At six o'clock in the afternoon of April 4, 1968, the pastor stood on the balcony of the Memphis motel. He is only 39 years old, but he has accumulated decades of experience in struggles, victories and setbacks. The civil rights leader achieved landmark victories against segregation and racial discrimination.
But at six o'clock in the afternoon, there was a loud bang in the sky of Memphis, a bullet flew across the road, and he fell in a pool of blood. Let's talk about Martin Luther King Jr. today.
In the 18th year of the Republic of China, Xiaojin was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and he was the second of three siblings. Jin admired his pastor father from an early age. At that time, racial segregation was still prevalent in the southern states of the United States.
As a child, he often saw his father stand up against apartheid and all forms of discrimination. He was deeply influenced by his father. He once read Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," which argued that the people should do what they thought was right, rather than acquiesce in the government's rule as they wished, and that they had a duty to avoid such acquiescence and making the government an agent of injustice.
Thoreau also believed that the government that governed the least was the best, so as a teenager, Kim made social movement his real calling, and religion was only his means to achieve that goal.
In September 1948, Kim entered Crozier Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he excelled and became the college's first African-American student union president. He read extensively on theology and philosophy in the college.
Notably, he developed a keen interest in Walter Lawson Bush's social evangelism movement during this period. He also admired Karl Marx's philosophy of socialism.
Although Marx's brazen criticism of capitalism in Capital was very appealing to him, after all, Marx advocated atheism, which a seminary student really did not agree with. So appreciation is appreciation, after all, people still have to touch the earth.
In 1951, Kim graduated from seminary and began pursuing a doctorate in theology at Boston University, while he began pursuing the beautiful young Greta Scott at New England College. Initially, Scott thought the priest nuns were a couple, but the two married on June 18, 1953.
After graduating from Boston University, Dr. King was soon appointed pastor of Dexter Church in Mongmaly, Alabama.
In 1955, a black seamstress was arrested for refusing to give up a seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery. That drew a reaction from the NAACA and the Women's Political Council, which organized nearly 20,000 African Americans to take to the streets to resist the segregation policy of Montmally's buses.
King initially provided only the crypt of his church as a contact point for activities. Because of his pastoral status and high education, he eventually became the leader of the bus boycott. During the boycott, he actively worked with the Gandhi Society for Human Rights to advocate for the importance of nonviolent protest.
King led the boycott for much of 1956, so he had the privilege of being a thorn in the side of white citizens and police officers. The protest ended on December 21, 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the apartheid policy on buses was unconstitutional. Despite Dr. King's initial success, the attacks from the white community did not stop. The Klan and some "white supremacy" old white men occasionally shot him twice outside his church, or even threw bombs directly into the church.
In January 1957, King and other civil rights activists gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, to create the Southern Conference of Christian Leaders, or SCLC, to coordinate civil rights protests. Kim became the chairman and fundraiser of the conference, so he spoke around the country.
In his first recorded speech, Kim captivated the crowd with his gifted oratory skills and chicken soup literature, and Kim outlined how he thought the people should use the power of love as a weapon against injustice. He said that love is not just an emotion, love is the only force that can turn enemies into friends.
In February 1957, Reverend King and his advisers sent a message to President Eisenhower's office asking him to chair a civil rights conference. Eisenhower selectively ignored the message, but Time magazine saw him and Pastor King appeared on the cover of May Weekly.
Pastor Kim, who appeared in Time magazine in the 50s, belongs to the top of the beautiful country.
Later that year, near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., he had friendly exchanges with 40,000 supporters. He launched the Citizenship Program to register 2 million black voters with the same right to vote as whites.
After Martin Luther King Jr.'s core grew rapidly in 1958, King published Toward Freedom, which described the entire process of the Montgmary bus boycott. This book is unsurprisingly on the hot search. He attended a book signing in Harlem on September 20, 1958.
At the book signing, a mentally ill black woman named Kim Zola Curry, who believed King was conspiring with the Soviet Union, stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener, almost stabbing the aorta.
Kim later recalled that if he sneezed more at that moment, he was afraid that the person would not be there. In the end, he underwent emergency surgery and saved his life.
In 1956, Kim visited India, where he deepened his understanding of the Gandhi Peace Kiji non-violent non-cooperation movement. After Kim returned home, he implemented this strategy in his own rallies.
In April 1959, African-American college students in North Carolina held a sit-in in the school cafeteria to protest the segregation policy. When the protests spread to Georgia, King participated in a sit-in in front of an Atlanta department store. Not surprisingly, Pastor Kim was arrested and briefly imprisoned.
Fortunately, then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was released early due to his sympathy for the civil rights movement. He delivered an impassioned speech after his release from prison, calling on protesters to calm down and helping to calm tensions. Because of this moderate attitude, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC for short, no longer trusts Kim's leadership.
The students asked if they could propose negotiations with Kennedy and his white moderates. Dr. King, who had just been released from prison, naturally became their best representative, but the negotiations ended in failure.
In 1961, King and his team organized a series of cycling and intercontinental bus trips aimed at training freedom standard-bearers through nonviolent protest. But their activities are often violently attacked by racists, and participants are shaken and question whether the campaign is worth it.
Kim's nonviolent rhetoric drew more criticism and skepticism. But it was because of King's involvement, through a dialogue with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, that their affirmative action movement had a positive meaning. He brought the federal government to the protesters, and the Justice Department intervened in their activities to protect the core protesters and ordered that the local government be prohibited from implementing quarantine policies during their intercontinental travel protests.
In December 1961, King participated in another protest, another sit-in led by the Student Coordinating Committee at the Albany Movement in Georgia. Kim decided to participate and gave a speech at the event.
Not surprisingly, Kim was arrested again. Based on the previous experience of "confessing leniently, sitting in prison", he refused to be released on bail at this time. Meanwhile, the young protesters became tired and frustrated. It wasn't until July 1962 that the protests turned violent.
Although King tried to keep the peace by mobilizing his priest's skills to pray at vigil while in prison, 2,000 protesters confronted police. Albany city authorities obtained a federal injunction prohibiting King and the students from holding any more similar protests.
This time the federal government sided with local governments. So Pastor King left Albany in August.
It was a failed civil rights movement, but he would learn from his next chance in Birmingham, Alabama.
The governor, mayor and police chief of Birmingham at the time were all notoriously racist. Between 1957 and 1962, there were 17 bombings of black homes and churches, including one belonging to the Southern Christian Church, whose boss was Reverend King.
It was only natural that King was invited to Birmingham to preside over the big picture. His rally began on April 3, 1963, with marches and sit-ins in public places, in flagrant violation of laws they considered unjust.
Rally, march and nonviolent protest were followed by mass arrests of traditional American performing arts. Not surprisingly, King's organization once again ushered in a ban, but this time from state courts, not federal courts.
Kim did not hesitate at all, and on April 12, he led another opportunity, the police cracked down, and finally Kim was sent to prison again, this time the prison intimately prepared a single room for him and held in solitary confinement. At this time, no one spoke, King, wrote the famous "Letter from Birmingham Prison", which became his manifesto in a way.
He called on Christians to be a force for change, even at the expense of being seen as an instigator or disruptor of peace, and the church should not integrate into the surrounding society, but change it by opposing injustice.
The letter has been described as one of the most important historical documents written by modern political prisoners. Reverend King's wife, Coretta, contacted the White House this time, and Kennedy immediately sent FBI agents to Birmingham to make sure King was treated better.
Kim was soon released from prison. This was followed by several marches, which were undoubtedly suppressed by the increasing violence of the local police chief. At this time, scenes of the riots in Birmingham appeared on television and were sent to thousands of families through direct broadcasts, which touched the conscience of the country and was a turning point in the civil rights movement.
King prompted thousands of citizens to express their anger to the White House. Kennedy saw his constituents outraged by the violent crackdown by Birmingham City Council and it was time to get more serious about race.
Kennedy's signaling of his willingness to negotiate an abolition plan was a huge victory for Pastor King, though it could once again go into a dead loop.
Often, after white moderates concede to African Americans, blacks are greeted with violence by white citizens. The street of Birmingham preaching that African Americans can only respond to violence with peace makes whites a bit brazen.
After some progress has been made in Birmingham, it is natural to organize national events. In August 1963, six leaders from the national civil rights movement marched in Washington. Kim is naturally one of the Big Six. Thousands marched to the Lincoln Memorial, where they would listen to Pastor King and others.
The plan for the campaign proved controversial at the beginning. The Kennedy administration supported King's fight and agreed to submit a civil rights bill to Congress, a landmark moment. But Kennedy was worried, after all, hundreds of thousands of people attended the event. If the march turns into a riot, Congress is likely to reject the bill.
So the government was involved in planning events and editing speeches, and included white organizations in the list of participants. The move alienated other black leaders. Malcolm, for example, from the Islamic State, questioned the authenticity of the march, so the march organizers appointed their own chief planner.
In the end, the March on Washington was a huge success, with attendance exceeding expectations, with nearly 300,000 people listening to Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous speech, "I Have a Dream."
"I have a dream that people are created equal. I have a dream that one day my four children will live in a country where people will be judged not by their skin color but by their conduct. I have such a dream today. ”
As King's civil rights organization grew, they succeeded in arousing the disgust of one of America's most powerful men, FBI Director Hoover. He had long feared that the civil rights movement might be infiltrated by the Soviet Union. Since the mid-1950s, the Bureau has created a file for Attorney Stanley Levison, King's senior adviser, who was one of King's senior advisers.
The FBI kept a close eye on Levison through its current network and did not give up until early 1957 because there was no evidence.
However, in 1963, the FBI discovered through an informant that Levison was a Soviet agent planted in the United States. Kennedy received a notification from Hoover that he authorized Hoover to conduct surveillance operations on King and Levieson's offices. Kennedy wanted King to cut ties with Levison, and Hoover suspected that King was from the Soviet side.
According to declassified documents, Kim was in fact seen by the KGB at the time as an important figure in infiltrating the civil rights movement, but found Kim too pro-American and anti-Soviet to consider any form of connection with him.
Subsequently, the KGB launched a disinformation campaign in African newspapers, portraying Kim as a pawn of the government. By this time, Hoover's suspicion of King had turned into a personal disgust.
By late 1962, according to a Justice Department report, King criticized the bureau's investigation into racial crimes in Albany, by which time Hoover's antipathy toward King had reached its peak, and his attitude toward King was the primary reason for the FBI's determination to discredit Pastor King and destroy him.
In March 1963, wiretaps reported to Hoover that Levison had severed all ties with the Soviet Union, but Hoover did not inform Kennedy. So in June 1963, Kenneny increased the pressure on King, who had to make a cut between him and Levison, using an intermediary to keep in touch with Levison.
The FBI naturally discovered their little maneuvers and in August 1963 snoozed on the phone calls at the middleman's home. Surprisingly, Hoover found no evidence of King's collusion with the Soviet Union, but he found evidence of his involvement in an extramarital affair.
In October 1963, Kennedy probably wanted to eat melons and extended King's surveillance license. The investigation was led by FBI Assistant Director Sullivan, who focused on documenting Kim's private life. Sullivan recorded Kim's encounter on tape in 1975.
Phillips, the FBI director at the time, testified before the U.S. Senate that Sullivan had used one of the tapes to blackmail Pastor Kim, sending him a copy of the recording, as well as a blackmail letter threatening to reveal the truth to King's wife and the public, and asking Kim to commit suicide to thank the world.
In order to avoid leaking information, King obviously ignored this villain, and a villain like Sullivan naturally did not have the courage to publicly scandalize, but Hoover and King's feud has continued.
Throughout 1964, Kim accused Hu of instigating racists and right-wingers. Hoover retorted, calling him the most notorious liar in the country. FBI agents continued to monitor the civil rights leader, but most surveillance operations were canceled in 1965. This is because when King moved into his new home in Atlanta, Hoover wanted to reduce the astronomical amount of his eavesdropping operations for administrative reasons, so he did not authorize the continued surveillance of King's new residence.
The FBI's tapes will be fully disclosed in 2027, but some of the material and surveillance recordings were declassified in June 2019. The dossier reveals how King was linked to several extramarital affairs and parish activists, and FBI agents even suspected he might have had a child born out of wedlock.
A handwritten note in the report shows a record of Kim and other members of the organization staying at a Washington, D.C. hotel in January 1964. The group met in the Baltimore priest's room and began discussing which of their parishioners were suitable for voluntary relationships with clergy. They called into the room a young lady from the group who was participating in the protest rally, and the pastor from Baltimore forcibly had sex with the young lady, and the note was likely evidence of Sullivan's extortion of money.
The note also records that Kim watched, smiled, and made suggestions during the process. But this information is only mentioned in the book of King's early biographer, David Gallo, and the truth will not be known until all the surveillance tapes are revealed in 2027.
Let's go back to King's civil rights movement, as King reached the peak of his career in 1964. After the Kennedy encounter, he supported Lyndon Johnson's campaign. Johnson vowed to support the Civil Rights Act, and on July 2 of that year, Johnson invited King to the White House to sign the Civil Rights Act, which officially became federal law. This is the result of Pastor King's efforts over the years.
The Civil Rights Act outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and country of origin. The Act prohibits unequal treatment in referendums and apartheid in schools, workplaces and public spaces.
In October of the same year, Dr. King received a call from Oslo that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He returned home on December 10 and soon donated the entire prize money to civil rights organizations.
At this time in Selma, Alabama, he will face another trial.
The mayor of Selma and the police chief, both racists, clinging to segregation policies and preventing black voters from reaching the voter registration sites for various reasons.
In February, King organized another march to the Selma courthouse to protest slow voter registration, and this time he was inevitably sent to jail again.
Because of his Nobel Peace Prize, he was naturally released quickly. On the 18th, he organized a second march lasting five days, but protesters were attacked by Klan mobs, and a young black man was shot.
King knew that he would have to rely on the power of the president watching from the sidelines, so on March 5, he met with President Johnson and proposed a voting rights law aimed at prohibiting local governments from using delaying and intimidation to prevent African Americans from registering for voting rights, but Johnson refused.
So Kim unveiled his next plan. March 7, a massive march from Selma to Mongmaly. More than 500 people began to march along the highway to Montgmary, where they reached the Edmont Pedez Bridge, where they were, where they faced off with state police and at least 66 protesters were seriously injured in the riot. Television broadcast footage of the fighting at the time, which later sparked similar protests in major cities across the country.
Johnson focused on the struggle, and Kim took the next step, marching on a larger scale and once again confronting the police. Still on the Edmund Pedres Bridge, because he did not want more bloodshed, King this time let the crowd evacuate despite the opposition of the protesters.
That night in Selma, a civil rights activist who participated in a march, the Rev. James Reeib, was tortured and killed by a white apartheid group, and the famous Selma case broke out.
Thousands of religious leaders rallied outside the White House, and President Johnson was convinced he needed to side with Martin Luther King Jr. in this fight. On March 24, he ordered 4,000 National Guard soldiers to protect protesters from marching into Montgomery. The procession eventually managed to reach Mongmalee, another major victory for King.
The Voting Rights Act was formally signed into law on August 6, 1965. Just six days later, Pastor Kim first objected to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War at a meeting of civil rights organizations, where Kim demanded that the government stop its intervention in Vietnam and even offered peace talks with North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh.
But the core leadership of the civil rights organization did not encourage him to wade into troubled waters at this time, because the civil rights movement needed President Johnson's support, and behind him stood a bunch of arms traffickers waiting to make war money, and they could not now distract elsewhere.
Notably, at this time, civil rights organizations were focusing their efforts on improving the economic conditions of black communities in northern cities. They organized Chicago Freedom Week on July 10, 1966. King was naturally the organizer and leader of the event, which 45,000 people attended in the peaceful march, but riots broke out on Chicago's West Side between black youth and the National Guard.
All in all, these activities have not produced the further reforms that King hoped for, and radicals in the group are rejecting his nonviolent tactics. They parted ways with King and founded the Black Panther Self-Defense Party, a black violent group, in October of that year.
At this time, Kim resumed his criticism of the Vietnam War, saying that Congress's generosity in spending military spending and stingy in disbursing poverty alleviation funds was Congress's hostility to the poor. He aimed to improve the economy of the local black community.
He delivered his first public speech against the war in February 1967, followed by anti-war demonstrations in March, and then again in the news in April 1967.
Kim expressed sympathy for the North Vietnamese government and called for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. Life magazine objected to the speech, saying Kim's speech sounded more like North Vietnamese propaganda and that Kim had been attacked by other civil rights groups this time.
More importantly, the speech outright angered President Johnson, who restored the FBI's authority to speak out against King's critical articles about the bureau and even obstructed fundraising by civil rights organizations. King realized that he could not play a decisive role in the pacifist movement, and the issue of racism and affirmative rights in the country remained his focus in late 1967.
In Washington in April 1968, King announced his plans for a poor people's march, which was conceived as a mass gathering of poor people without racial restrictions aimed at paralyzing the capital until the government made appropriate reforms.
But Pastor Kim did not live to see the reform coming. In March 1968, King joined a strike by black sanitation workers. Sanitation workers in Tennessee and Memphis demanded equal pay for equal work, and King joined their first march on the 28th. Soon the strike turned violent. Kim didn't want to see violence in the march he organized, so he left.
But a few days later, on the evening of April 3, King delivered his last speech at Mason Episcopal Church.
"I want to live a long life like anyone, but I don't care about that right now. Now I just want to do God's will, and He has put me on the top of the mountain, and then I see the Promised Land. I may not be able to walk there with you, but I already see God's coming light in my eyes. ”
Unfortunately, his speech came true. It has to be said that he had the foresight, because the next afternoon, the assassin's bullet ended the life of Martin Luther King Jr.
The gunman was a white man named James Ray, which sparked shootings and riots across the United States. Although Kim is dead, his mind is not. The Memphis strike and the March of the Poor in Washington were ultimately a huge success. He has critics inside and outside the civil rights organization, with radicals refuting his nonviolent tactics and criticizing him for being too ambiguous about moderate white people, and law enforcement trying to discredit him as a source of unrest.
In the near future, we will see the ultimate truth about his private life and crimes, but no one can deny the long-term impact of his significant legacy on society. He did more of empowering people and voting than any leader of his time. Even today, his life's wish may not have been fulfilled.