Martin Luther King Jr.

1. Martin Luther King Jr. • The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 had several significant results which extended beyond the desegregation of bussing in Montgomery • The Montgomery Bus Boycott established non-violent protest as the means for change in the Civil Rights Movement and it established a young black minister named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the leader of the Civil Rights Movement in America

2. Dr. King was just 26 when he stepped forward as a leader in the Bus Boycott • Dr. King was greatly influenced by Gandhi's beliefs of nonviolence and civil disobedience • Riding the success of the Boycott in Montgomery Dr. King and other black clergymen in the South formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC with Dr. King as its spokesman • Dr. King and the SCLC would play key roles in most every Civil Rights Protest through the 50ís and 60ís

3. Dr Kings nonviolent philosophy would not only drive the SCLC but would spread to other groups as well • CORE, the Congress On Racial Equality and SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee, while not directly associated with Dr. King or SCLC adopted the principals of them • Both Core and SNCC tended to attract younger college students from the North to take part in Civil Disobedience Protest about Civil Rights in the South

4. Sit-Ins • One way in which SNCC members would protest segregation was a sit-in where black and white students would sit in white only dinning areas in restaurants • Sit-Ins would force owners to either serve the protesters violating its segregation rules, or having a very large disturbance in the restaurants • By the end of 1960 70,000 students had taken part in sit-ins and 3,600 of those had been arrested and severed time for taking part

5. Taking part in a nonviolent protest is not easy, you as a nonviolent protester can not react to anything that anyone may do to you while protesting • People who participated in sit-ins had food dumped on them, where spit on, had their hair pulled or cut and occasionally they were beaten and kicked all while being called every derogatory name in the book • As a protester you could not retaliate, not even in self defense, you simply had to take it

7. Freedom Rides • In 1961 CORE and SNCC organized what became know as the Freedom Rides • The Freedom Riders where a group of busses who planned to drive through the South to see whether Southern state would obey Supreme Court rulings banning segregation in facilities which served interstate busses • The Freedom Riders planned to go from Washington DC to New Orleans • As the Busses moved into the South they began to run in violent confrontations

8. In Rock Hill North Carolina people line the road to throw rocks at the busses • In Anniston Alabama the Freedom Rides ran into their first real threats, while tiring to leave a rest stop a mob slashed the busses tiers then chase the bus down, and set the bus on fire and when the riders got off the burning bus they were beaten by a mob • Several riders were hospitalized, the violence was so bad that SNCC pulled out of the Freedom Rides however CORE sent new riders to replace those who had been beaten

10. As the Rides continued images of passive college kids being beaten by savage mobs shocked the nation placing enormous pressure on Washington to act • Bobby Kennedy the Attorney General sent Federal Marshals to protect the Freedom Riders • Kennedy also pressured the ICC into issuing a ruling that all interstate transportation and areas that severed them must desegregate and sued local communities which did not comply