A bridge must be strong, tough and resilient to withstand great quantities of weight and pressure; a bridge must stand tall against the hardest winds and storms; a bridge must connect, bring things together and provide a way for people to reach each other; a bridge must always provide a way across, a way through and a way forward. In the mid-1950s, the United States began to undergo a downpour which would require a mighty and steady bridge to help guide its people through the tempest.
“He was their voice of anguish, their eloquence in humiliation, their battle cry for human dignity,” Murray Schumach said, author of Martin Luther King Jr.’s New York Times Obituary published on April 5, 1968.
“He forged for them the weapons of nonviolence that withstood and blunted the ferocity of segregation,” Schumach said.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his first national address on May 17, 1957, entitled “Give us the Ballot” at the Lincoln Memorial. During the speech, King speaks directly about the President and members of Congress, saying they have betrayed the cause of justice and in turn asks them to ensure voting rights for African Americans, according to The King Institute at Stanford University.
In the years prior to his first national speech, King developed into his role as one of the most prominent civil rights leaders by riding among the first passengers of the integrated buses in Montgomery in May of 1956, delivering speeches about the passage to freedom and declaring the path of nonviolence even after several threats in January of 1956.
In September 1958, King published his first book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The book reveals King’s thoughts on the Montgomery bus boycotts and its effectiveness on desegregation.
“[They] took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth,” King wrote.
On his journey toward a more equal future, King was met with tremendous mental and physical tolls. King nearly lost his life after he was stabbed during a book signing in 1958. Later in October of 1960, King was arrested during a sit-in demonstration in Atlanta, Georgia and again in December of 1961 and July 1962 in Albany, Georgia.
From his jail cell in April of 1963, King responded to local religious leaders’ criticisms and advice to “wait” for justice in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
“I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham,” King wrote. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny… Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”
Following the increasingly severe circumstances and demonstrations in Birmingham, King returned to the Lincoln Memorial along with other civil rights leaders and more than 200,000 people as they marched on Washington on August 28, 1963. King delivered his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech that echoed the freedoms that were promised in 1863 but were not fulfilled.
The speech reflected King’s ability to sound like a rhythmic poem, to present civil rights as America’s obligation and to make his hopes and dreams for the future feel like a prayer. The next day, James Reston of the New York Times wrote, “He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”
The next year, on July 2, 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or natural origin.
In his final speech entitled “I’ve been to the Mountaintop,” King spoke to a large crowd in Memphis, Tennessee on April 3, 1968, saying, “we’ve got some difficult days ahead.”
“But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop … I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the next day on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and was buried in his birthplace of Atlanta, Georgia at the age of 39.