Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968), Pastor in the Baptist Church, lived in Montgomery, a city in the south of the United States, with his wife, Coretta Scott, and his four children. There, white people considered black people inferior and they lived segregated. This meaned they had different shops, hospitals or schools. One day (december 1st, 1955), in a bus, Rosa Park, a black women, refusing to give up her seat to a white man, and she was arrested for one day. Because of this, Martin Luther King decided to use a non-violent protest: a bus boycott. The boycott lasted 382 days, and was the first great black nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States. In 1956 black people got the same rights as the white people in buses. During these days of boycott, King was arrested and his home was bombed. In may 1963 Martin Luther King organized the “Children’s Crusade”, a march by hundreds of school students in Birmingham. The children were sprayed with water from high-power. They were also attacked by dogs. By the end of the day, the police had arrested 959 boys and girls. Images of the attacks were shown on national television and in newspapers. Many Americans became disgusted by what they saw. In june 1963 the president, John Kennedy gives the black people the right of entering to public places. In 1964, at the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, he was assassinated.