Martin Luther King Jr.
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About this ebook
Martin Luther King, Jr., lived 14,325 days, but then of them changed his world—and ours. Follow Dr. King’s journey from his teenage refusal to give up his bus seat to his famous “I Have a Dream” speech that inspired the world. This essential book includes historical black-and-white photographs, a selected bibliography, and an important introduction to the Civil Rights Movement—including the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, and Dr. King’s time in a Birmingham jail cell.
David Colbert
David Colbert is the author of New York Times bestseller Michelle Obama: An American Story. In addition to the 10 Days series, he wrote the acclaimed Eyewitness series of first-person history and the Magical Worlds series for children. More than two million copies of his books are in print in almost thirty languages.
Read more from David Colbert
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Reviews for Martin Luther King Jr.
3 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great book! I had some mixed emotions. I think this country has come a long way in 50 years. I would recommend this book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brilliant book, that is sadly shorter than I would like it to be, but just enough to fill me with love and strenght. For we all have a dream.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A very accessible look at the defining moments of MLK Jr's life, with enough backstory linking the days covered that those who are not overly familiar with his life will be able to easily follow the flow. The content warrants 4 stars, but there were a surprising number of grammatical errors throughout that were fairly distracting.
Book preview
Martin Luther King Jr. - David Colbert
CONTEST
Franklinton, Georgia.
"You need to get up, now, the bus driver says, looking at fifteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.
These other folks need to sit down."
M. L. (that’s what everybody calls him) stares straight ahead. Why? M. L. thinks. Why should I have to get up? But of course he knows the reason. He’s black, and white people want his seat. They expect it.
He knows what can happen to African Americans who refuse to obey the bus laws. He knows they can be forced off the bus or even arrested. He has seen blacks savagely beaten for less. He looks out the window and sees the sign at the bus stop: FRANKLINTON. He’s ninety miles away from Atlanta and home.
You need to get up,
the bus driver repeats angrily. He sees only a black teenager—a disobedient black teenager. In the culture of the South, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter than this young man plays the violin, enjoys opera, excels at sports, and earns top grades in high school, where he has already skipped one grade and will later skip his senior year. It doesn’t matter that M. L. is a minister’s son who lives in a household with rules, expectations, and discipline; or that he goes to church all day on Sunday and almost every other day of the week; or that he’s often dressed as he is today, in a smart suit. It doesn’t even matter that earlier today M. L. represented his school at a statewide oratory contest.
There’s no innocent explanation for the driver’s demand: He’s not merely asking a polite young man to give up his seat for an older person. One of M. L.’s teachers, Sarah Grace Bradley, who has accompanied M. L. to the contest, is also being told to move.
JIM CROW
Usually M. L. is treated like a prince. He’s a member of the affluent and educated elite of Atlanta, one of the most important cities in African American life. Nearly half of Atlanta’s 300,000 citizens are African American. The city is home to some of the nation’s best black colleges—Clark, Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University—which have attracted intellectuals like the prominent scholar W. E. B. Du Bois. Economically, the black community ranges from business tycoons to sharecroppers. Socially, there’s no more important institution in black Atlanta than the church, and the church where M. L.’s father is pastor, Ebenezer Baptist, has been at the center of the community for three generations. M. L. and his older sister and younger brother are well known within the community because of their father’s position. They’re aware that their family has many advantages not shared by the many black citizens of Atlanta who are kept from c jobs because of racism. But neither their social status nor their affluence protects them from bigotry. M. L. has known it all his life. When he was five, the father of his best friend, a white boy, had forbidden his son to play with M. L. because M. L. was black. M. L. never forgot the shock of that first lesson in racism.
M. L. has inherited his father’s ability to captivate an audience, and it was no surprise that a few days earlier he won a spot at the oratory contest. By this time, the subject of his speech was also no surprise: He was already furious at the injustices Southern blacks faced, and the poverty that resulted from it. The title of his speech was The Negro and the Constitution.
It called for the full enforcement of laws already in the U.S. Constitution that should have guaranteed equality for African Americans. It demanded access to education, jobs, and health care, all of which were kept from African Americans by local laws—which the Constitution should have overruled—that maintained segregation.
Those laws were known casually as Jim Crow.
The name came from a character in minstrel shows, a popular entertainment that made fun of African Americans, portraying them as lazy, stupid, and superstitious. White actors played Jim Crow in blackface
(dark, clownish makeup). There were Jim Crow laws against eating in the same restaurants, drinking from the same water fountains, swimming in the same pools, and, of course, sitting together on buses.
THOMAS D. RICE (1808–1860) CREATED THE 1828 SONG AND DANCE ROUTINE JUMP JIM CROW.
HE WAS MIMICKING AN AFRICAN AMERICAN STREET PERFORMER.
The first Jim Crow laws were passed a few decades after the Civil War, when political compromises allowed Southern states to reestablish some of the local power they had lost when they lost the war. The laws ignored the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, passed after the war, guaranteeing that blacks were free, that they would receive equal protection under the law, and that they could vote.
Jim Crow laws were designed specifically to make sure blacks stayed poor, uneducated, and utterly powerless to change their circumstances. They also kept the two races physically separated in public. Hypocritically, it was common for even the most admired men in the white community to have relationships with African American women, and these were usually ignored by friends provided the man was discreet. For example, Strom Thurmond, a governor of South Carolina and then a senator from the state, who actually ran for president of the United States in 1948 on a segregationist platform, had a secret daughter who resulted from his relationship with a family maid. This was only made public after his death in the year 2003—when his daughter was almost seventy-eight years old. (Thurmond lived to just less than 101 years.)
A segregated movie theater in Florida. This is the back entrance. The front entrance was reserved for