The Social and Political Thought of Martin Luther King Essay

The Social and Political Thought of Martin Luther King - Essay Example It was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a year-long protest in Montgomery, Alabama, that inflamed the American Civil Rights Movement and catapulted King to national fame. In December 1955, 42,000 black residents of Montgomery began a year-long boycott of city buses (Montgomery Bus Boycott)1 to protest racially segregated seating. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed and King was elected as its president. That evening King inspired the audience with his words: "There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression." With this speech, King was able to ignite the African-Americans' collective outrage into a grassroots movement that would sustain the boycott. King's nonviolent resistance was the mission statement that captained the cause of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, even in the face of violent opposition from the police and the whites. Even though the boycott was challenged throughout by violent protests, King did not let people forget that Christian principles were the base of the protest. He urged the black protestors when faced with violence, to "turn the other cheek". This set the tone for all of King's subsequent campaigns. The protest propelled the Civil Rights Movement into national consciousness and Martin Luther King Jr. into the public eye. In the words of King: "We have gained a new sense of dignity and destiny. We have discovered a new and powerful weapon-nonviolent resistance." After 381 days of intense struggle, African Americans eventually won their fight to desegregate seating on public buses, not only in Montgomery, but throughout the United States. With the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, King had begun his journey along the road of civil rights, whose ultimate destination was the realization of human rights, not only for the blacks but to all the underprivileged of America. Thomas F.Jackson begins his book, "From Civil Rights to Human Rights" by stating "Over the course of his public ministry, between the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956 and the Memphis sanitation workers' Strike of 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., wove together African American dreams of freedom with global dreams of political and economic equality. King opposed racism, imperialism, poverty, and political disfranchisement in increasingly radical terms. Often he referred to the American civil rights movement as simply one expression of an international human rights revolution that demanded economic rights to work, income, housing, and security." Jackson argues that King's ideas and his socio-political thoughts did not undergo a sudden change towards economic justice in the final few years of his life but had begun taking root even in the initial years of his involvement in the civil rights movement. The fact that the theme of economic justice was central to King's thoughts throughout his career is evident from the way King attacked the unequal distribution of American wealth twice before the NAACP2.He even pointed out to a January MIA mass meeting