive the Medal of Honor during the war, and their tasks in the war were largely reserved to noncombat units. Black soldiers had to sometimes give up their seats in trains to the Nazi prisoners of war.[64]

A club which was central to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City was a whites-only establishment, where Blacks (such as Duke Ellington) were allowed to perform, but they were only allowed to perform in front of a white audience.[65] In the reception to honor his success at the 1936 Summer Olympics, Jesse Owens was not permitted to enter through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria New York and instead forced to travel up to the event in a freight elevator.[66] The first black Academy Award recipient Hattie McDaniel was not permitted to attend the premiere of Gone with the Wind at Loew's Grand Theatre, Atlanta, because of Georgia's segregation laws, and at the 12th Academy Awards ceremony at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles she was required to sit at a segregated table at the far wall of the room; the hotel had a no-blacks policy, but allowed McDaniel in as a favor.[67] Her final wish to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery was denied because the graveyard was restricted to Whites only.[67]

On 11 September 1964, John Lennon announced the Beatles would not play to a segregated audience in Jacksonville, Florida.[68] City officials relented following this announcement.[68] A contract for a 1965 Beatles concert at the Cow Palace in California specifies that the band "not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience".[68]

American sports were racially segregated until the mid-twentieth century. In baseball, the " Negro leagues" were established by Rube Foster for non-white players, such as Negro league baseball, which ran through the early 1950s.[69] In basketball, the Black Fives (all-black teams) were established in 1904, and emerged in New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and other cities. Racial segregation in basketball lasted until 1950 when the NBA became racially integrated.[70]

Many U.S. states banned interracial marriage. While opposed to slavery in the U.S., in a speech in Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race".[71] In 1967, Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other.[72] Their marriage violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as white and people classified as " colored" (persons of non-white ancestry).[73]

In the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967, the Supreme Court invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the U.S.[74]

Institutionalized racial segregation was ended as an official practice during the civil rights movement by the efforts of such civil rights activists as Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer working for social and political freedom during the period from the end of World War II through the Interstate Commerce Commission desegregation order of 1961, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Many of their efforts were acts of non-violent civil disobedience aimed at disrupting the enforcement of racial segregation rules and laws, such as refusing to give up a seat in the black part of the bus to a white person (Rosa Parks), or holding sit-ins at all-white diners.

By 1968, all forms of segregation had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, and by 1970 support for formal legal segregation had dissolved.[75][76] The Warren Court's decision on landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954 outlawed segregation in public schools, and its decision on Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States in 1964 prohibits racial segregation and discrimination in public institutions and public accommodations.[77][78][79] The Fair Housing Act of 1968, administered and enforced by the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, prohibited discrimination in the sale and rental of housing on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. Formal racial discrimination became illegal in school systems, businesses, the American military, other civil services and the government. However, implicit racism continues to this day through avenues like occupational segregation.[80] In recent years, there has been a trend that reverses those efforts to desegregate schools made by those mandatory school desegregation orders.[81]

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Racial segregation is the systematic separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Racial segregation can amount to the international crime of apartheid and a crime against humanity under the Statute of the International Criminal Court.

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Parks' arrest and bus boycott

The seat layout on the bus where Parks sat, December 1, 1955

Montgomery buses: law and prevailing customs

In 1900, Montgomery had passed a city ordinance to segregate bus passengers by race. Conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. According to the law, no passenger would be required to move or give up their seat and stand if the bus was crowded and no other seats were available. Over time and by custom, however, Montgomery bus drivers adopted the practice of requiring black riders to move when there were no white-only seats left.[32]

The first four rows of seats on each Montgomery bus were reserved for whites. Buses had "colored" sections for black people generally in the rear of the bus, although blacks composed more than 75% of the ridership. The sections were not fixed but were determined by placement of a movable sign. Black people could sit in the middle rows until the white section filled. If more whites needed seats, blacks were to move to seats in the rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus.[33]

Black people could not sit across the aisle in the same row as white people. The driver could move the "colored" section sign, or remove it altogether. If white people were already sitting in the front, black people had to board at the front to pay the fare, then disembark and reenter through the rear door.[33]

For years, the black community had complained that the situation was unfair. Parks said, "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest. I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."[16]

One day in 1943, Parks boarded a bus and paid the fare. She then moved to a seat, but driver James F. Blake told her to follow city rules and enter the bus again from the back door. When Parks exited the vehicle, Blake drove off without her.[34] Parks waited for the next bus, determined never to ride with Blake again.[35]

Refusal to move

After working all day, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus, a General Motors Old Look bus belonging to the Montgomery City Lines,[38] around 6 pm, Thursday, December 1, 1955, in downtown Montgomery. She paid her fare and sat in an empty seat in the first row of back seats reserved for blacks in the "colored" section. Near the middle of the bus, her row was directly behind the ten seats reserved for white passengers.[39]

Initially, she did not notice that the bus driver was the same man, James F. Blake, who had left her in the rain in 1943. As the bus traveled along its regular route, all of the white-only seats in the bus filled up. The bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, and several white passengers boarded. Blake noted that two or three white passengers were standing, as the front of the bus had filled to capacity.[39]

The bus driver moved the "colored" section sign behind Parks and demanded that four black people give up their seats in the middle section so that the white passengers could sit. Years later, in recalling the events of the day, Parks said, "When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night."[39]

By Parks's account, Blake said, "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats."[40] Three of them complied. Parks said, "The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn't move at the beginning, but he says, 'Let me have these seats.' And the other three people moved, but I didn't."[41] The black man sitting next to her gave up his seat.[42]

Parks moved, but toward the window seat; she did not get up to move to the redesignated colored section.[42] Parks later said about being asked to move to the rear of the bus, "I thought of Emmett Till-a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store, whose killers were tried and acquitted-and I just couldn't go back."[43]

Blake said, "Why don't you stand up?" Parks responded, "I don't think I should have to stand up." Blake called the police to arrest Parks. When recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television series on the Civil Rights Movement, Parks said, "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.'"[44]

During a 1956 radio interview with Sydney Rogers in West Oakland several months after her arrest, Parks said she had decided, "I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen."[45]

In her autobiography, My Story, she said:

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.[46]

When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her. As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you push us around?" She remembered him saying, "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest."[47] She later said, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind. ... "[41]

Parks was charged with a violation of Chapter 6, Section 11, segregation law of the Montgomery City code,[48] although technically she had not taken a white-only seat; she had been in a colored section.[49] Edgar Nixon, president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and leader of the Pullman Porters Union, and her friend Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail that evening.[50][51]

Parks did not originate the idea of protesting segregation with a bus sit-in. Those preceding her included Bayard Rustin in 1942,[52] Irene Morgan in 1946, Lillie Mae Bradford in 1951,[53] Sarah Louise Keys in 1952,[54] and the members of the ultimately successful Browder v. Gayle 1956 lawsuit ( Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith) who were arrested in Montgomery for not giving up their bus seats months before Parks.[55]

Montgomery bus boycott

Nixon conferred with Jo Ann Robinson, an Alabama State College professor and member of the Women's Political Council (WPC), about the Parks case. Robinson believed it important to seize the opportunity and stayed up all night mimeographing over 35,000 handbills announcing a bus boycott. The Women's Political Council was the first group to officially endorse the boycott.

On Sunday, December 4, 1955, plans for the Montgomery bus boycott were announced at black churches in the area, and a front-page article in the Montgomery Advertiser helped spread the word. At a church rally that night, those attending agreed unanimously to continue the boycott until they were treated with the level of courtesy they expected, until black drivers were hired, and until seating in the middle of the bus was handled on a first-come basis.

The next day, Parks was tried on charges of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. The trial lasted 30 minutes. After being found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs (combined total equivalent to $159 in 2023),[41] Parks appealed her conviction and formally challenged the legality of racial segregation. In a 1992 interview with National Public Radio's Lynn Neary, Parks recalled:

I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time ... there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner.[56] I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.[57]

On the day of Parks's trial-December 5, 1955-the WPC distributed the 35,000 leaflets. The handbill read,

We are ... asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial ... You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.[58]

It rained that day, but the black community persevered in their boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in black-operated cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents (equivalent to $1.14 in 2023). Most of the remainder of the 40,000 black commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles (30 km).

That evening after the success of the one-day boycott, a group of 16 to 18 people gathered at the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to discuss boycott strategies. At that time, Parks was introduced but not asked to speak, despite a standing ovation and calls from the crowd for her to speak; when she asked if she should say something, the reply was, "Why, you've said enough."[59] This movement also sparked riots leading up to the 1956 Sugar Bowl.[60]

The group agreed that a new organization was needed to lead the boycott effort if it were to continue. Rev. Ralph Abernathy suggested the name " Montgomery Improvement Association" (MIA).[61]: 432  The name was adopted, and the MIA was formed. Its members elected as their president Martin Luther King Jr., a relative newcomer to Montgomery, who was a young and mostly unknown minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.[62]

That Monday night, 50 leaders of the African-American community gathered to discuss actions to respond to Parks's arrest. Edgar Nixon, the president of the NAACP, said, "My God, look what segregation has put in my hands!"[63] Parks was considered the ideal plaintiff for a test case against city and state segregation laws, as she was seen as a responsible, mature woman with a good reputation. She was securely married and employed, was regarded as possessing a quiet and dignified demeanor, and was politically savvy. King said that Parks was regarded as "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery-not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery".[16]

Parks's court case was being slowed down in appeals through the Alabama courts on their way to a Federal appeal and the process could have taken years.[64] Holding together a boycott for that length of time would have been a great strain. In the end, black residents of Montgomery continued the boycott for 381 days. Dozens of public buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit company's finances, until the city repealed its law requiring segregation on public buses following the US Supreme Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that it was unconstitutional. Parks was not included as a plaintiff in the Browder decision because the attorney Fred Gray concluded the courts would perceive they were attempting to circumvent her prosecution on her charges working their way through the Alabama state court system.[65]

Parks played an important part in raising international awareness of the plight of African Americans and the civil rights struggle. King wrote in his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom that Parks's arrest was the catalyst rather than the cause of the protest: "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."[61]: 437  He wrote, "Actually, no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.'"[61]: 424

1960s

Parks on one of Montgomery's buses on December 21, 1956, the day they became legally integrated. Behind her is a UPI reporter.

After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement but suffered hardships as a result. Due to economic sanctions used against activists, she lost her job at the department store. Her husband lost his job as a barber at Maxwell Air Force Base[66] after his boss forbade him to talk about his wife or the legal case.[67] Parks traveled and spoke about the issues.

In 1957, Raymond and Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Hampton, Virginia; mostly because she was unable to find work. She also disagreed with King and other leaders of Montgomery's struggling civil rights movement about how to proceed, and was constantly receiving death threats.[15] In Hampton, she found a job as a hostess in an inn at Hampton Institute, a historically Black college.

Later that year, at the urging of her brother and sister-in-law in Detroit, Sylvester and Daisy McCauley, Rosa and Raymond Parks and her mother moved north to join them. The City of Detroit attempted to cultivate a progressive reputation, but Parks encountered numerous signs of discrimination against African-Americans. Schools were effectively segregated, and services in Black neighborhoods substandard. In 1964, Parks told an interviewer that, "I don't feel a great deal of difference here ... Housing segregation is just as bad, and it seems more noticeable in the larger cities." She regularly participated in the movement for open and fair housing.[68]

Parks rendered crucial assistance in the first campaign for Congress by John Conyers. She persuaded Martin Luther King, who was generally reluctant to endorse local candidates, to appear with Conyers, thereby boosting the novice candidate's profile.[68] When Conyers was elected, he hired her as a secretary and receptionist for his congressional office in Detroit. She held this position until she retired in 1988.[16] In a telephone interview with CNN on October 24, 2005, Conyers recalled, "You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene-just a very special person ... There was only one Rosa Parks."[69] Doing much of the daily constituent work for Conyers, Parks often focused on socio-economic issues including welfare, education, job discrimination, and affordable housing. She visited schools, hospitals, senior citizen facilities, and other community meetings and kept Conyers grounded in community concerns and activism.[68]

Parks participated in activism nationally during the mid-1960s, traveling to support the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches, the Freedom Now Party,[15] and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. She also befriended Malcolm X, who she regarded as a personal hero.[70]

Like many Detroit Blacks, Parks remained particularly concerned about housing issues. She herself lived in a neighborhood, Virginia Park, which had been compromised by highway construction and urban renewal. By 1962, these policies had destroyed 10,000 structures in Detroit, displacing 43,096 people, 70 percent of them African-American. Parks lived just a mile from the center of the riot that took place in Detroit in 1967, and she considered housing discrimination a major factor that provoked the disorder.[68]

In the aftermath Parks collaborated with members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Republic of New Afrika in raising awareness of police abuse during the conflict. She served on a "people's tribunal" on August 30, 1967, investigating the killing of three young men by police during the 1967 Detroit uprising, in what came to be known as the Algiers Motel incident.[71] She also helped form the Virginia Park district council to help rebuild the area. The council facilitated the building of the only Black-owned shopping center in the country.[68] Parks took part in the Black power movement, attending the Philadelphia Black Power conference, and the Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. She also supported and visited the Black Panther school in Oakland.[72][73][74]

1970s

Parks c. 1978

In the 1970s, Parks organized for the freedom of political prisoners in the United States, particularly cases involving issues of self-defense. She helped found the Detroit chapter of the Joanne Little Defense Committee, and also worked in support of the Wilmington 10, the RNA 11, and Gary Tyler.[75][76] When Angela Davis was acquitted, Parks introduced her to an audience of 12,000 as a "dear sister who has suffered so much persecution".[77] Following national outcry around her case, Little succeeded in her defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault and was acquitted.[67] Tyler was finally released in April 2016 after 41 years in prison.[78]

The 1970s were a decade of loss for Parks in her personal life. Her family was plagued with illness; she and her husband had suffered stomach ulcers for years and both required hospitalization. In spite of her fame and constant speaking engagements, Parks was not a wealthy woman. She donated most of the money from speaking to civil rights causes, and lived on her staff salary and her husband's pension. Medical bills and time missed from work caused financial strain that required her to accept assistance from church groups and admirers.

Her husband died of throat cancer on August 19, 1977, and her brother, her only sibling, died of cancer that November. Her personal ordeals caused her to become removed from the civil rights movement. She learned from a newspaper of the death of Fannie Lou Hamer, once a close friend. Parks suffered two broken bones in a fall on an icy sidewalk, an injury which caused considerable and recurring pain. She decided to move with her mother into an apartment for senior citizens. There she nursed her mother Leona through the final stages of cancer and geriatric dementia until she died in 1979 at the age of 92.

1980s

In 1980, Parks-widowed and without immediate family-rededicated herself to civil rights and educational organizations. She co-founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation for college-bound high school seniors,[79][80] to which she donated most of her speaker fees. In February 1987, she co-founded, with Elaine Eason Steele, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, an institute that runs the "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours which introduce young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country. Parks also served on the Board of Advocates of Planned Parenthood.[81][82][83]

Though her health declined as she entered her seventies, Parks continued to make many appearances and devoted considerable energy to these causes. Unrelated to her activism, Parks loaned quilts of her own making to an exhibit at Michigan State University of quilts by African-American residents of Michigan.[17]

1990s

Parks in 1993

In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography aimed at younger readers, which recounts her life leading to her decision to keep her seat on the bus. A few years later, she published Quiet Strength (1995), her memoir, which focuses on her faith.

At age 81, Parks was robbed and assaulted in her home in central Detroit on August 30, 1994. The assailant, Joseph Skipper, broke down the door but claimed he had chased away an intruder. He requested a reward and when Parks paid him, he demanded more. Parks refused and he attacked her. Hurt and badly shaken, Parks called a friend, who called the police. A neighborhood manhunt led to Skipper's capture and reported beating. Parks was treated at Detroit Receiving Hospital for facial injuries and swelling on the right side of her face. Parks said about the attack on her by the African-American man, "Many gains have been made ... But as you can see, at this time we still have a long way to go." Skipper was sentenced to 8 to 15 years and was transferred to prison in another state for his own safety.[84][85][86][87]

Suffering anxiety upon returning to her small central Detroit house following the ordeal, Parks moved into Riverfront Towers, a secure high-rise apartment building. Learning of Parks's move, Little Caesars owner Mike Ilitch offered to pay for her housing expenses for as long as necessary.[88]

In 1994, the Ku Klux Klan applied to sponsor a portion of United States Interstate 55 in St. Louis County and Jefferson County, Missouri, near St. Louis, for cleanup (which allowed them to have signs stating that this section of highway was maintained by the organization). Since the state could not refuse the KKK's sponsorship, the Missouri legislature voted to name the highway section the "Rosa Parks Highway". When asked how she felt about this honor, she is reported to have commented, "It is always nice to be thought of."[89][90]

In 1999, Parks filmed a cameo appearance for the television series Touched by an Angel.[91] It was her last appearance on screen; Parks began to suffer from health problems due to old age.

2000s

In 2002, Parks received an eviction notice from her $1,800 per month (equivalent to $3,000 in 2023) apartment for non-payment of rent. Parks was incapable of managing her own financial affairs by this time due to age-related physical and mental decline. Her rent was paid from a collection taken by Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit. When her rent became delinquent and her impending eviction was highly publicized in 2004, executives of the ownership company announced they had forgiven the back rent and would allow Parks, by then 91 and in extremely poor health, to live rent-free in the building for the remainder of her life. Elaine Steele, manager of the nonprofit Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute, defended Parks's care and stated that the eviction notices were sent in error.[92] Several of Parks's family members alleged that her financial affairs had been mismanaged.[93]

In 2016, Parks's former residence in Detroit was threatened with demolition. A Berlin-based American artist, Ryan Mendoza, arranged to have the house disassembled, moved to his garden in Germany, and partly restored. It served as a museum honoring Rosa Parks.[94] In 2018, the house was moved back to the United States. Brown University was planning to exhibit the house, but the display was cancelled.[95] The house was exhibited during part of 2018 in an arts centre in Providence, Rhode Island.[96]

Parks died of natural causes on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92, in her apartment on the east side of Detroit. She and her husband never had children and she outlived her only sibling. She was survived by her sister-in-law (Raymond's sister), 13 nieces and nephews and their families, and several cousins, most of them residents of Michigan or Alabama.

City officials in Montgomery and Detroit announced on October 27, 2005, that the front seats of their city buses would be reserved with black ribbons in honor of Parks until her funeral. Parks' coffin was flown to Montgomery and taken in a horse-drawn hearse to the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, where she lay in repose at the altar on October 29, 2005, dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess. A memorial service was held there the following morning. One of the speakers, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said that if it had not been for Parks, she would probably have never become the Secretary of State. In the evening the casket was transported to Washington, D.C., and transported by a bus similar to the one in which she made her protest, to lie in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

The casket of Rosa Parks at the U.S. Capitol rotunda

Parks was the 31st person, the first American who had not been a U.S. government official, and the second private person (after the French planner Pierre L'Enfant) to be honored in this way. She was the first woman and the second black person to lie in honor in the Capitol.[97][98] An estimated 50,000 people viewed the casket there, and the event was broadcast on television on October 31, 2005. A memorial service was held that afternoon at Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C.[99]

With her body and casket returned to Detroit, for two days, Parks lay in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Her funeral service was seven hours long and was held on November 2, 2005, at the Greater Grace Temple Church in Detroit. After the service, an honor guard from the Michigan National Guard draped the U.S. flag over the casket and carried it to a horse-drawn hearse, which was intended to carry it, in daylight, to the cemetery. As the hearse passed the thousands of people who were viewing the procession, many clapped, cheered loudly and released white balloons. Parks was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery in the chapel's mausoleum. The chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel in her honor.[100]

Rosa Parks statue by Eugene Daub (2013), in National Statuary Hall, United States Capitol

1963: Inspired by the Montgomery boycott, Paul Stephenson initiated a bus boycott in Bristol, England, to protest against the refusal of a local bus company to employ black and Asian drivers and conductors.[101][102]

1979: The NAACP awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal,[104] its highest honor,[105]

1980: She received the Martin Luther King Jr. Award.[106]

1982: California State University, Fresno, awarded Parks the African-American Achievement Award. The honor, given to deserving students in succeeding years, became the Rosa Parks Awards.[107][108]

1983: She was inducted into Michigan Women's Hall of Fame for her achievements in civil rights.[109]

1984: She received a Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 black Women.[110]

1990:

1994: She received an honorary doctorate from Soka University in Tokyo, Japan.[116][117]

1998: She was the first-ever recipient of the International Freedom Conductor Award from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, honoring people whose actions support those struggling with modern-day issues related to freedom.[120][121]

1999:

Time named Parks one of the 20 most influential and iconic figures of the 20th century.[58]

President Bill Clinton honored her in his State of the Union address, saying: "She's sitting down with the first lady tonight, and she may get up or not as she chooses."[123]

2000:

Her home state awarded her the Alabama Academy of Honor,[124]

She received the first Governor's Medal of Honor for Extraordinary Courage.[125]

She was awarded two dozen honorary doctorates from universities worldwide[126]

the Rosa Parks Library and Museum on the campus of Troy University in Montgomery was dedicated to her.

2002:

2004: In the Los Angeles County MetroRail system, the Imperial Highway/Wilmington station, where the A Line connects with the C Line, has been officially named the "Rosa Parks Station".[131][132]

2005:

Senate Concurrent Resolution 61, 109th Congress, 1st Session, was agreed to October 29, 2005. This set the stage for her to become the 1st woman to lie in honor, in the Capitol Rotunda.[133]

On October 30, 2005, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation ordering that all flags on U.S. public areas both within the country and abroad be flown at half-staff on the day of Parks's funeral.

Metro Transit in King County, Washington, placed posters and stickers dedicating the first forward-facing seat of all its buses in Parks's memory shortly after her death,[134][135]

The American Public Transportation Association declared December 1, 2005, the 50th anniversary of her arrest, to be a "National Transit Tribute to Rosa Parks Day".[136]

On that anniversary, President George W. Bush signed Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law (United States) 109-116 (text) (PDF), directing that a statue of Parks be placed in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. In signing the resolution directing the Joint Commission on the Library to do so, the President stated:

By placing her statue in the heart of the nation's Capitol, we commemorate her work for a more perfect union, and we commit ourselves to continue to struggle for justice for every American.[137]

2006:

2007: Nashville, Tennessee, renamed MetroCenter Boulevard (8th Avenue North) (US 41A and SR 12) as Rosa L. Parks Boulevard.[141]

On March 14, 2008, the State of California Government Center at 464 West Fourth Street, on the northwest corner of Court and Fourth Streets, in San Bernardino was renamed the Rosa Parks Memorial Building.[142][143]

2010: in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a plaza in the heart of the city was named Rosa Parks Circle.

2012:

2013:

On February 4, 2,000 birthday wishes gathered from people throughout the United States were transformed into 200 graphics messages at a celebration held on her 100th Birthday at the Davis Theater for the Performing Arts in Montgomery, Alabama. This was the 100th Birthday Wishes Project managed by the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University and the Mobile Studio and was also a declared event by the Senate.[147]

On February 27, Parks became the first African-American woman to have her likeness depicted in National Statuary Hall. The monument, created by sculptor Eugene Daub, is a part of the Capitol Art Collection among nine other women featured in the National Statuary Hall Collection.[149]

2014:

2015:

2016:

The house lived in by Rosa Parks's brother, Sylvester McCauley, his wife Daisy, and their 13 children, and where Rosa Parks often visited and stayed after leaving Montgomery, was bought by her niece Rhea McCauley for $500 and donated to the artist Ryan Mendoza. It was subsequently dismantled and shipped to Berlin where it was re-erected in Mendoza's garden.[155] In 2018 it was returned to the United States and rebuilt at the WaterFire Arts Center, Providence, Rhode Island, where it was put on public display, accompanied by a range of interpretive materials and public and scholarly events.[156]

The National Museum of African American History and Culture was opened, containing among other things the dress that Parks was sewing the day she refused to give up her seat to a white man.[157][158][159][a]

2018:

2019:
A statue of Rosa Parks was unveiled in Montgomery, Alabama.[161]

2021:

2023: Rosa Parks statue approved for Alabama State Capitol grounds.[163]

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Montgomery buses: law and prevailing customs In 1900, Montgomery had passed a city ordinance to segregate bus passengers by race. Conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. According to the law, no passenger would be required to move or give up their seat and stand if the bus was crowded and no other seats were available.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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. A Black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolence and civil disobedience. Inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, he led targeted, nonviolent resistance against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in the United States.

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. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who frequently 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.[3]

On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, 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. His death was followed by national mourning, as well as anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the federal holiday was first observed in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and King County in Washington was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

Crozer Theological Seminary

King enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania.[78][79] During this time, King also enrolled in several courses at the University of Pennsylvania.[80][81] During his time at Penn, King took courses with William Fontaine, Penn's first African American professor and Elizabeth F. Flower, one of Penn's professors of philosophy.[82] King's father fully supported his decision to continue his education and made arrangements for King to work with prominent Crozer alum, J. Pius Barbour, a family friend who pastored at Calvary Baptist Church in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania.[83] King became known as one of the "Sons of Calvary", an honor he shared with William Augustus Jones Jr. and Samuel D. Proctor who both went on to become well-known preachers in the black church.[84]

King once reproved another student for keeping beer in his room, saying they had shared responsibility as African Americans to bear "the burdens of the Negro race". For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbusch's "social gospel". In his third year at Crozer, King became romantically involved with[88] the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who worked as a dietitian in the cafeteria. King planned to marry her, but friends, as well as King's father,[88] advised against it, saying that an interracial marriage would provoke animosity from both blacks and whites, potentially damaging his chances of ever pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he could not endure his mother's pain over the marriage and broke the relationship off six months later. He continued to have lingering feelings toward the woman he left; one friend was quoted as saying, "He never recovered." Other friends, including Harry Belafonte, said Betty had been "the love of King's life."[88] King graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity (B.Div.) degree in 1951.[78] He applied to the University of Edinburgh to do his doctorate in the School of Divinity. An offer was made by Edinburgh but he chose Boston instead.[89]

Boston University

In 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University.[90] While pursuing doctoral studies, King worked as an assistant minister at Boston's historic Twelfth Baptist Church with William Hunter Hester. Hester was an old friend of King's father and was an important influence on King.[91] In Boston, King befriended a small cadre of local ministers his age, and sometimes guest pastored at their churches, including Michael Haynes, associate pastor at Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury (and younger brother of jazz drummer Roy Haynes). The young men often held bull sessions in their various apartments, discussing theology, sermon style, and social issues.

At the age of 25 in 1954, King was called as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.[92] King received his PhD degree on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation (initially supervised by Edgar S. Brightman and, upon the latter's death, by Lotan Harold DeWolf) titled A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.[93][90]

An academic inquiry in October 1991 concluded that portions of his doctoral dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. However, "[d]espite its finding, the committee said that 'no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree,' an action that the panel said would serve no purpose."[94][90][95] The committee found that the dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." A letter is now attached to the copy of King's dissertation held in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.[96] Significant debate exists on how to interpret King's plagiarism.[97]

Marriage and family

Martin Luther King Jr. with his wife, Coretta Scott King, and daughter, Yolanda Denise King, in 1956

While studying at Boston University, he asked a friend from Atlanta named Mary Powell, who was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, if she knew any nice Southern girls. Powell asked fellow student Coretta Scott if she was interested in meeting a Southern friend studying divinity. Scott was not interested in dating preachers but eventually agreed to allow Martin to telephone her based on Powell's description and vouching. On their first phone call, King told Scott "I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms," to which she replied, "You haven't even met me." They went out for dates in his green Chevy. After the second date, King was certain Scott possessed the qualities he sought in a wife. She had been an activist at Antioch as an undergraduate student.

King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama.[98] They became the parents of four children: Yolanda King (1955-2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (b. 1961), and Bernice King (b. 1963).[99] During their marriage, King limited Coretta's role in the civil rights movement, expecting her to be a housewife and mother.[100]

In December 1959, after being based in Montgomery for five years, King announced his return to Atlanta at the request of the SCLC.[101] In Atlanta, King served until his death as co-pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and helped expand the Civil Rights Movement across the South.

Montgomery bus boycott, 1955

In March 1955, Claudette Colvin-a fifteen-year-old black schoolgirl in Montgomery-refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in violation of Jim Crow laws, local laws in the Southern United States that enforced racial segregation. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; E. D. Nixon and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue because the incident involved a minor.

Nine months later on December 1, 1955, a similar incident occurred when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus.[104] The two incidents led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which was urged and planned by Nixon and led by King.[105] King was in his twenties, and had just taken up his clerical role. The other ministers asked him to take a leadership role simply because his relative newness to community leadership made it easier for him to speak out. King was hesitant about taking the role but decided to do so if no one else wanted it.[106]

The boycott lasted for 385 days,[107] and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed.[108] King was arrested for traveling 30 mph in a 25 mph zone[109] and jailed during this campaign, which overnight drew the attention of national media, and greatly increased King's public stature. The controversy ended when the United States District Court issued a ruling in Browder v. Gayle that prohibited racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. Blacks resumed riding the buses again, and were able to sit in the front with full legal authorization.[106]

King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform. The group was inspired by the crusades of evangelist Billy Graham, who befriended King,[112] as well as the national organizing of the group In Friendship, founded by King allies Stanley Levison and Ella Baker.[113] King led the SCLC until his death.[114] The SCLC's 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was the first time King addressed a national audience.[115] Other civil rights leaders involved in the SCLC with King included: James Bevel, Allen Johnson, Curtis W. Harris, Walter E. Fauntroy, C. T. Vivian, Andrew Young, The Freedom Singers, Cleveland Robinson, Randolph Blackwell, Annie Bell Robinson Devine, Charles Kenzie Steele, Alfred Daniel Williams King, Benjamin Hooks, Aaron Henry and Bayard Rustin.[116]

The Gandhi Society

Harry Wachtel joined King's legal advisor Clarence B. Jones in defending four ministers of the SCLC in the libel case Abernathy et al. v. Sullivan; the case was litigated about the newspaper advertisement " Heed Their Rising Voices". Wachtel founded a tax-exempt fund to cover the suit's expenses and assist the nonviolent civil rights movement through a more effective means of fundraising. This organization was named the "Gandhi Society for Human Rights". King served as honorary president for the group. He was displeased with the pace that President Kennedy was using to address the issue of segregation. In 1962, King and the Gandhi Society produced a document that called on the President to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln and issue an executive order to deliver a blow for civil rights as a kind of Second Emancipation Proclamation. Kennedy did not execute the order.[117] The FBI was under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy when it began tapping King's telephone line in the fall of 1963.[118] Kennedy was concerned that public allegations of communists in the SCLC would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives. He warned King to discontinue these associations and later felt compelled to issue the written directive that authorized the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the civil rights movement and investigated the allegations of communist infiltration. When no evidence emerged to support this, the FBI used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years, as part of its COINTELPRO program, in attempts to force King out of his leadership position [3]

King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.[122][123]

The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities, who sometimes turned violent.

Survived knife attack, 1958

On September 20, 1958, King was signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein's department store in Harlem[124] when he narrowly escaped death. Izola Curry-a mentally ill black woman who thought that King was conspiring against her with communists-stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener, which nearly impinged on the aorta. King received first aid by police officers Al Howard and Philip Romano.[125] King underwent emergency surgery with three doctors: Aubre de Lambert Maynard, Emil Naclerio and John W. V. Cordice; he remained hospitalized for several weeks. Curry was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.[126][127]

Atlanta sit-ins, prison sentence, and the 1960 elections

Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver expressed open hostility towards King's return to his hometown in late 1959. He claimed that "wherever M. L. King Jr., has been there has followed in his wake a wave of crimes", and vowed to keep King under surveillance.[128] On May 4, 1960, several months after his return, King drove writer Lillian Smith to Emory University when police stopped them. King was cited for "driving without a license" because he had not yet been issued a Georgia license. King's Alabama license was still valid, and Georgia law did not mandate any time limit for issuing a local license.[129] King paid a fine but was unaware that his lawyer agreed to a plea deal that also included a probationary sentence.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta Student Movement had been acting to desegregate businesses and public spaces in the city, organizing the Atlanta sit-ins from March 1960 onwards. In August the movement asked King to participate in a mass October sit-in, timed to highlight how 1960's Presidential election campaign had ignored civil rights. The coordinated day of action took place on October 19. King participated in a sit-in at the restaurant inside Rich's, Atlanta's largest department store, and was among the many arrested that day. The authorities released everyone over the next few days, except for King. Invoking his probationary plea deal, judge J. Oscar Mitchell sentenced King on October 25 to four months of hard labor. Before dawn the next day, King was taken from his county jail cell and transported to Georgia State Prison.[130]

The arrest and harsh sentence drew nationwide attention. Many feared for King's safety, as he started a prison sentence with people convicted of violent crimes, many of them White and hostile to his activism.[131] Both Presidential candidates were asked to weigh in, at a time when both parties were courting the support of Southern Whites and their political leadership including Governor Vandiver. Nixon, with whom King had a closer relationship before, declined to make a statement despite a personal visit from Jackie Robinson requesting his intervention. Nixon's opponent John F. Kennedy called the governor (a Democrat) directly, enlisted his brother Robert to exert more pressure on state authorities, and also, at the personal request of Sargent Shriver, made a phone call to King's wife to express his sympathy and offer his help. The pressure from Kennedy and others proved effective, and King was released two days later. King's father decided to openly endorse Kennedy's candidacy for the November 8 election which he narrowly won.[132]

Albany Movement, 1961

King returned in July 1962 and was given the option of forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine (equivalent to $1,700 in 2022); he chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett discreetly arranged for King's fine to be paid and ordered his release. "We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools ... ejected from churches ... and thrown into jail ... But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail."[137] It was later acknowledged by the King Center that Billy Graham was the one who bailed King out of jail during this time.[138]

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy with King, Benjamin Mays, and other civil rights leaders, June 22, 1963

Birmingham campaign, 1963

King was arrested in 1963 for protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham.[142]

In April 1963, the SCLC began a campaign against racial segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics, developed in part by Wyatt Tee Walker. Black people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC, occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that they considered unjust.

King's intent was to provoke mass arrests and "create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation." The campaign's early volunteers did not succeed in shutting down the city, or in drawing media attention to the police's actions. Over the concerns of an uncertain King, SCLC strategist James Bevel changed the course of the campaign by recruiting children and young adults to join in the demonstrations.[144] Newsweek called this strategy a Children's Crusade.[145][146]

King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign-his 13th arrest[148] out of 29.[149] From his cell, he composed the now-famous " Letter from Birmingham Jail" that responds to calls on the movement to pursue legal channels for social change. The letter has been described as "one of the most important historical documents penned by a modern political prisoner".[150] King argues that the crisis of racism is too urgent, and the current system too entrenched: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."[151] He points out that the Boston Tea Party, a celebrated act of rebellion in the American colonies, was illegal civil disobedience, and that, conversely, "everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal'."[151] Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, arranged for $160,000 to bail out King and his fellow protestors.[152]

Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in an interview in the Netherlands, 1964

March on Washington, 1963

King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the " Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were Roy Wilkins from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young, National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James L. Farmer Jr., of the Congress of Racial Equality.[153]

Bayard Rustin's open homosexuality, support of socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin,[154] which King agreed to do. However, he did collaborate in the 1963 March on Washington, for which Rustin was the primary logistical and strategic organizer.[156][157] For King, this role was another which courted controversy, since he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of United States President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march.[158][159]

Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation. However, the organizers were firm that the march would proceed.[160] With the march going forward, the Kennedys decided it was important to work to ensure its success. President Kennedy was concerned the turnout would be less than 100,000. Therefore, he enlisted the aid of additional church leaders and Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, to help mobilize demonstrators for the cause.[161]

The March, a 1964 documentary film produced by the United States Information Agency. King's speech has been redacted from this video because of the copyright held by King's estate.

King gave his most famous speech, "I Have a Dream", before the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The march made specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public schools; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers (equivalent to $19 in 2022); and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee.[164][165][166] Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success.[167] More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.'s history.[167]

I Have a Dream

King delivered a 17-minute speech, later known as "I Have a Dream". In the speech's most famous passage - in which he departed from his prepared text, possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted behind him, "Tell them about the dream!"[168][169] - King said:[170]

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream 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."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

St. Augustine, Florida, 1964

In March 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with Robert Hayling's then-controversial movement in St. Augustine, Florida. Hayling's group had been affiliated with the NAACP but was forced out of the organization for advocating armed self-defense alongside nonviolent tactics. However, the pacifist SCLC accepted them.[175][176] King and the SCLC worked to bring white Northern activists to St. Augustine, including a delegation of rabbis and the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, all of whom were arrested.[177][178] During June, the movement marched nightly through the city, "often facing counter demonstrations by the Klan, and provoking violence that garnered national media attention." Hundreds of the marchers were arrested and jailed. During this movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.[179]

Biddeford, Maine, 1964

On May 7, 1964, King spoke at Saint Francis College's "The Negro and the Quest for Identity", in Biddeford, Maine. This was a symposium that brought many civil rights leaders together such as Dorothy Day and Roy Wilkins.[180][181] King spoke about how "We must get rid of the idea of superior and inferior races," through nonviolent tactics.[182]

New York City, 1964

On February 6, 1964, King delivered the inaugural speech[183] of a lecture series initiated at the New School called "The American Race Crisis". In August 2013, almost 50 years later, the school discovered an audiotape with 15 minutes of a question-and-answer session that followed King's address. In these remarks, King referred to a conversation he had recently had with Jawaharlal Nehru in which he compared the sad condition of many African Americans to that of India's untouchables.[184] The original speech recording is part of a collection of audiotapes in Amherst College's Archives & Special Collections in 1989.[185] Dr. King's speech had been rebroadcast on Amherst's student-run radio station, WAMF (now WAMH). The tape was digitized in the fall of 2015 and shared with The New School Archives. In his March 18, 1964, interview by Robert Penn Warren, King compared his activism to his father's, citing his training in non-violence as a key difference. He also discusses the next phase of the civil rights movement and integration.[186]

Scripto strike in Atlanta, 1964

Starting in November 1964, King supported a labor strike led by several hundred workers at the Scripto factory in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood of Atlanta, just a few blocks from Ebenezer Baptist.[187] Many of the strikers were also congregants of his church, and the strike was supported by other civil rights leaders in the city.[187] King helped elevate the labor dispute from a local to nationally known event and led the SCLC to organize a nationwide boycott of Scripto products.[187] However, as the strike stretched into December, King, who was wanting to focus more on a civil rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, began to negotiate in secret with Scripto's president Carl Singer and eventually brokered a deal where the SCLC would call off their boycott in exchange for the company giving the striking employees their Christmas bonuses.[187] King's involvement in the strike ended on December 24 and a contract between the company and union was signed on January 9 of the following year.[187]

Selma voting rights movement and "Bloody Sunday", 1965

In December 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, where the SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months.[188] A local judge issued an injunction that barred any gathering of three or more people affiliated with the SNCC, SCLC, DCVL, or any of 41 named civil rights leaders. This injunction temporarily halted civil rights activity until King defied it by speaking at Brown Chapel on January 2, 1965.[189] During the 1965 march to Montgomery, Alabama, violence by state police and others against the peaceful marchers resulted in much publicity, which made racism in Alabama visible nationwide.

On March 5, King met with officials in the Johnson Administration to request an injunction against any prosecution of the demonstrators. He did not attend the march due to church duties, but he later wrote, "If I had any idea that the state troopers would use the kind of brutality they did, I would have felt compelled to give up my church duties altogether to lead the line." Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused national public outrage.

King next attempted to organize a march for March 9. The SCLC petitioned for an injunction in federal court against the State of Alabama; this was denied and the judge issued an order blocking the march until after a hearing. Nonetheless, King led marchers on March 9 to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, then held a short prayer session before turning the marchers around and asking them to disperse so as not to violate the court order. The unexpected ending of this second march aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. Meanwhile, on March 11 King cried at the news of Johnson supporting a voting rights bill on television in Marie Foster's living room.[193] The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, 1965.[194][195] At the conclusion of the march on the steps of the state capitol, King delivered a speech that became known as " How Long, Not Long". In it, King stated that equal rights for African Americans could not be far away, "because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" and "you shall reap what you sow".[c][196][197][198]

Chicago open housing movement, 1966

The SCLC formed a coalition with CCCO, Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an organization founded by Albert Raby, and the combined organizations' efforts were fostered under the aegis of the Chicago Freedom Movement.[201] During that spring, several white couple/black couple tests of real estate offices uncovered racial steering: discriminatory processing of housing requests by couples who were exact matches in income, background, number of children, and other attributes. Several larger marches were planned and executed: in Bogan, Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park, Evergreen Park (a suburb southwest of Chicago), Gage Park, Marquette Park, and others.[201][204]

President Lyndon B. Johnson meeting with King in the White House Cabinet Room in 1966

King later stated and Abernathy wrote that the movement received a worse reception in Chicago than in the South. Marches, especially the one through Marquette Park on August 5, 1966, were met by thrown bottles and screaming throngs. Rioting seemed very possible.[205][206] King's beliefs militated against his staging a violent event, and he negotiated an agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley to cancel a march in order to avoid the violence that he feared would result.[207] King was hit by a brick during one march, but continued to lead marches in the face of personal danger.[208]

A 1967 CIA document declassified in 2017 downplayed King's role in the "black militant situation" in Chicago, with a source stating that King "sought at least constructive, positive projects."[211]

Opposition to the Vietnam War

King was long opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War,[214] but at first avoided the topic in public speeches in order to avoid the interference with civil rights goals that criticism of President Johnson's policies might have created.[214] At the urging of SCLC's former Director of Direct Action and now the head of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, James Bevel, and inspired by the outspokenness of Muhammad Ali,[215] King eventually agreed to publicly oppose the war as opposition was growing among the American public.[214]

During an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church-exactly one year before his death-King delivered a speech titled " Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence".[216] He spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, arguing that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". He connected the war with economic injustice, arguing that the country needed serious moral change:

King opposed the Vietnam War because it took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare at home. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. He summed up this aspect by saying, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." He stated that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands", and accused the U.S. of having killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children".[221] King also criticized American opposition to North Vietnam's land reforms.[222]

King's opposition cost him significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, Billy Graham, union leaders and powerful publishers.[223][224][225] "The press is being stacked against me", King said,[226] complaining of what he described as a double standard that applauded his nonviolence at home, but deplored it when applied "toward little brown Vietnamese children".[227] Life magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."[227]

The "Beyond Vietnam" speech reflected King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with which he was affiliated.[229][230] King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation, and more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice.[231][232] He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism.[233][234]

King stated in "Beyond Vietnam" that "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar ... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."[235] King quoted a United States official who said that from Vietnam to Latin America, the country was "on the wrong side of a world revolution."[235] King condemned America's "alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America", and said that the U.S. should support "the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution.[235]

King's stance on Vietnam encouraged Allard K. Lowenstein, William Sloane Coffin and Norman Thomas, with the support of anti-war Democrats, to attempt to persuade King to run against President Johnson in the 1968 United States presidential election. King contemplated but ultimately decided against the proposal on the grounds that he felt uneasy with politics and considered himself better suited for his morally unambiguous role as an activist.[236]

On April 15, 1967, King participated and spoke at an anti-war march from Manhattan's Central Park to the United Nations. The march was organized by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and initiated by its chairman, James Bevel. At the U.N. King brought up issues of civil rights and the draft:

Seeing an opportunity to unite civil rights activists and anti-war activists,[215] Bevel convinced King to become even more active in the anti-war effort.[215] Despite his growing public opposition towards the Vietnam War, King was not fond of the hippie culture which developed from the anti-war movement.[238] In his 1967 Massey Lecture, King stated:

We need to make clear in this political year, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the president of the United States, that we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killings of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self-determination in Southeast Asia.[239][240]

Correspondence with Thích Nhất Hạnh

Thích Nhất Hạnh was an influential Vietnamese Buddhist who taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He had written a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 entitled: "In Search of the Enemy of Man". It was during his 1966 stay in the US that Nhất Hạnh met with King and urged him to publicly denounce the Vietnam War.[241] In 1967, King gave a famous speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, his first to publicly question the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.[242] Later that year, King nominated Nhất Hạnh for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize. In his nomination, King said, "I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of [this prize] than this gentle monk from Vietnam. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity".[243]

Poor People's Campaign, 1968

In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the " Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an "economic bill of rights" for poor Americans.[244][245]

The campaign was preceded by King's final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? which laid out his view of how to address social issues and poverty. King quoted from Henry George and George's book, Progress and Poverty, particularly in support of a guaranteed basic income.[246][247][248] The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C., demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States.

King and the SCLC called on the government to invest in rebuilding America's cities. He felt that Congress had shown "hostility to the poor" by spending "military funds with alacrity and generosity". He contrasted this with the situation faced by poor Americans, claiming that Congress had merely provided "poverty funds with miserliness".[245] His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of "racism, poverty, militarism and materialism", and argued that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced."

The Poor People's Campaign was controversial even within the civil rights movement. Rustin resigned from the march, stating that the goals of the campaign were too broad, that its demands were unrealizable, and that he thought that these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.[250]

Global policy

King was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution.[251][252] As a result, in 1968, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.[253]

On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the black sanitary public works employees, who were represented by AFSCME Local 1733. The workers had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. In one incident, black street repairmen received pay for two hours when they were sent home because of bad weather, but white employees were paid for the full day.[254][255][256]

On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address[257] at Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane.[258] In the prophetic peroration of the last speech of his life, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:

King was booked in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel (owned by Walter Bailey) in Memphis. Ralph Abernathy, who was present at the assassination, testified to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed at Room 306 so often that it was known as the "King-Abernathy suite".[260] According to Jesse Jackson, who was present, King's last words on the balcony before his assassination were spoken to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was attending: "Ben, make sure you play ' Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."[261]

King was fatally shot by James Earl Ray at 6:01 p.m., Thursday, April 4, 1968, as he stood on the motel's second-floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder.[262][263] Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor. Jackson stated after the shooting that he cradled King's head as King lay on the balcony, but this account was disputed by other colleagues of King; Jackson later changed his statement to say that he had "reached out" for King.[265]

After emergency chest surgery, King died at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m.[266] According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only 39 years old, he "had the heart of a 60 year old", which Branch attributed to the stress of 13 years in the civil rights movement.[267] King was initially interred in South View Cemetery in South Atlanta, but in 1977 his remains were transferred to a tomb on the site of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.[268]

Aftermath

The assassination led to a nationwide wave of race riots in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities.[269][270][271] Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King's death. He gave a short, improvised speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and urging them to continue King's ideal of nonviolence.[272] The following day, he delivered a prepared response in Cleveland.[273] James Farmer Jr. and other civil rights leaders also called for non-violent action, while the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for a more forceful response.[274] The city of Memphis quickly settled the strike on terms favorable to the sanitation workers.[275]

The plan to set up a shantytown in Washington, D.C., was carried out soon after the April 4 assassination. Criticism of King's plan was subdued in the wake of his death, and the SCLC received an unprecedented wave of donations for the purpose of carrying it out. The campaign officially began in Memphis, on May 2, at the hotel where King was murdered.[276] Thousands of demonstrators arrived on the National Mall and stayed for six weeks, establishing a camp they called " Resurrection City".[277]

President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to quell the riots by making several telephone calls to civil rights leaders, mayors and governors across the United States and told politicians that they should warn the police against the unwarranted use of force.[271] However, his efforts did not work out: "I'm not getting through," Johnson told his aides. "They're all holing up like generals in a dugout getting ready to watch a war."[271] Johnson declared April 7 a national day of mourning for the civil rights leader. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended King's funeral on behalf of the President, as there were fears that Johnson's presence might incite protests and perhaps violence.[279] At his widow's request, King's last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church was played at the funeral,[280] a recording of his "Drum Major" sermon, given on February 4, 1968. In that sermon, King made a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity".[281] His good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", at the funeral.[282] The assassination helped to spur the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.[271]

Two months after King's death, James Earl Ray-who was on the loose from a previous prison escape-was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave England on a false Canadian passport. He was using the alias Ramon George Sneyd on his way to white-ruled Rhodesia.[283] Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, though he recanted this confession three days later.[284] On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray pleaded guilty to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty. He was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.[284][285] Ray later claimed a man he met in Montreal, Quebec, with the alias "Raoul" was involved and that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy.[286][287] He spent the remainder of his life attempting, unsuccessfully, to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.[285] Ray died in 1998 at age 70.[288]

Allegations of conspiracy

The sarcophagus for Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King is within the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ray's lawyers maintained he was a scapegoat similar to the way that John F. Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is seen by conspiracy theorists.[289] Supporters of this assertion said that Ray's confession was given under pressure and that he had been threatened with the death penalty.[285][290] They admitted that Ray was a thief and burglar, but claimed that he had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon.[287] However, prison records in different U.S. cities have shown that he was incarcerated on numerous occasions for charges of armed robbery.[291] In a 2008 interview with CNN, Jerry Ray, the younger brother of James Earl Ray, claimed that James was smart and was sometimes able to get away with armed robbery. Jerry Ray said that he had assisted his brother on one such robbery. "I never been with nobody as bold as he is," Jerry said. "He just walked in and put that gun on somebody, it was just like it's an everyday thing."[291]

Those suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point to the two successive ballistics tests which proved that a rifle similar to Ray's Remington Gamemaster had been the murder weapon. Those tests did not implicate Ray's specific rifle.[285][292] Witnesses near King at the moment of his death said that the shot came from another location. They said that it came from behind thick shrubbery near the boarding house-which had been cut away in the days following the assassination-and not from the boarding house window.[293] However, Ray's fingerprints were found on various objects (a rifle, a pair of binoculars, articles of clothing, a newspaper) that were left in the bathroom where it was determined the gunfire came from.[291] An examination of the rifle containing Ray's fingerprints determined that at least one shot was fired from the firearm at the time of the assassination.[291]

In 1997, King's son Dexter Scott King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a new trial.[294]

Two years later, King's widow Coretta Scott King and the couple's children won a wrongful death claim against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found in favor of the King family, finding Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King and that government agencies were party to the assassination.[295][296]William F. Pepper represented the King family in the trial.[297]

In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice completed the investigation into Jowers' claims but did not find evidence to support allegations about conspiracy. The investigation report recommended no further investigation unless some new reliable facts are presented.[298] A sister of Jowers admitted that he had fabricated the story so he could make $300,000 from selling the story, and she in turn corroborated his story in order to get some money to pay her income tax.[299][300]

In 2002, The New York Times reported that a church minister, Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson-not James Earl Ray-assassinated King. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way." Wilson provided no evidence to back up his claims.[301]

King researchers David Garrow and Gerald Posner disagreed with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King.[302] In 2003, Pepper published a book about the long investigation and trial, as well as his representation of James Earl Ray in his bid for a trial, laying out the evidence and criticizing other accounts.[303][304] King's friend and colleague, James Bevel, also disputed the argument that Ray acted alone, stating, "There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man."[305] In 2004, Jesse Jackson stated:

FBI surveillance and wiretapping

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered surveillance of King, with the intent to undermine his power as a civil rights leader.[418][419] The Church Committee, a 1975 investigation by the U.S. Congress, found that "From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader."[420]

In the fall of 1963, the FBI received authorization from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to proceed with wiretapping of King's phone lines, purportedly due to his association with Stanley Levison.[421] The Bureau informed President John F. Kennedy. He and his brother unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison, a New York lawyer who had been involved with Communist Party USA.[422] Although Robert Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King's telephone lines "on a trial basis, for a month or so", Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy.

The Bureau placed wiretaps on the home and office phone lines of both Levison and King, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country.[422][425] In 1967, Hoover listed the SCLC as a black nationalist hate group, with the instructions: "No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups ... to insure [sic] the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited."[419][426]

NSA monitoring of King's communications

In a secret operation code-named " Minaret", the National Security Agency monitored the communications of leading Americans, including King, who were critical of the U.S. war in Vietnam.[427] A review by the NSA itself concluded that Minaret was "disreputable if not outright illegal".[427]

Allegations of communism

Due to the relationship between King and Stanley Levison, the FBI feared Levison was working as an "agent of influence" over King, in spite of its own reports in 1963 that Levison had left the Party and was no longer associated in business dealings with them. Another King lieutenant, Jack O'Dell, was also linked to the Communist Party by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).[430]

Despite the extensive surveillance conducted, by 1976 the FBI had acknowledged that it had not obtained any evidence that King himself or the SCLC were actually involved with any communist organizations.[420]

For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to communism. In a 1965 Playboy interview, he stated that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida." He argued that Hoover was "following the path of appeasement of political powers in the South" and that his concern for communist infiltration of the civil rights movement was meant to "aid and abet the salacious claims of southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements."[420] Hoover did not believe King's pledge of innocence and replied by saying that King was "the most notorious liar in the country".[432] After King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, the FBI described King as "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country".[425] It alleged that he was "knowingly, willingly and regularly cooperating with and taking guidance from communists."

The attempts to prove that King was a communist was related to the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were content with the status quo, but had been stirred up by "communists" and "outside agitators".[434] As context, the civil rights movement in 1950s and '60s arose from activism within the black community dating back to before World War I. King said that "the Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals-the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations."

CIA surveillance

Allegations of adultery

The only meeting of King and Malcolm X, outside the United States Senate chamber, March 26, 1964, during the Senate debates regarding the (eventual) Civil Rights Act of 1964[438]

The FBI, having concluded that King was dangerous due to communist infiltration, began attempting to discredit King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, attempted to demonstrate that he also had numerous extramarital affairs.[425] Lyndon B. Johnson once said that King was a "hypocritical preacher".[439]

In his 1989 autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Ralph Abernathy stated that King had a "weakness for women", although they "all understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside of marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation."[440] In a later interview, Abernathy said that he only wrote the term "womanizing", that he did not specifically say King had extramarital sex and that the infidelities King had were emotional rather than sexual.[441]

In his 1986 book Bearing the Cross, David Garrow wrote about a number of extramarital affairs, including one woman King saw almost daily. According to Garrow, "that relationship ... increasingly became the emotional centerpiece of King's life, but it did not eliminate the incidental couplings ... of King's travels." He alleged that King explained his extramarital affairs as "a form of anxiety reduction". Garrow asserted that King's supposed promiscuity caused him "painful and at times overwhelming guilt".[442] King's wife Coretta appeared to have accepted his affairs with equanimity, saying once that "all that other business just doesn't have a place in the very high-level relationship we enjoyed." Shortly after Bearing the Cross was released, civil rights author Howell Raines gave the book a positive review but opined that Garrow's allegations about King's sex life were "sensational" and stated that Garrow was "amassing facts rather than analyzing them".[444]

The FBI distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family.[445] The bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he did not cease his civil rights work.[446] The FBI-King suicide letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part:

The FBI-King suicide letter,[447] mailed anonymously by the FBI

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping-Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are-an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

The letter was accompanied by a tape recording-excerpted from FBI wiretaps-of several of King's extramarital liaisons. King interpreted this package as an attempt to drive him to suicide,[450] although William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the time, argued that it may have only been intended to "convince Dr. King to resign from the SCLC."[420] King refused to give in to the FBI's threats.[425]

In 1977, Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.[451]

In May 2019, an FBI file emerged on which a handwritten note alleged that King "looked on, laughed and offered advice" as one of his friends raped a woman. Expert professional historians of the period who have examined this notional evidence have dismissed it as highly unreliable.[452][453] David Garrow, author of an earlier biography of King, wrote that "the suggestion ... that he either actively tolerated or personally employed violence against any woman, even while drunk, poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible".[454][453] Garrow's reliance on a handwritten note addended to a typed report is considered poor scholarship by several other authorities. The professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham, Peter Ling, pointed out that Garrow was excessively credulous, if not naive, in accepting the accuracy of FBI reports during a period when the FBI was undertaking a massive operation to attempt to discredit King as part of its COINTELPRO activities.[455] Garrow had earlier referred to Ling's work on King, widely considered authoritative, as "thoughtful, perceptive, and thoroughly well-informed".[456] Experts in 20th-century American history, including Distinguished Professor of Political Science Jeanne Theoharis, the professors Barbara Ransby of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Nathan Connolly of Johns Hopkins University and Professor Emeritus of History Glenda Gilmore of Yale University have expressed reservations about Garrow's scholarship. Theoharis commented "Most scholars I know would penalize graduate students for doing this." It is not the first time the care and rigor of Garrow's work has been called into serious question.[457] Clayborne Carson, Martin Luther King biographer and overseer of the Dr. King records at Stanford University states that he came to the opposite conclusion of Garrow saying "None of this is new. Garrow is talking about a recently added summary of a transcript of a 1964 recording from the Willard Hotel that others, including Mrs. King, have said they did not hear Martin's voice on it. The added summary was four layers removed from the actual recording. This supposedly new information comes from an anonymous source in a single paragraph in an FBI report. You have to ask how could anyone conclude King looked at a rape from an audio recording in a room where he was not present."[458] Carson bases his position of Coretta Scott King's memoirs where she states "I set up our reel-to-reel recorder and listened. I have read scores of reports talking about the scurrilous activities of my husband but once again, there was nothing at all incriminating on the tape. It was a social event with people laughing and telling dirty jokes. But I did not hear Martin's voice on it, and there was nothing about sex or anything else resembling the lies J. Edgar and the FBI were spreading." The tapes that could confirm or refute the allegation are scheduled to be declassified in 2027.[459]

Police observation during the assassination

A fire station was located across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the boarding house in which James Earl Ray was staying. Police officers were stationed in the fire station to keep King under surveillance.[460] Agents were watching King at the time he was shot.[461] Immediately following the shooting, officers rushed out of the station to the motel. Marrell McCollough, an undercover police officer, was the first person to administer first aid to King.[462] The antagonism between King and the FBI, the lack of an all points bulletin to find the killer, and the police presence nearby led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination.[463]

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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.

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When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he became the first African American to hold the office. Obama faced major challenges during his two-term tenure in office. His primary policy...

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The official Black Lives Matter Instagram account 

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The official Black Lives Matter Instagram account 

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Black Lives Matter Protests Around the World

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• “changing Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter is a demonstration of how we don’t actually understand structural racism in this country”

• “I think that the reason that the organizers used the phrase Black Lives Matter was not because they were suggesting that no one else’s lives matter … rather what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem that is happening in the African American community that’s not happening in other communities.”
- Barack Obama

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A powerful illustration

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“#BlackLivesMatter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important – it means that Black lives, which are seen without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation”