Martin Luther King, Jr. in Civil Rights Movement: "Black Power" Era
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) was the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama who rose to prominence in the movement for civil rights. He remains to this day a symbol of the nonviolent struggle against segregation.
In 1965, King launched a voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, a city where only 355 of 15,000 Black residents had managed to register to vote.
The following year, he moved his family north to Chicago to focus his energies on discrimination in housing and employment in northern cities. Still, by the mid-1960s, many younger Black activists, such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, found the nonviolent leader to be out of touch with the plight of Blacks living in the inner city.
King's murder in April of 1968 confirmed for activists both radical and moderate that nonviolence failed to change white society.
For more on Martin Luther King, Jr., head over to our Historical Texts learning guides for "I Have a Dream" and "I've Been to the Mountaintop."