Martin Luther King et les droits civiques

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was an American Baptist minister and the most famous leader of the civil rights movement, the struggle of African Americans for equality in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 15 January 1929, he became a pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. Inspired by Gandhi, he chose non-violence: marches, boycotts, sit-ins and speeches instead of weapons.

Premières victoires avant King : en 1954, la Cour suprême (Brown v. Board of Education) déclare la ségrégation scolaire unconstitutional. En 1957, neuf élèves noirs, les Little Rock Nine, entrent dans un lycée blanc de l'Arkansas sous la protection de l'armée. En 1960, Ruby Bridges, six ans, est la première enfant noire d'une école blanche de La Nouvelle-Orléans.

On 1 December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. The police arrested her. Four days later, the Black community started a boycott of the buses: for 381 days, 40,000 people walked, cycled or shared cars. The young pastor Martin Luther King led the boycott.

In November 1956, the Supreme Court declared bus segregation illegal. The boycott ended on 20 December 1956: it was the first great victory of the movement, and King became famous across the country.

In spring 1963, King organised peaceful marches in Birmingham, Alabama, the most segregated city in the country. The police used dogs and fire hoses against the demonstrators, even children; the images shocked the world. King was jailed and wrote his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.

On 28 August 1963, about 250,000 people took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In front of the Lincoln Memorial, King gave his most famous speech, « I have a dream »: he dreamed that his four children would one day live in a nation where they would be judged « not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character ».

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which banned segregation in public places. The same year, at 35, King received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1965, after the marches from Selma to Montgomery, the Voting Rights Act protected African Americans' right to vote.

On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he supported a strike of dustmen. He was 39. Since 1986, the United States has celebrated Martin Luther King Day on the third Monday of January.