9.5: Martin Luther King Jr.: “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963)

Martin Luther King Jr. is the most famous civil rights activist in American history. He was a Baptist minister with a PhD in theology and was one of the greatest orators in American history. He essentially became the face of the civil rights movement after he went to Montgomery, Alabama, to assist in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. King was important to the movement, since he provided a charismatic leader for the media to follow. His presence, and the male-dominated Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that he cofounded, often overshadowed the major role that average men and women played behind the scenes in carrying out the work of civil rights activism. (Most notably, women were central to the success of the movement, working tirelessly to organize the campaigns and marches that King helped lead.) Starting in the mid- 1950s, black men, women, and children pushed the civil rights movement forward by putting their bodies on the line in the quest for civil rights.