Why is MLK Important?
Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) was an important person among the people involved in fighting for American civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929 on January 15th. Racial discrimination was considered legal before 1960s in America. Black people were not allowed to participate in Restaurants, hotels, shopping centers, Theaters and even are not given proper employment. Blacks were not given permission to vote too. In 1954, Supreme Court passed a rule that black and white segregation was considered as unconstitutional. But even after this was done, many schools were not ready to implement that segregation was injustice. Several people could not accept interracial marriage though the Court declared that interracial marriage is completely as per the law.
Martin Luther King Jr. became popular when he opposed all these racial discrimination policies and led the civil rights movement. He was known to the public as a famous personality when he led the bus boycott in 1955 in Montgomery at Alabama. Bus boycott started when Rosa Parks rejected to give up her seat to a white man and she was arrested for that purpose. He followed the path of Mahatma Gandhi in protesting the injustice by non-violence, peaceful march and passive resistance. In 1963, MLK Jr. was able to bring peace among the outraged public when the Black church at Birmingham, Alabama was blasted. In the same year MLK Jr. was respected with the award of Nobel peace prize when he led a peace march in Washington in which people belonging to all races participated. People were very much inspired by his speech about ‘I have a dream,.
MLK Jr. was arrested several times while campaigning for civil rights and he strongly opposed Vietnam War during the last days of his life. When he was encouraging the sanitation workers to go on strike in order to get good payment and better conditions to work, he was assassinated on 4th of April in 1968 at Memphis, Tennessee. MLK Jr. is important because all the injustice for which he had fought have disappeared almost in the United States now.
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