On the third Monday of each January, Americans honor the memory of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. A Baptist minister from the southern state of Alabama, Dr. King was a leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, advocating social change through non-violent means. On January 15th, he would have turned 96 years old.
The country young Martin was born into was one of racial segregation and discrimination by design. Most southern states were governed by so-called Jim Crow laws, local and state legislation that codified and enforced segregation and behavior of the non-white population. But Dr. King believed in the biblical proposition that all people are created equal in the image of God. In keeping with the motto he chose for his civil rights movement, he set out “to redeem the soul of America.”
Believing that "change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle," Dr. King organized and participated in mass-action boycotts, sit-ins, peaceful marches and other non-violent acts of civil disobedience.
Dr. King once stated that "an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law." And so, activists sometimes deliberately, but peacefully and respectfully, broke laws aimed at segregating the white citizenry from the non-white, thus hoping to bring attention to the inherent unfairness of such legislation.
Dr. King’s greatest achievements came with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which outlawed employment discrimination and segregation in public places, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These two victories had a major impact not only on the United States, but around the world.
Dr. King once said that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” These words guided his life’s work, but ultimately, another’s hatred cost him his life at a young age. He was thirty-nine years old when an assassin's bullet cut him down on April 4th, 1968. But his legacy lives on. In time, all segregationist laws were repealed, and discrimination is a legally punishable – and punished – offence.
Dr. King's life is well summed up in his own words: "The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.”