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How Did Martin Luther King Change The World?

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Examining The Global Impact Of Martin Luther King Jr.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Americans pay tribute to the iconic leader renowned for his role in the U.S. civil rights movement. What some may not know is that King’s influence and legacy extended beyond the U.S.; he visited countries in West Africa, toured Europe and South America, and spent a month in India where it is said he was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s use of nonviolence in protests against British rule.

Texas A&M Today spoke with Professor of History Dr. Albert S. Broussard about King’s global impact. Broussard specializes in African-American history and is the author of books and other publications on topics including slavery, civil rights and racial equality.

What are some of the ways King carried his humanitarian message to the world?

Martin Luther King, Jr. is regarded today as one of the most significant leaders in world history. Although he is widely regarded as one of the most important civil rights leaders in U.S. history, Dr. King began to speak out on other pressing global issues following receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

King, himself, felt that the award imposed a responsibility to address issues larger than civil rights, and he felt that receiving an international award also gave him the gravitas to offer his views. Few people know that King, for example, spoke out against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, which collapsed in 1991. Had he lived, there is no doubt that King and Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first Black president, would have become kindred spirits. King also spoke out against nuclear war and regarded himself as an anti-nuclear war activist, condemning the use of nuclear weapons against Japan during World War II. Finally, Dr. King was a major critic of the Vietnam War, and his criticism of the war and the role that the U.S. played drew widespread condemnation against the United States and fueled the anti-war movement in America.

Why do you think it was important to King to have a place on the global stage?

King, like many global activists, believed that he had an obligation to speak out against global issues in part because of his celebrity. But, as a Christian minister, he also believed that Jesus had spoken to him directly from the time of his first civil rights campaign in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. To put this another way, Dr. King believed that he was doing God’s work.

What is your favorite King quote as it relates to spreading his message worldwide?

The quote that I always recall by Dr. King that can be used to support both national and international reform is, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According to Clayborne Carson, editor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, this quote has been attributed to Theodore Parker, a 19th century abolitionist and Unitarian.

How is his message still relevant today?

I think leaders like Dr. King provide hope, even in the darkest moments of a nation’s history, that change is possible if people are willing to struggle and make sacrifices. As the great 19th century Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Dr. King certainly understood that sentiment as well as thousands of ordinary people and activists around the world today fighting to improve their lives and to guarantee a better future for their families.

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Martin Luther King Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on martin luter king.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an African-American leader in the U.S. He lost his life while performing a peaceful protest for the betterment of blacks in America. His real name was Michael King Jr. He completed his studies and attained a Ph.D. After that, he joined the American Civil Right Movement. He was among one of the great men who dedicated their life for the community.

Reason for Martin Luther King to be famous

There are two reasons for someone to be famous either he is a good man or a very bad person. Martin Luther King was among the good one who dedicated his life to the community. Martin Luther King was also known as MLK Jr. He gained popularity after he became the leader and spokesperson of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Martin Luther King was an American activist, minister, and humanitarian. Also, he had worked for several other causes and actively participated in many protests and boycotts. He was a peaceful man that has faith in Christian beliefs and non-violence. Also, his inspiration for them was the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. For his work in the field of civil rights, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was a great speaker that motivated the blacks to protest using non-violence. Also, he uses peaceful strategies like a boycott, protest march , and sit-ins, etc. for protests against the government.

Impact of King

King is one of the renowned leaders of the African-American who worked for the welfare of his community throughout his life. He was very famous among the community and is the strongest voice of the community. King and his fellow companies and peaceful protesters forced the government several times to bend their laws. Also, kings’ life made a seismic impact on life and thinking of the blacks. He was among one of the great leaders of the era.

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Humanitarian and civil rights work

As we know that King was a civic leader . Also, he has taken part in many civil right campaigns and boycotts like the Bus Boycott, Voting Rights and the most famous March on Washington. In this march along with more than 200,000 people, he marched towards Washington for human right. Also, it’s the largest human right campaign in U.S.A. history. During the protest, he gave a speech named “I Have a Dream” which is history’s one of the renowned speeches.

Death and memorial

During his life working as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement he makes many enemies. Also, the government and plans do everything to hurt his reputation. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Every year the US celebrates his anniversary as Martin Luther King Jr. day in the US. Also, they honored kings’ memory by naming school and building after him and a Memorial at Independence Mall.

Martin Luther King was a great man who dedicated his whole life for his community. Also, he was an active leader and a great spokesperson that not only served his people but also humanity. It was due to his contribution that the African-American got their civil rights.

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How Martin Luther King, Jr.’s multifaceted view on human rights still inspires today

The legendary civil rights activist pushed to ban nuclear weapons, end the Vietnam War, and lift people out of poverty through labor unions and access to healthcare.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. towers over history as a civil rights legend—known for leading the movement to end segregation and counter prejudice against Black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, largely through peaceful protests. He helped pass landmark federal civil rights and voting rights legislation that outlawed segregation and enfranchised Americans who had been barred from the polls through intimidation and discriminatory state and local laws.  

( How the Voting Rights Act was won—and why it’s under fire today .)  

But King knew it would take more to achieve true equality. And so he also worked tirelessly for education, wage equity, peace, housing, and to lift people out of poverty. Some of King’s most iconic speeches and marches were devoted to ending war, dismantling nuclear weapons, and bringing economic justice. As King said after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 , he believed that any “spiritual and moral lag” in humanity was due to racial injustice, poverty, and war.  

His multifaceted view on human rights still inspires today, and on the third Monday in January every year, the United States honors King’s legacy of fighting for equal rights—and standing up for human rights everywhere.

During his lifetime, King’s views often made him unpopular and heralded harsh criticism. At the time of his assassination in 1968, a Harris poll revealed a low approval rating of only about 25 percent among white Americans and 52 percent among Black Americans. But in the decades after he was killed, more Americans came to recognize the enormity of King’s contributions. Communities across the country began to name streets and landmarks after him, and soon a push began to establish a federal holiday in his birth month of January.  

( Subscriber exclusive: Where the streets have MLK’s name .)

In 1983 , over objections from Southern lawmakers, President Ronald Reagan finally signed a bill creating the holiday into law and the first celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day took place in January 1986—although it would take another decade for states such as Arizona and South Carolina to follow suit.  

King’s work continues to influence and inspire activism—particularly in the realm of environmental justice, as studies indicate that climate change disproportionately harms marginalized communities. Here are the many layers of King’s work that the U.S. honors on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  

He advocated against the use of nuclear weapons

King was adamant that peace was inextricably linked to civil rights. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, major powers like the United States and the U.S.S.R. were aggressively developing and testing nuclear weapons, and several times crept to the brink of warfare that threatened to annihilate the world.  

King made clear the connection between the Black freedom struggle and the need for nuclear disarmament, writes nuclear studies and African American history expert Vincent Intondi in the book African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement . King argued that it would be “rather absurd” to integrate schools and lunch counters but not be concerned with world peace and survival.

King spoke out about nuclear warfare as early as 1957, when he signed onto a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that called for all nations to suspend nuclear tests immediately. When asked about his stance later that same year, King tied the weapons to the whole of war, and argued that they should be banned everywhere.

“It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic,” he told Ebony magazine in an interview. “The principal objective of all nations must be the total abolition of war.”

As part of King’s advocacy for peace and nuclear disarmament, he condemned the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. government had carried out more than a decade earlier to effectively end World War II. Today, Hiroshima is one of the only cities outside North America to celebrate Martin Luther King Day.  

King also used the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962—a 13-day stretch in which the U.S. and Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war over the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba—as an opportunity to connect nuclear disarmament to racial and economic justice. King called for the U.S. government to instead turn its attention and funds to education, Medicare, and civil rights, Intondi writes. He then voiced his support for a nuclear test ban treaty , which was signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963.  

He was outspoken against the Vietnam War

King often linked nuclear disarmament with the Vietnam War as it escalated in the 1960s.

King was against the war but initially worried that making his stance public would derail his work to pass the Civil Rights Act and impair his relationship with President Lyndon B. Johnson, according to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University .

But in 1965, the year the first U.S. ground troops were sent to Vietnam, King issued his first public statement, asserting the war was “accomplishing nothing” and calling for a peace treaty.

He tempered his criticism for the next two years to avoid diminishing the impact of his civil rights work, but by 1967, King was active in the anti-war sphere again, attending a march in Chicago before he went on to make his most notable speech on the matter a few days later on April 4.

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament… may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation , and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On that day at the Riverside Church in New York City, King denounced the war for deepening the problems of Black Americans and people living in poverty. He condemned the “madness” of Vietnam as a “symptom of a far deeper malady” that put the U.S. at odds with the aspirations for social justice throughout the world. Just 11 days later, King led 125,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations headquarters in New York as one of the largest peace demonstrations in history.

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During the last year of his life , King continued his anti-war work by encouraging grassroots peace activism. On March 31, 1968, five days before he died, King denounced the Vietnam War in his final Sunday sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., saying that it was “one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world.”

King did not live to see the war end. U.S. troops officially pulled out of Vietnam in April 1975 .

He championed union representation and worker’s rights

King's passion for union representation and workers' rights is also an important part of his legacy. Much as he had done with his anti-war speeches, King often tied workers’ rights to the civil rights movement.

“I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice,” King said in a 1958 speech in New York . “Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me.”

In a 1959 interview with Challenge magazine , King acknowledged that labor unions had historically left out Black Americans, but also could be a key to economic justice. He called for Black Americans to organize their economic and political power in the form of labor unions, and he championed ideas in the labor movement, including better working conditions, adequate housing, guaranteed annual income, and access to healthcare.

For years, King continued to call for economic justice, notably at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Before a crowd of 250,000 people, he delivered the legendary “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he called for an end to poverty, especially targeted poverty and discrimination against Black Americans.

One of King’s last actions before his assassination was in support of the labor movement. King’s final days were spent supporting a group of Black sanitation workers striking in Memphis, Tennessee.  

After two workers had been crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck, 1,300 Black workers went on strike for 11 days, seeking an end to a long pattern of neglect and abuse from their management. The strike would’ve ended after the City Council voted to recognize their newly formed union, but the Memphis mayor rejected the vote. King traveled to Memphis to lead a protest march and, on April 3, he spoke to the striking sanitation workers.  

“We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end,” King said . “Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through.”

King was gunned down by an assassin on the balcony of his Memphis hotel the next day. On April 16, the sanitation workers’ union was finally recognized and a better wage was promised—the first of many examples of how King’s legacy would continue to reverberate in the work of those whom he inspired.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. Martin Luther King, Jr.

He’s inspiring a new generation of environmental activists

Although King’s last act supporting the Black sanitation workers in Memphis was not explicitly an act of environmental justice , it has inspired a generation of activists. The working conditions the sanitation workers had endured were polluted and hazardous—much like the conditions many Black Americans endured in their communities and jobs at the time.

Modern environmental activists have drawn on King’s message: Much as segregation and discrimination were inseparable from poverty, they point out that poor communities of color disproportionately face environmental hazards such as pollution. They also bear the brunt of the harmful effects of climate change, including extreme weather events.

( The origins of environmental justice—and why it’s finally getting the attention it deserves .)

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in the use of federal funds , even gave marginalized people a means to address racial discrimination in environmental matters.   As the environmental justice movement grew, King’s work also inspired the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

His advocacy for people of color to have a voice and power has inspired many communities impacted most by climate change to speak up—and take action. Now, the holiday honoring King is typically observed as a national day of service. Organizations and individuals alike volunteer for their communities, often cleaning up roads or river banks in the name of a man who many believe would be on the forefront of the climate fight if he were still alive today.

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How Did Martin Luther King Changed The World Essay

Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision changed the world by empowering African Americans to fight for their rights through nonviolent civil disobedience. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is widely considered one of the greatest speeches in American history. In it, he called for an end to racial segregation and discrimination. His words inspired millions of black Americans to stand up for their rights, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

These laws outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. They also guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. Martin Luther King’s vision changed America for the better and ensured that everyone is treated equally regardless of skin color.

Most of us have dreams, but Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that surpassed most and changed the course of history for African American people. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most prominent African American civil rights leaders during his time. Under his leadership, many important advances were made for equality and justice.

His work towards equality and civil disobedience continues to influence people today. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream was to see the African American people gain equal rights to the white people. Sadly, he was assassinated before he could see his dream come true. However, his vision did change the world in many ways.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech called for an end to discrimination and violence against African Americans. His words inspired many people, both black and white, to work together for change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing segregation in public places and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 giving African Americans the right to vote are just two examples of how Martin Luther King’s vision changed the world.

Today, Martin Luther King’s dream of equality is still being fought for. Although there has been much progress made, there is still more work to be done. Martin Luther King’s vision continues to inspire people all over the world to stand up for what they believe in and fight for change.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an important leader of the civil rights movement who worked hard to change America’s laws and improve the situation for African Americans. He always used peaceful methods in his protests against discrimination, which made him very respected by many people.

Martin Luther King’s vision changed the world by helping to end segregation and racism in America, as well as promoting non-violent protests as a way to achieve change.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. He was an African American Baptist minister and activist who is most well-known for his role in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955. In 1963, Martin Luther King organized and led the March on Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech advocating for racial harmony.

King’s work towards social change began long before the March on Washington though. In December of 1955, Martin Luther King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest segregation on public buses in Alabama. The boycott lasted 381 days and resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregated buses unconstitutional.

In 1957, Martin Luther King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization devoted to peaceful protests for civil rights reform. Under Martin Luther King’s leadership, the SCLC organized multiple campaigns against segregation and racism, including the famous Birmingham Campaign of 1963.

The Birmingham Campaign was a series of nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama that took place between April and May of 1963. The campaign was organized by Martin Luther King and the SCLC in order to draw attention to the injustices faced by African Americans in Birmingham, such as police brutality and racial segregation in public places. The campaign ended with the arrest of over 2,000 people, including Martin Luther King.

While he was in jail, Martin Luther King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which he argued that individuals have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. The letter became one of the most important documents of the civil rights movement and helped Martin Luther King gain support for his cause.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is unquestionably the most famous and accomplished activist in history. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, as he was originally known, lived for only thirty-nine years on this Earth. He had one of the biggest influences on African-American rights and America itself during his thirty-nine years on earth.

Lower social status groups were treated unfairly during 1954-1968, radiating frustration, racism, hunger and violence throughout the entire society. Martin Luther King Jr., an outstanding hero who used to be a priest, helped African Americans and poor people gain basic human rights after the Civil War. Although he only lived for thirty nine years old, he was deeply influenced by Christianity and allusive of the Bible in both his notion speeches.

Martin Luther King believed that people should not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character, which is also one of the principles in Christianity.

He fought for what he thought was right and changed American society—African-Americans could now get an education, have a job, and vote. Martin Luther King’s speeches were often quoted “I Have a Dream” which is his most famous speech delivered on August 28th, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

In this speech, Martin Luther King Jr. used rhetoric to appeal to both emotion and logic, making it an incredibly effective speech that helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement. By using personal stories and images, he was able to tap into the hearts of his audience and get them to see the world through his eyes.

Martin Luther King’s vision for America was one where all people would be treated equally, regardless of race or gender. This dream has largely been realized in America today, although there is still room for improvement. Thanks to Martin Luther King Jr., we are now closer to achieving true equality in America than ever before. His vision changed the world and continues to inspire people to fight for what they believe in.

Martin Luther King Jr. is a role model for many people because he fought for what he thought was right, even though it was not the popular opinion at the time. He showed that change is possible if enough people come together and stand up for what they believe in. Martin Luther King’s vision for America is one that is still relevant today, and his legacy will continue to inspire people for generations to come.

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5 ways Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. changed American history

It was 50 years ago on April 4th, 1968 that millions across the United States and the world were stunned to learn that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Prior to that, for many people, the simple knowledge that Dr. King was out there somewhere working to make the world a better, fairer place had been a comfort, and his killing came as a gut-wrenching shock. People who followed the activist preacher more closely — and certainly King himself — were less surprised. In 1966, after all, a bomb had exploded on the porch of the King residence and death threats were a daily occurrence for his family; he was also surveilled with suspicion by the U.S. government. The night before he died, King spoke to a crowd in Memphis:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter to with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Dr. King’s signature insights

Some of King’s signature insights:

• Those in power can be expected to divide people against each other and use those divisions to provoke violence. However, strategic protest can neutralize those outcomes.
• Media, especially television, is a powerful platform that can be leveraged to reach the heart of the American public.

The tactics of power that King wanted to defeat

The nasty game of us vs. them.

The idea here is to pick a characteristic held by some people within the population and promote those people as somehow different and responsible for everyone else’s hardships. It may be skin color, it may be religion, but whoever the target is, the intention is to create a decoy enemy:  they want our money, they want our possessions, they’re taking over, they’re denying us what’s rightfully ours.

It’s a devastatingly effective trick because it distracts from the true problem, presenting a make-believe zero-sum game where either you win or they do. In reality, however, what is being fought over is merely what remains after the powerful have satiated themselves.

The trick is especially insidious because people lower and lower in the power structure — having taken the bait — are more willingly join in. At that point, us vs. them  rationalizes cruelty toward others as the freedom to protect one’s domain.

Us vs. them  is not just an illusion for the masses — it serves equally well as a self-delusion for the powerful. Consider slaveholders who chose to view their slaves somehow different, somehow less , and unworthy of consideration or fair treatment.

Provocation of violence as an excuse for repression

When people do speak up, particularly as a group, the powerful have the option of silencing them using armed police, military personnel, and so on. However, to preserve the illusion that the problem is with the fictional them , authorities may deliberately provoke — or even invent — a violent act on the part of people raising their voice to justify the deployment of brutal force. It’s a trick that’s been employed when workers went on strike , and we still see it today when agitators, some of whom are planted by opponents of the cause being promoted, appear at gatherings and attempt to provoke violence.

Dr. King’s legacy

King’s struggle sadly continues in 2018. There have been steps both forward and back across the racial divide he sought for years to bridge. Late in life, King focused on the problem of economic inequality, which has gotten worse since his death.

We’re still easily divided against each other by fear, and inexcusable violence is excused by those in power on a regular basis. Still, there’s reason to hope: Progress eventually tends to move forward. Nonetheless, King’s lasting impact is indelible and multifaceted, his life a model of commitment and his strategy a continuing influence on those still struggling for positive change in America and throughout the world. Across the globe over a thousand streets have been renamed in tribute. Here are five examples of his lasting impact.

1. Dr. King was the first to master TV as a force for change

America watched the charismatic, captivating King as he spoke, marched and was attacked and arrested. Through him, the entire nation began, at last, to see just how false the us vs. them narrative really was. Racial discrimination was no longer something that only its victims had to reckon with, but a grave problem for the American soul. Designed to be viewed from the average Joe’s couch, King devised political spectacle that would inevitably attract TV coverage that just as inevitably changed the heart of a nation.

King’s gatherings provided a model that still works. Even in 2018, the sight of crowds gathering for an idea remains powerful in demonstrations such as 2017’s Women’s March and the March for Our Lives rallies this year in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

2. America began to confront its post-slavery race problem

King would no doubt be the first to remind us that he traveled with many others on the road towards the end of legal segregation in the United States and the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1964. Still, it would be difficult to overstate the magnitude of his personal oratory and influence, and the fundamental way that it changed America’s understanding of both its racial history and its current culture.

3. Showing America to itself

Most people know by now that there’s no such thing as race, biologically — it’s simply an arbitrary social construct . By so eloquently invoking our moral obligations to each other, King made it clear that we’re all in this together, and as a result, a gathering of his supporters was a tapestry of people in all shades, sizes, ages, and genders.

To watch a rally on TV such as in 1963’s March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs was to see a new, vital United States. Not the white one depicted on our other shows or in history books taught from in schools. It was the first good look Americans got at themselves.

4. The power of non-violence demonstrated

King advocated non-violence categorically and weathered his critics who said that violence was the only way to truly get oppressors’ attention.

Non-violence allowed King to keep attention focused on the issues at hand while allowing people of good conscience to participate (and feel safer doing so). On a more strategic level, though, he was well aware that non-violence may be returned with violence, resulting in TV coverage that would help the viewing public to sympathize with his cause and pierce any indifference to racial issues

5. Poverty is not just a problem of theirs. It’s everyone’s problem.

Towards the end of his life, King had refocused his efforts on the pernicious and devastating effects of poverty, regardless of its victims’ complexions. He saw inequality growing, and as a crucial danger to the entire nation. In 1968 when he died, 12.8% lived below the poverty line. The number in 2016 was 14%.

To listen to some, welfare in the U.S. today primarily benefits black Americans and immigrants. It’s not true : Poor whites receive the lion’s share of government money. Of the 70 million Medicare beneficiaries in 2016, 43% were white, 18% black, and 30% Hispanic. 36% of the 43 million food stamp recipients that year were white, 25.6% black, and 17.2% Hispanic (the remaining recipients are unknown).

Difficult days ahead

We are still far from King’s promised land. Yet no matter how heartbreaking the setbacks are, forward is the only direction we can go. Race is not even a consideration in contemporary music, TV, and films. We just need to keep calm — as King preached — and take care of each other as we travel forward together. In the long run, there’s simply no other sensible choice. We may yet arrive.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. summary

Learn about the life of martin luther king, jr., and his role in the civil rights movement in the united states.

Martin Luther King, Jr. , (born Jan. 15, 1929, Atlanta, Ga., U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tenn.), U.S. civil rights leader.

The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, King became an adherent of nonviolence while in college. Ordained a Baptist minister himself in 1954, he became pastor of a church in Montgomery, Ala.; the following year he received a doctorate from Boston University. He was selected to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, whose boycott efforts eventually ended the city’s policies of racial segregation on public transportation.

In 1957 King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and began lecturing nationwide, urging active nonviolence to achieve civil rights for Black Americans. In 1960 he returned to Atlanta to become copastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was arrested and jailed for protesting segregation at a lunch counter; the case drew national attention, and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy interceded to obtain his release.

In 1963 King helped organize the March on Washington, an assembly of more than 200,000 people at which he made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The march influenced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and King was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace.

In 1965 he was criticized from within the civil rights movement for yielding to state troopers at a march in Selma, Ala., and for failing in the effort to change Chicago’s housing segregation policies. Thereafter he broadened his advocacy, addressing the plight of the poor of all races and opposing the Vietnam War. In 1968 he went to Memphis, Tenn., to support a strike by sanitation workers; there on April 4, he was assassinated by James Earl Ray.

A U.S. national holiday is celebrated in King’s honour on the third Monday in January.

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✯ ✯ ✯ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ✯ ✯ ✯ His Life and Legacy

Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated his life to the nonviolent struggle for civil rights in the United States. King's leadership played a pivotal role in ending entrenched segregation for African Americans and to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, considered a crowning achievement of the civil rights era. King was assassinated in 1968, but his words and legacy continue to resonate for all those seeking justice in the United States and around the world. As King said at the Washington National Cathedral on March 31, 1968, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

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Playlist: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Critic’s Notebook

The Lasting Power of Dr. King’s Dream Speech

By Michiko Kakutani

• Aug. 27, 2013

It was late in the day and hot, and after a long march and an afternoon of speeches about federal legislation, unemployment and racial and social justice, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. finally stepped to the lectern, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, to address the crowd of 250,000 gathered on the National Mall.

He began slowly, with magisterial gravity, talking about what it was to be black in America in 1963 and the “shameful condition” of race relations a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Unlike many of the day’s previous speakers, he did not talk about particular bills before Congress or the marchers’ demands. Instead, he situated the civil rights movement within the broader landscape of history — time past, present and future — and within the timeless vistas of Scripture.

Dr. King was about halfway through his prepared speech when Mahalia Jackson — who earlier that day had delivered a stirring rendition of the spiritual “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned” — shouted out to him from the speakers’ stand: “Tell ’em about the ‘Dream,’ Martin, tell ’em about the ‘Dream’!” She was referring to a riff he had delivered on earlier occasions, and Dr. King pushed the text of his remarks to the side and began an extraordinary improvisation on the dream theme that would become one of the most recognizable refrains in the world.

With his improvised riff, Dr. King took a leap into history, jumping from prose to poetry, from the podium to the pulpit. His voice arced into an emotional crescendo as he turned from a sobering assessment of current social injustices to a radiant vision of hope — of what America could be. “I have a dream,” he declared, “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”

Many in the crowd that afternoon, 50 years ago on Wednesday, had taken buses and trains from around the country. Many wore hats and their Sunday best — “People then,” the civil rights leader John Lewis would recall, “when they went out for a protest, they dressed up” — and the Red Cross was passing out ice cubes to help alleviate the sweltering August heat. But if people were tired after a long day, they were absolutely electrified by Dr. King. There was reverent silence when he began speaking, and when he started to talk about his dream, they called out, “Amen,” and, “Preach, Dr. King, preach,” offering, in the words of his adviser Clarence B. Jones, “every version of the encouragements you would hear in a Baptist church multiplied by tens of thousands.”

You could feel “the passion of the people flowing up to him,” James Baldwin, a skeptic of that day’s March on Washington, later wrote, and in that moment, “it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real.”

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Nonviolence

As a theologian, Martin Luther King reflected often on his understanding of nonviolence. He described his own “pilgrimage to nonviolence” in his first book,  Stride Toward Freedom , and in subsequent books and articles. “True pacifism,” or “nonviolent resistance,” King wrote, is “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love” (King,  Stride , 80). Both “morally and practically” committed to nonviolence, King believed that “the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” (King,  Stride , 79;  Papers  5:422 ).

King was first introduced to the concept of nonviolence when he read Henry David Thoreau’s  Essay on Civil Disobedience  as a freshman at  Morehouse College . Having grown up in Atlanta and witnessed segregation and racism every day, King was “fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system” (King,  Stride , 73).

In 1950, as a student at  Crozer Theological Seminary , King heard a talk by Dr. Mordecai  Johnson , president of Howard University. Dr. Johnson, who had recently traveled to  India , spoke about the life and teachings of Mohandas K.  Gandhi . Gandhi, King later wrote, was the first person to transform Christian love into a powerful force for social change. Gandhi’s stress on love and nonviolence gave King “the method for social reform that I had been seeking” (King,  Stride , 79).

While intellectually committed to nonviolence, King did not experience the power of nonviolent direct action first-hand until the start of the  Montgomery bus boycott  in 1955. During the boycott, King personally enacted Gandhian principles. With guidance from black pacifist Bayard  Rustin  and Glenn  Smiley  of the  Fellowship of Reconciliation , King eventually decided not to use armed bodyguards despite threats on his life, and reacted to violent experiences, such as the bombing of his home, with compassion. Through the practical experience of leading nonviolent protest, King came to understand how nonviolence could become a way of life, applicable to all situations. King called the principle of nonviolent resistance the “guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method” ( Papers  5:423 ).

King’s notion of nonviolence had six key principles. First, one can resist evil without resorting to violence. Second, nonviolence seeks to win the “friendship and understanding” of the opponent, not to humiliate him (King,  Stride , 84). Third, evil itself, not the people committing evil acts, should be opposed. Fourth, those committed to nonviolence must be willing to suffer without retaliation as suffering itself can be redemptive. Fifth, nonviolent resistance avoids “external physical violence” and “internal violence of spirit” as well: “The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him” (King,  Stride , 85). The resister should be motivated by love in the sense of the Greek word  agape , which means “understanding,” or “redeeming good will for all men” (King,  Stride , 86). The sixth principle is that the nonviolent resister must have a “deep faith in the future,” stemming from the conviction that “The universe is on the side of justice” (King,  Stride , 88).

During the years after the bus boycott, King grew increasingly committed to nonviolence. An India trip in 1959 helped him connect more intimately with Gandhi’s legacy. King began to advocate nonviolence not just in a national sphere, but internationally as well: “the potential destructiveness of modern weapons” convinced King that “the choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence” ( Papers  5:424 ).

After  Black Power  advocates such as Stokely  Carmichael  began to reject nonviolence, King lamented that some African Americans had lost hope, and reaffirmed his own commitment to nonviolence: “Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. This is what I have found in nonviolence” (King,  Where , 63–64). He wrote in his 1967 book,  Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? : “We maintained the hope while transforming the hate of traditional revolutions into positive nonviolent power. As long as the hope was fulfilled there was little questioning of nonviolence. But when the hopes were blasted, when people came to see that in spite of progress their conditions were still insufferable … despair began to set in” (King,  Where , 45). Arguing that violent revolution was impractical in the context of a multiracial society, he concluded: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. The beauty of nonviolence is that in its own way and in its own time it seeks to break the chain reaction of evil” (King,  Where , 62–63). 

King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” 13 April 1960, in  Papers  5:419–425 .

King,  Stride Toward Freedom , 1958.

King,  Where Do We Go from Here , 1967.

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How Martin Luther Changed the World

Clang! Clang! Down the corridors of religious history we hear this sound: Martin Luther, an energetic thirty-three-year-old Augustinian friar, hammering his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and thus, eventually, splitting the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church into two churches—one loyal to the Pope in Rome, the other protesting against the Pope’s rule and soon, in fact, calling itself Protestant. This month marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s famous action. Accordingly, a number of books have come out, reconsidering the man and his influence. They differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on is that the hammering episode, so satisfying symbolically—loud, metallic, violent—never occurred. Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened. He remembered drawing up a list of ninety-five theses around the date in question, but, as for what he did with it, all he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop. Furthermore, the theses were not, as is often imagined, a set of non-negotiable demands about how the Church should reform itself in accordance with Brother Martin’s standards. Rather, like all “theses” in those days, they were points to be thrashed out in public disputations, in the manner of the ecclesiastical scholars of the twelfth century or, for that matter, the debate clubs of tradition-minded universities in our own time.

If the Ninety-five Theses sprouted a myth, that is no surprise. Luther was one of those figures who touched off something much larger than himself; namely, the Reformation—the sundering of the Church and a fundamental revision of its theology. Once he had divided the Church, it could not be healed. His reforms survived to breed other reforms, many of which he disapproved of. His church splintered and splintered. To tote up the Protestant denominations discussed in Alec Ryrie’s new book, “ Protestants ” (Viking), is almost comical, there are so many of them. That means a lot of people, though. An eighth of the human race is now Protestant.

The Reformation, in turn, reshaped Europe. As German-speaking lands asserted their independence from Rome, other forces were unleashed. In the Knights’ Revolt of 1522, and the Peasants’ War, a couple of years later, minor gentry and impoverished agricultural workers saw Protestantism as a way of redressing social grievances. (More than eighty thousand poorly armed peasants were slaughtered when the latter rebellion failed.) Indeed, the horrific Thirty Years’ War, in which, basically, Europe’s Roman Catholics killed all the Protestants they could, and vice versa, can in some measure be laid at Luther’s door. Although it did not begin until decades after his death, it arose in part because he had created no institutional structure to replace the one he walked away from.

Almost as soon as Luther started the Reformation, alternative Reformations arose in other localities. From town to town, preachers told the citizenry what it should no longer put up with, whereupon they stood a good chance of being shoved aside—indeed, strung up—by other preachers. Religious houses began to close down. Luther led the movement mostly by his writings. Meanwhile, he did what he thought was his main job in life, teaching the Bible at the University of Wittenberg. The Reformation wasn’t led, exactly; it just spread, metastasized.

And that was because Europe was so ready for it. The relationship between the people and the rulers could hardly have been worse. Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, was dying—he brought his coffin with him wherever he travelled—but he was taking his time about it. The presumptive heir, King Charles I of Spain, was looked upon with grave suspicion. He already had Spain and the Netherlands. Why did he need the Holy Roman Empire as well? Furthermore, he was young—only seventeen when Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses. The biggest trouble, though, was money. The Church had incurred enormous expenses. It was warring with the Turks at the walls of Vienna. It had also started an ambitious building campaign, including the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. To pay for these ventures, it had borrowed huge sums from Europe’s banks, and to repay the banks it was strangling the people with taxes.

It has often been said that, fundamentally, Luther gave us “modernity.” Among the recent studies, Eric Metaxas’s “ Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World ” (Viking) makes this claim in grandiose terms. “The quintessentially modern idea of the individual was as unthinkable before Luther as is color in a world of black and white,” he writes. “And the more recent ideas of pluralism, religious liberty, self-government, and liberty all entered history through the door that Luther opened.” The other books are more reserved. As they point out, Luther wanted no part of pluralism—even for the time, he was vehemently anti-Semitic—and not much part of individualism. People were to believe and act as their churches dictated.

The fact that Luther’s protest, rather than others that preceded it, brought about the Reformation is probably due in large measure to his outsized personality. He was a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic. Above all, he was intransigent. To oppose was his joy. And though at times he showed that hankering for martyrdom that we detect, with distaste, in the stories of certain religious figures, it seems that, most of the time, he just got out of bed in the morning and got on with his work. Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks.

Luther was born in 1483 and grew up in Mansfeld, a small mining town in Saxony. His father started out as a miner but soon rose to become a master smelter, a specialist in separating valuable metal (in this case, copper) from ore. The family was not poor. Archeologists have been at work in their basement. The Luthers ate suckling pig and owned drinking glasses. They had either seven or eight children, of whom five survived. The father wanted Martin, the eldest, to study law, in order to help him in his business, but Martin disliked law school and promptly had one of those experiences often undergone in the old days by young people who did not wish to take their parents’ career advice. Caught in a violent thunderstorm one day in 1505—he was twenty-one—he vowed to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that if he survived he would become a monk. He kept his promise, and was ordained two years later. In the heavily psychoanalytic nineteen-fifties, much was made of the idea that this flouting of his father’s wishes set the stage for his rebellion against the Holy Father in Rome. Such is the main point of Erik Erikson’s 1958 book, “ Young Man Luther ,” which became the basis of a famous play by John Osborne (filmed, in 1974, with Stacy Keach in the title role).

Today, psychoanalytic interpretations tend to be tittered at by Luther biographers. But the desire to find some great psychological source, or even a middle-sized one, for Luther’s great story is understandable, because, for many years, nothing much happened to him. This man who changed the world left his German-speaking lands only once in his life. (In 1510, he was part of a mission sent to Rome to heal a rent in the Augustinian order. It failed.) Most of his youth was spent in dirty little towns where men worked long hours each day and then, at night, went to the tavern and got into fights. He described his university town, Erfurt, as consisting of “a whorehouse and a beerhouse.” Wittenberg, where he lived for the remainder of his life, was bigger—with two thousand inhabitants when he settled there—but not much better. As Lyndal Roper, one of the best of the new biographers, writes, in “ Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet ” (Random House), it was a mess of “muddy houses, unclean lanes.” At that time, however, the new ruler of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, was trying to make a real city of it. He built a castle and a church—the one on whose door the famous theses were supposedly nailed—and he hired an important artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, as his court painter. Most important, he founded a university, and staffed it with able scholars, including Johann von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustinian friars of the German-speaking territories. Staupitz had been Luther’s confessor at Erfurt, and when he found himself overworked at Wittenberg he summoned Luther, persuaded him to take a doctorate, and handed over many of his duties to him. Luther supervised everything from monasteries (eleven of them) to fish ponds, but most crucial was his succeeding Staupitz as the university’s professor of the Bible, a job that he took on at the age of twenty-eight and retained until his death. In this capacity, he lectured on Scripture, held disputations, and preached to the staff of the university.

He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis. He called his problem his Anfechtungen —trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. Years later, commenting on his reading of Scripture as a young friar, Luther spoke of his rage at the description of God’s righteousness, and of his grief that, as he was certain, he would not be judged worthy: “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.”

There were good reasons for an intense young priest to feel disillusioned. One of the most bitterly resented abuses of the Church at that time was the so-called indulgences, a kind of late-medieval get-out-of-jail-free card used by the Church to make money. When a Christian purchased an indulgence from the Church, he obtained—for himself or whomever else he was trying to benefit—a reduction in the amount of time the person’s soul had to spend in Purgatory, atoning for his sins, before ascending to Heaven. You might pay to have a special Mass said for the sinner or, less expensively, you could buy candles or new altar cloths for the church. But, in the most common transaction, the purchaser simply paid an agreed-upon amount of money and, in return, was given a document saying that the beneficiary—the name was written in on a printed form—was forgiven x amount of time in Purgatory. The more time off, the more it cost, but the indulgence-sellers promised that whatever you paid for you got.

Actually, they could change their minds about that. In 1515, the Church cancelled the exculpatory powers of already purchased indulgences for the next eight years. If you wanted that period covered, you had to buy a new indulgence. Realizing that this was hard on people—essentially, they had wasted their money—the Church declared that purchasers of the new indulgences did not have to make confession or even exhibit contrition. They just had to hand over the money and the thing was done, because this new issue was especially powerful. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar locally famous for his zeal in selling indulgences, is said to have boasted that one of the new ones could obtain remission from sin even for someone who had raped the Virgin Mary. (In the 1974 movie “ Luther ,” Tetzel is played with a wonderful, bug-eyed wickedness by Hugh Griffith.) Even by the standards of the very corrupt sixteenth-century Church, this was shocking.

In Luther’s mind, the indulgence trade seems to have crystallized the spiritual crisis he was experiencing. It brought him up against the absurdity of bargaining with God, jockeying for his favor—indeed, paying for his favor. Why had God given his only begotten son? And why had the son died on the cross? Because that’s how much God loved the world. And that alone, Luther now reasoned, was sufficient for a person to be found “justified,” or worthy. From this thought, the Ninety-five Theses were born. Most of them were challenges to the sale of indulgences. And out of them came what would be the two guiding principles of Luther’s theology: sola fide and sola scriptura .

Sola fide means “by faith alone”—faith, as opposed to good works, as the basis for salvation. This was not a new idea. St. Augustine, the founder of Luther’s monastic order, laid it out in the fourth century. Furthermore, it is not an idea that fits well with what we know of Luther. Pure faith, contemplation, white light: surely these are the gifts of the Asian religions, or of medieval Christianity, of St. Francis with his birds. As for Luther, with his rages and sweats, does he seem a good candidate? Eventually, however, he discovered (with lapses) that he could be released from those torments by the simple act of accepting God’s love for him. Lest it be thought that this stern man then concluded that we could stop worrying about our behavior and do whatever we wanted, he said that works issue from faith. In his words, “We can no more separate works from faith than heat and light from fire.” But he did believe that the world was irretrievably full of sin, and that repairing that situation was not the point of our moral lives. “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger,” he wrote to a friend.

The second great principle, sola scriptura , or “by scripture alone,” was the belief that only the Bible could tell us the truth. Like sola fide , this was a rejection of what, to Luther, were the lies of the Church—symbolized most of all by the indulgence market. Indulgences brought you an abbreviation of your stay in Purgatory, but what was Purgatory? No such thing is mentioned in the Bible. Some people think that Dante made it up; others say Gregory the Great. In any case, Luther decided that somebody made it up.

Guided by those convictions, and fired by his new certainty of God’s love for him, Luther became radicalized. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints. He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he (Frederick) had founded at Wittenberg. He vowed to protect this troublemaker.

Things came to a head in 1520. By then, Luther had taken to calling the Church a brothel, and Pope Leo X the Antichrist. Leo gave Luther sixty days to appear in Rome and answer charges of heresy. Luther let the sixty days elapse; the Pope excommunicated him; Luther responded by publicly burning the papal order in the pit where one of Wittenberg’s hospitals burned its used rags. Reformers had been executed for less, but Luther was by now a very popular man throughout Europe. The authorities knew they would have serious trouble if they killed him, and the Church gave him one more chance to recant, at the upcoming diet—or congregation of officers, sacred and secular—in the cathedral city of Worms in 1521. He went, and declared that he could not retract any of the charges he had made against the Church, because the Church could not show him, in Scripture, that any of them were false:

Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything.

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The Pope often errs! Luther will decide what God wants! By consulting Scripture! No wonder that an institution wedded to the idea of its leader’s infallibility was profoundly shaken by this declaration. Once the Diet of Worms came to an end, Luther headed for home, but he was “kidnapped” on the way, by a posse of knights sent by his protector, Frederick the Wise. The knights spirited him off to the Wartburg, a secluded castle in Eisenach, in order to give the authorities time to cool off. Luther was annoyed by the delay, but he didn’t waste time. That’s when he translated the New Testament.

During his lifetime, Luther became probably the biggest celebrity in the German-speaking lands. When he travelled, people flocked to the high road to see his cart go by. This was due not just to his personal qualities and the importance of his cause but to timing. Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him once he got going. Among the quincentennial books is an entire volume on his relationship to print, “ Brand Luther ” (Penguin), by the British historian Andrew Pettegree. Luther’s collected writings come to a hundred and twenty volumes. In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him.

By producing them, he didn’t just create the Reformation; he also created his country’s vernacular, as Dante is said to have done with Italian. The majority of his writings were in Early New High German, a form of the language that was starting to gel in southern Germany at that time. Under his influence, it did gel.

The crucial text is his Bible: the New Testament, translated from the original Greek and published in 1523, followed by the Old Testament, in 1534, translated from the Hebrew. Had he not created Protestantism, this book would be the culminating achievement of Luther’s life. It was not the first German translation of the Bible—indeed, it had eighteen predecessors—but it was unquestionably the most beautiful, graced with the same combination of exaltation and simplicity, but more so, as the King James Bible. (William Tyndale, whose English version of the Bible, for which he was executed, was more or less the basis of the King James, knew and admired Luther’s translation.) Luther very consciously sought a fresh, vigorous idiom. For his Bible’s vocabulary, he said, “we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street,” and, like other writers with such aims—William Blake, for example—he ended up with something songlike. He loved alliteration—“ Der Herr ist mein Hirte ” (“The Lord is my shepherd”); “ Dein Stecken und Stab ” (“thy rod and thy staff”)—and he loved repetition and forceful rhythms. This made his texts easy and pleasing to read aloud, at home, to the children. The books also featured a hundred and twenty-eight woodcut illustrations, all by one artist from the Cranach workshop, known to us only as Master MS. There they were, all those wondrous things—the Garden of Eden, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel—which modern people are used to seeing images of and which Luther’s contemporaries were not. There were marginal glosses, as well as short prefaces for each book, which would have been useful for the children of the household and probably also for the family member reading to them.

These virtues, plus the fact that the Bible was probably, in many cases, the only book in the house, meant that it was widely used as a primer. More people learned to read, and the more they knew how to read the more they wanted to own this book, or give it to others. The three-thousand-copy first edition of the New Testament, though it was not cheap (it cost about as much as a calf), sold out immediately. As many as half a million Luther Bibles seem to have been printed by the mid-sixteenth century. In his discussions of sola scriptura , Luther had declared that all believers were priests: laypeople had as much right as the clergy to determine what Scripture meant. With his Bible, he gave German speakers the means to do so.

In honor of the five-hundredth anniversary, the excellent German art-book publisher Taschen has produced a facsimile with spectacular colored woodcuts. Pleasingly, the book historian Stephan Füssel, in the explanatory paperback that accompanies the two-volume facsimile, reports that in 2004, when a fire swept through the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, in Weimar, where this copy was housed, it was “rescued, undamaged, with not a second to lose, thanks to the courageous intervention of library director Dr. Michael Knoche.” I hope that Dr. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. I don’t know what the price of a calf is these days, but the price of this facsimile is sixty dollars. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. Master MS’s Garden of Eden is full of wonderful animals—a camel, a crocodile, a little toad—and in the towns everyone wears those black shoes like the ones in Brueghel paintings. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear. Even if you don’t understand German, you can sort of read them.

Among the supposedly Biblical rules that Luther pointed out could not be found in the Bible was the requirement of priestly celibacy. Well before the Diet of Worms, Luther began advising priests to marry. He said that he would marry, too, if he did not expect, every day, to be executed for heresy. One wonders. But in 1525 he was called upon to help a group of twelve nuns who had just fled a Cistercian convent, an action that was related to his reforms. Part of his duty to these women, he felt, was to return them to their families or to find husbands for them. At the end, one was left, a twenty-six-year-old girl named Katharina von Bora, the daughter of a poor, albeit noble, country family. Luther didn’t want her, he said—he found her “proud”—but she wanted him. She was the one who proposed. And though, as he told a friend, he felt no “burning” for her, he formed with her a marriage that is probably the happiest story in any account of his life.

One crucial factor was her skill in household management. The Luthers lived in the so-called Black Monastery, which had been Wittenberg’s Augustinian monastery—that is, Luther’s old home as a friar—before the place emptied out as a result of the reformer’s actions. (One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on.) It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. Käthe, as Luther called her, made it livable, and not just for her immediate family. Between ten and twenty students lodged there, and the household took in many others as well: four children of Luther’s dead sister Margarete, plus four more orphaned children from both sides of the family, plus a large family fleeing the plague. A friend of the reformer, writing to an acquaintance journeying to Wittenberg, warned him on no account to stay with the Luthers if he valued peace and quiet. The refectory table seated between thirty-five and fifty, and Käthe, having acquired a large market garden and a considerable amount of livestock (pigs, goats), and now supervising a staff of up to ten employees (maids, a cook, a swineherd, et al.), fed them all. She also handled the family’s finances, and at times had to economize carefully. Luther would accept no money for his writings, on which he could have profited hugely, and he would not allow students to pay to attend his lectures, as was the custom.

Luther appreciated the sheer increase in his physical comfort. When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man. More important, he began to take women seriously. He objects, in a lecture, to coitus interruptus, the most common form of birth control at the time, on the ground that it is frustrating for women. When he was away from home, he wrote Käthe affectionate letters, with such salutations as “Most holy Frau Doctor” and “To the hands and feet of my dear housewife.”

Among Käthe’s virtues was fertility. Every year or so for eight years, she produced a child—six in all, of whom four survived to adulthood—and Luther loved these children. He even allowed them to play in his study while he was working. Of five-year-old Hans, his firstborn, he wrote, “When I’m writing or doing something else, my Hans sings a little tune for me. If he becomes too noisy and I rebuke him for it, he continues to sing but does it more privately and with a certain awe and uneasiness.” That scene, which comes from “ Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval ” (Oxford), by the German historian Heinz Schilling, seems to me impossible to improve upon as a portrait of what it must have been like for Luther to have a little boy, and for a little boy to have Luther as a father. Luther was not a lenient parent—he used the whip when he felt he needed to, and poor Hans was sent to the university at the age of seven—but when, on his travels, the reformer passed through a town that was having a fair he liked to buy presents for the children. In 1536, when he went to the Diet of Augsburg, another important convocation, he kept a picture of his favorite child, Magdalene, on the wall of his chamber. Magdalene died at thirteen. Schilling again produces a telling scene. Magdalene is nearing the end; Luther is holding her. He says he knows she would like to stay with her father, but, he adds, “Are you also glad to go to your father in heaven?” She died in his arms. How touching that he could find this common-sense way to comfort her, and also that he seems to feel that Heaven is right above their heads, with one father holding out a hand to take to himself the other’s child.

One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies. When Hans finally learned to bend his knees and relieve himself on the floor, Luther rejoiced, reporting to a friend that the child had “crapped in every corner of the room.” I wonder who cleaned that up—not Luther, I would guess—but it is hard not to feel some of his pleasure. Sixteenth-century Germans were not, in the main, dainty of thought or speech. A representative of the Vatican once claimed that Luther was conceived when the Devil raped his mother in an outhouse. That detail comes from Eric Metaxas’s book, which is full of vulgar stories, not that one has to look far for vulgar stories in Luther’s life. My favorite (reported in Erikson’s book) is a comment that Luther made at the dinner table while in the grip of a depression. “I am like a ripe shit,” he said, “and the world is a gigantic asshole. We will both probably let go of each other soon.” It takes you a minute to realize that Luther is saying that he feels he is dying. And then you want to congratulate him on the sheer zest, the proto-surrealist nuttiness, of his metaphor. He may feel as though he’s dying, but he’s having a good time feeling it.

The group on which Luther expended his most notorious denunciations was not the Roman Catholic clergy but the Jews. His sentiments were widely shared. In the words of Heinz Schilling, “Late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews.” But Luther despised them dementedly, ecstatically. In his 1543 treatise “On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of Christ,” he imagines the Devil stuffing the Jews’ orifices with filth: “He stuffs and squirts them so full, that it overflows and swims out of every place, pure Devil’s filth, yes, it tastes so good to their hearts, and they guzzle it like sows.” Witness the death of Judas Iscariot, he adds: “When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss . . . and afterwards together they ate the shit.” The Jews’ synagogues should be burned down, he wrote; their houses should be destroyed. He did not recommend that they be killed, but he did say that Christians had no moral responsibilities to them, which amounts to much the same thing.

This is hair-raising, but what makes Luther’s anti-Semitism most disturbing is not its extremity (which, by sounding so crazy, diminishes its power). It is the fact that the country of which he is a national hero did indeed, quite recently, exterminate six million Jews. Hence the formula “ From Luther to Hitler ,” popularized by William Montgomery McGovern’s 1941 book of that title—the notion that Luther laid the groundwork for the slaughter. Those who have wished to defend him have pointed out that his earlier writings, such as the 1523 pamphlet “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” are much more conciliatory in tone. He seemed to regret that, as he put it, Christians had “dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs.” But making excuses for Luther on the basis of his earlier, more temperate writings does not really work. As scholars have been able to show, Luther was gentler early on because he was hoping to persuade the Jews to convert. When they failed to do so, he unleashed his full fury, more violent now because he believed that the comparative mildness of his earlier writings may have been partly responsible for their refusal.

Luther’s anti-Semitism would be a moral problem under any circumstances. People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. But when one adds the historical factor—that, in Luther’s case, the judgment is being made five centuries after the event—we hit a brick wall. At the Nuremberg trials, in 1946, Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of the Jew-baiting newspaper Der Stürmer , quoted Luther as the source of his beliefs and said that if he was going to be blamed Luther would have to be blamed as well. But, in the words of Thomas Kaufmann, a professor of church history at the University of Göttingen, “The Nuremberg judges sat in judgment over the mass murderers of the twentieth century, not over the delusions of a misguided sixteenth-century theology professor. . . . Another judge must judge Luther.” How fortunate to be able to believe that such a judge will come, and have an answer.

Luther lived to what, in the sixteenth century, was an old age, sixty-two, but the years were not kind to him. Actually, he lived most of his life in turmoil. When he was young, there were the Anfechtungen . Then, once he issued the theses and began his movement, he had to struggle not just with the right, the Roman Church, but with the left—the Schwärmer (fanatics), as he called them, the people who felt that he hadn’t gone far enough. He spent days and weeks in pamphlet wars over matters that, today, have to be patiently explained to us, they seem so remote. Did Communion involve transubstantiation, or was Jesus physically present from the start of the rite? Luther, a “Real Presence” man, said the latter. Should people be baptized soon after they are born, as Luther said, or when they are adults, as the Anabaptists claimed?

When Luther was young, he was good at friendship. He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him. (Hence the fifty-seat dinner table.) As he grew older, he changed. He found that he could easily discard friends, even old friends, even his once beloved confessor, Staupitz. People who had dealings with the movement found themselves going around him if they could, usually to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Always sharp-tongued, Luther now lost all restraint, writing in a treatise that Pope Paul III was a sodomite and a transvestite—no surprise, he added, when you considered that all popes, since the beginnings of the Church, were full of devils and vomited and farted and defecated devils. This starts to sound like his attacks on the Jews.

His health declined. He had dizzy spells, bleeding hemorrhoids, constipation, urine retention, gout, kidney stones. To balance his “humors,” the surgeon made a hole, or “fontanelle,” in a vein in his leg, and it was kept open. Whatever this did for his humors, it meant that he could no longer walk to the church or the university. He had to be taken in a cart. He suffered disabling depressions. “I have lost Christ completely,” he wrote to Melanchthon. From a man of his temperament and convictions, this is a terrible statement.

In early 1546, he had to go to the town of his birth, Eisleben, to settle a dispute. It was January, and the roads were bad. Tellingly, he took all three of his sons with him. He said the trip might be the death of him, and he was right. He died in mid-February. Appropriately, in view of his devotion to the scatological, his corpse was given an enema, in the hope that this would revive him. It didn’t. After sermons in Eisleben, the coffin was driven back to Wittenberg, with an honor guard of forty-five men on horseback. Bells tolled in every village along the way. Luther was buried in the Castle Church, on whose door he was said to have nailed his theses.

Although his resting place evokes his most momentous act, it also highlights the intensely local nature of the life he led. The transformations he set in motion were incidental to his struggles, which remained irreducibly personal. His goal was not to usher in modernity but simply to make religion religious again. Heinz Schilling writes, “Just when the lustre of religion threatened to be outdone by the atheistic and political brilliance of the secularized Renaissance papacy, the Wittenberg monk defined humankind’s relationship to God anew and gave back to religion its existential plausibility.” Lyndal Roper thinks much the same. She quotes Luther saying that the Church’s sacraments “are not fulfilled when they are taking place but when they are being believed.” All he asked for was sincerity, but this made a great difference. ♦

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Famous Speech Almost Didn’t Have the Phrase “I Have a Dream”

After staying up until 4 a.m. to craft a speech he hoped would have the same impact as the Gettysburg Address, MLK went off-script for his most iconic words.

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The best-laid plans are often better off ignored—at least that was the case with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

Widely regarded as one of the world’s most “transformative and influential” speeches alongside Abraham Lincoln ’s 1863 Gettysburg Address and Winston Churchill ’s 1940 “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech , the impact of King’s words that hot summer afternoon in Washington D.C. struck a chord with civil rights advocates near and far and became a powerful rallying cry.

King’s speech added fuel to the ongoing movement for racial equality. Its impact helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , outlawing racial segregation in the United States.

But those four famous words almost didn’t make it into the speech.

King wanted the speech to be “like the Gettysburg Address”

Before he stepped up to the podium that day, King was already known on the national stage for his civil rights work. He had already been a leader in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and the Greensboro sit-in movement in 1960 and was known for his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail , where he was taken after a peaceful demonstration.

The Baptist minister, who was also the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was known as a powerful orator, but the bulk of his audience had been within the Black community. Fellow civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin had reached out to him and other prominent figures in the movement to organize the march followed by three hours of speeches.

The three major television networks at the time—ABC, CBS, and NBC—had all promised to cover the event, so King knew the stakes were high. Even though he was limited to five minutes, his goal was clear: To make a speech with impact on the nation “like the Gettysburg address.”

He confided in a team of trusted advisors

To carefully craft the right words, King turned to his inner circle. Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones, two of his advisers, wrote the first draft. “When it came to my speech drafts, [King] often acted like an interior designer,” Jones said, according to The Guardian . “I would deliver four strong walls, and he would use his God-given abilities to furnish the place so it felt like home.”

Even though they knew the importance of the speech, they were only able to gather as a group at the Willard Hotel the evening before the speech. “We met in the lobby rather than in a suite, under the assumption that the lobby would be harder to wiretap,” Jones wrote in The Washington Post . “It was with this odd start, hiding in plain sight, that 12 hours before the March on Washington began, Martin gathered with a small group of advisers to hammer out the themes of his speech.”

Even though King was happy with the draft, he had wanted to get as much input as possible. “So that evening he had a cross-section of advisers present to fill any blind spots,” Jones wrote. “Cleveland Robinson, Walter Fauntroy, Bernard Lee, Ralph Abernathy , Lawrence Reddick, and I joined him, along with Wyatt Walker and Bayard Rustin , who were in and out of our deliberations.”

Of course, everyone had their own take, which became a challenge to juggle. “As we ate sandwiches, our suggestions tumbled out,” Jones remembers. “Cleve, Lawrence, and I saw the speech as an opportunity to stake an ideological and political marker in the debate over civil rights and segregation. Others were more inclined for Martin to deliver a sort of church sermon, steeped in parables and Bible quotes. Some, however, worried that biblical language would obfuscate the real message—reform of the legal system. And still others wanted Martin to direct his remarks to the students, Black and white, who would be marching that day.”

“I have a dream” was originally cut from the speech

The idea of the “dream” had actually been one that King long talked about, almost like a theme throughout his previous speeches. Walker had the strongest opinion: “Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream.’ It’s trite, it’s cliche. You’ve used it too many times already.”

Respecting his view, the mention of the dream was cut from the speech. At 4 a.m., King finally went to bed. “I am now going upstairs to my room to counsel with my Lord,” he said, according to The Guardian . “I will see you all tomorrow.”

“It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment”

While everything was meticulously planned, the organizers still worried there might not be the turnout they hoped for. After all, they set a goal of 100,000 to attend the March on Washington.

But on August 28—despite the heat in the nation’s capital, which reached 87 degrees Fahrenheit with uncomfortable humidity—people started showing up en masse. Among them were notable names: Josephine Baker , Marlon Brando , Harry Belafonte , Sammy Davis Jr. , James Garner , Charlton Heston, Paul Newman , and Sidney Poitier .

“It was truly staggering. Estimates vary widely, depending on the agenda of who was keeping count, but those of us who were involved in planning the March put the number at a minimum of 250,000,” Jones wrote in his book Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation . “They showed up to connect with the Movement, to draw strength from the speakers and from each other.”

By the time it was King’s turn, some people had already headed out because of the stifling heat. But nothing was holding him back from his moment on the national stage. “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,” he first addressed the crowd.

Then, much like the Lincoln speech he sought inspiration from that started “Four score and seven years ago,” King said “Five score years ago,” and highlighted the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation . “But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free,” he continued, before describing the state of African American life in the United States.

Then he moved into the purpose of the march: “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, Black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment,” he continued, emphasizing why it was essential for imminent action. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

A gospel singer prompted King to say “I have a dream”

While his words were impactful, they didn’t have the tremendous punch he was hoping for. But then gospel singer Mahalia Jackson , who had sung “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned” and was close to King, instinctively shouted out, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.”

Throwing the script out the window, he turned to his dream.

“Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he started before launching into his most famous passage:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

Building up a cadence that had the crowd engaged and enthused, he concluded: “And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

King knew that abandoning his manuscript created the strongest impact

Looking back on the day, Jones notes a shift as soon King threw all the prepared remarks out the window: “When he was reading from his text, he stood like a lecturer. But from the moment he set that text aside, he took on the stance of a Baptist preacher.” And that was the kind of messaging America needed to hear.

Even King looked back on all the long hours preparing and realized that nothing resonated more than reading a crowd and trusting his instinct.

“I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point,” helater said. “The audience response was wonderful that day… and all of a sudden this thing came to me that… I’d used many times before… ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here… I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”

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“You cannot, you cannot”: How Martin Luther King Convinced One Star Trek Legend Not to Quit The Original Series

Nichelle Nichols almost quite Star Trek: The Original Series. However, Martin Luther King convinced her to change her mind.

• Nichelle Nichols almost left Star Trek: The Original Series for Broadway.
• However, her mind was swayed after Martin Luther King told her that he was a big fan of hers.
• When she told him that she wanted to leave, he convinced her to stay in the series.

Martin Luther King’s impact on the political landscape of the United States of America and the world as a whole cannot be measured. Being influential in every way possible, his activism and political viewpoints shaped the country into what it is today, making a significant contribution to the betterment of the treatment of people of color. However, as history would have it, civil rights wasn’t the only way that he changed lives.

It would seem that on his days off, he would be out in the world, inspiring actors into not quitting their jobs. The legendary actress, Nichelle Nichols had her life completely changed when King inspired her to not quit Star Trek: The Original Series.

Martin Luther King—The No. 1 Nichelle Nichols Fan?

Nichelle Nichols’s contribution to the big screen cannot be understated. The actress played the iconic role of Nyota Uhura, and she was one of the first black characters to not follow a stereotype in popular culture. Having complexities and a personality that did not follow any mold, she created a new standard for writers when they were writing characters of color.

Long before her passing , Nichols gave an interview with NPR , where she revealed quite an interesting piece of information about her time in Star Trek: The Original Series . The actress was once attending a fundraiser for the NAACP, where she was told that she would be meeting her biggest fan ever.

I remember thinking, ‘whoever the fan is, is going to have to wait. Because Dr. King — Dr. Martin Luther King, my leader! — is walking toward me!’

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To her surprise, she was met with the legendary Martin Luther King . Interestingly enough, the activist ended up complimenting her on the character that she crafted in the hit series. She then tried to talk to him about what he was most well known for, stating that she wished that she could march with him for their cause.

He complimented me on the manner in which I’d created the character. I thanked him, and I think I said something like, ‘Dr. King, I wish I could be out there marching with you.’ He said, ‘no, no, no. No, you don’t understand… You are marching. You are reflecting what we are fighting for.’

However, he told her that she did not need to as she was making a lot of difference with her character. Being the personification of what he was fighting for, he told her that she was playing a character that they had been desperately trying to show the world.

Martin Luther King Would Not Let Nichelle Nichols Leave

While Martin Luther King was telling Nichelle Nichols all these niceties, he did not know that the actress had recently had a conversation with the creator of Star Trek: The Original Series about quitting. She wanted to pursue other professional opportunities and try her hand at Broadway. However, the showrunner, Gene Roddenberry, had told her to think about it for a weekend before taking such a big decision.

I said, ‘Well, I told Gene just yesterday that I’m going to leave the show after the first year because I’ve been offered…’ — and he stopped me and said: ‘You cannot do that.’ And I was stunned. He said, ‘Don’t you understand what this man has achieved? For the first time, we are being seen the world over as we should be seen.’ He says, ‘Do you understand that this is the only show that my wife Coretta and I will allow our little children to stay up and watch?’ I was speechless.’

Oddly enough, she ended up having her encounter with King during that very weekend. As the activist was telling her how big of an impact she was having, she tried to tell him about her decision to quit the series. However, before she could finish her sentence, he told her not to go through with it.

You cannot, you cannot…for the first time on television, we will be seen as we should be seen every day, as intelligent, quality, beautiful people who can sing dance, and can go to space, who are professors, lawyers.

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In a separate interview , she mentioned that he immediately told her that she could not leave the role when she was making such a big difference to Hollywood by simply being a part of the series. She was helping the world see people of color in a completely new light; being seen as human rather than a construct or a stereotype.

Such big words coming from someone as influential as King made Nichols change her mind and rethink her decision. It is safe to say that fans are very glad that she did not leave the series when she had planned to.

Star Trek: The Original Series is available for streaming on Paramount+.

Martin Luther King Jr. Nichelle Nichols

Written by Ananya Godboley

A poet and art enthusiast, Ananya Godboley is a striving academic who is pursuing a career in Criminal Psychology, currently doing an undergrad degree in Psychology. Passionate about History, Philosophy and Literature, she loves to learn about new and interesting subjects. A writer for FandomWire with over 1000 published articles, she adores all things superhero and Taylor Swift.

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