The name of Martin Luther King, Jr., is intertwined with the history of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom rides, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, the Selma march, the Chicago campaign, and the Memphis boycott are some of the more noteworthy battlefields where King and his followers–numerous in numbers, humble and great in name– fought for the equal rights and equal justice that the United States Constitution ensures for all its citizens. King, building on the tradition of civil disobedience and passive resistance earlier expressed by Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi, waged a war of nonviolent direct action against opposing forces of racism and prejudice that were embodied in the persons of local police, mayors, governors, angry citizens, and night riders of the Ku Klux Klan. The great legal milestones achieved by this movement were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In the later 1960s, the targets of King’s activism were less often the legal and political obstacles to the exercise of civil rights by blacks, and more often the underlying poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and blocked avenues of economic opportunity confronting black Americans. Despite increasing militancy in the movement for black power, King steadfastly adhered to the principles of nonviolence that had been the foundation of his career. Those principles were put to a severe test in his support of a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. This was King’s final campaign before his death.

From the Tennessee marker about the Highlander Folk School:
“2E 75
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL
1932-1962
In 1932, Myles Horton and Don West founded Highlander Folk School… It quickly became one of the few schools in the South committed to the cause of organized labor, economic justice, and an end to racial segregation. Courses included labor issues, literacy, leadership, and non-violent desegregation strategies, with workshops led by Septima Clark. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Eleanor Roosevelt found inspiration for the modern civil rights movement there. Opponents of its causes tried to close the school.” Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Memphis Sanitation Workers | Mining Awareness +