Martin Luther King, Jr. had an extremely rough childhood, in which he witnessed many things that would later effect the way in which he handled his life.

"I had passed spots where Negroes had been savagely lynched, and had watched the Ku Klux Klan on its rides at night. I had seen police brutality of the worst kind, and watched Negroes receive the most tragic injustices in the courts." (Martin Luther King 90)

The things he saw and the things he experienced were eventually what caused him to strive for freedom for African Americans, and caused him to hate segregation. "I had grown up abhorring not only segregation but also the aggressive and barbaric acts that grew out of it." (Martin Luther King 90) King, although going through a lot as a young child, would fight through it all and eventually graduate from hi

"At this point I began to think about Thoreau's 'Essay on Civil Disobedience'...I became convinced that what we were preparing to do in Montgomery was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, 'We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system." (Martin Luther King 51)

After Dr. King's studying was complete he began to set out to become a leader in the civil rights movement. Perhaps the thing that first put King's name in the books is The Montgomery Bus Boycott. It all started when Ms. Rosa Parks refused to abide by the segregation rule that African Americans were unable to sit anywhere but the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Ms. Parks was arrested for not obeying the bus driver when he told her to move to the back of the bus. Upon hearing the news of her arrest, King and two other men decided to organize a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The men knew that the African American population made up much of the organization's revenue, and if they could organize the black population in a manner that would convince them not to travel on buses they could get what they were fighting for.

King's next move in the civil rights movement came with the foundation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. The purpose of this organization was to, "...urge the Federal government to pass civil rights laws and to promote the movement for black equality in the South." (Haskins 49) The most specific of the group's issues were Negro-voting rights. The leaders of the SCLC knew that it was the African American's right to vote under the Constitution and the denial of this right was unlawful. King felt very strongly about blacks gaining the right to vote. "The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic traditions and it is democracy turned upside down." (Haskins 50)

"You may well ask: 'Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of the direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue." (Haskins 64)

During his studies at school and as a minister, two very important people came into Dr. King's life. One of these men was Ghandi. As Dr. King once said, "'If humanity is to progress, Ghandi is inescapable. He lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk.'" (Haskins 54)

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Approximate Word count = 2075
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)