Martin Luther King, Jr

A 14-year-old black boy like Emmett Till could be hunted down and murdered by a Mississippi gang simply because he had supposedly made suggestive remarks to white woman. Even Highly educated blacks ere routinely denied the right to vote or serve on juries. They could not eat at lunch counters, register in motels or use whites-only rest rooms; they could not buy or rent a home wherever they chose. In some rural enclaves in the South, they were even compelled to get off the sidewalk and stand in the street if a Caucasian walked by.
             Many whites believed that blacks were inferior to whites in all respects, and that, therefore, they should not have the same rights as whites. A secret society called the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had been organized to uphold this white "supremacy-. KKK members burned blacks' homes and churches, and even hanged blacks simply for "talking back- to whites. When these hangings, or lynchings, occurred, the police often looked the other way. Seldom did a court of law convict a white person for harming a black.
             The movement that King led swept all that away. Its victory was so complete that event through those outrages took place within the living memory of the baby boomers, they seem like ancient history. And though this revolution was the product of two centuries of agitation by thousands upon thousands of courageous men and women, King was its culmination. It is impossible to think of the movement unfolding as it did without him at its helm. He was, as the cliché has it, the right man at the right time.
             To begin with, King was a preacher who spoke in biblical cadences ideally suited to leading a stride toward freedom that found its inspiration in the Old Testament story of the Israelites and the New Testament gospel of Jesus Christ. Being a minister not only put King in touch with the spirit of the black masses but also gave him a base within the black church, then and now the strongest and most independent of black institutions.