How Did Martin Luther King Influence The Civil Rights Movement

Throughout the Civil Rights Movement in the in the United States, there have many great influential leaders. However, there is always one unequivocal leader that jumps into mind, and that is Martin Luther King Jr. MLK was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. During this time, segregation and discrimination was still integrated in the daily life of every African American. Even though it had been nearly 100 years after the emancipation proclamation, “African Americans in Southern states still inhabited a starkly unequal world of disenfranchisement, segregation and various forms of oppression, including race-inspired violence.” Jim Crow laws at the state and local levels discriminated against African Americans. It barred them from schools, restrooms, and other public accommodations.
Martin Luther King Jr. was thrown into the epicenter of the civil rights movement when he began his career as a pastor in 1954. In December 1955, when Montgomery’s black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to protest the arrest of Rosa Park for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, they selected King to head the new group. In his role as the primary spokesman, King utilized the leadership abilities he had gained from his religious background and academic training to forge a distinctive protest strategy that involved the mobilization of black churches. He also understood how nonviolence could become a way of life, applicable of all situations. A tool that would be used to dismantle institutionalized racial segregation, discrimination, and inequality. After black power advocates started to reject nonviolence, he reaffirmed his own commitment to nonviolence and realized it was the only true way to tackle this momentous