Martin Luther king was a great civil rights activist; one of his iconic phrases is ‘’ I have a dream’’, and it comes from one of the most iconic speeches in the english language, given by king on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of a quarter of a million people in Washington in 1963.
King was assassinated by a fanatical racist, infuriated by the religious leader’s fight for a civil right for his fellow black americans.
The american civil rights movement actually began with Rosa Parks, a black american woman who refused to give up her seat in a segregated bus in Alabama in 1956. King also happened to have to give his place to a white man. So the Rosa Park’s situation affected him deeply. He organized a highly boycott of the company which finally had to admit black and white people to the same places on buses.
After the civil war, finished sixty years earlier, black people were not allowed to use the same hospitals, bars, restaurants, toilets, schools,as white people.
So King, after the Rosa Parks incident, decided to lead the the civil rights movement throughout the fifties and some of the sixties. For twelve years, he criss-crossed america, making thousands of speeches.He led protests, demonstrations, all of them peaceful.
For millions people around the word, black and white, King was a hero. He was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his activities in defense of human rights.
For the FBI, King was the enemy. The FBI constantly followed him and they bugged his phone. King, one of America’s bravest citizens, finally met his end in April 1968. James Earl Ray shot him on his hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.
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