Martin Luther King Jr.
The Baptist minister who made nonviolent mass protest work against American segregation, and whose victory Washington then spent decades advertising abroad.
Martin Luther King Jr. was twenty-six years old and a year into his first pastorate when Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955. He was chosen to lead the resulting bus boycott partly because he was new in town and had not yet made enemies. The boycott lasted 381 days, cost the city's transit system most of its revenue, and ended with a Supreme Court ruling against segregated buses. King was thirty-nine when he was shot dead on a motel balcony in Memphis in 1968.
In the thirteen years between, he did something more specific than being an inspiring speaker. He and the movement around him worked out a method.
The method
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in 1957, treated nonviolent direct action as a technique with a mechanism, not a moral gesture. The mechanism required an opponent who would respond brutally in front of cameras.
Birmingham in 1963 is the clearest case. The city was chosen precisely because its police commissioner, Bull Connor, could be relied upon to use dogs and fire hoses on children, and because national television would carry it. The campaign was not a plea to Alabama, which was not listening. It was a plea to the rest of the country and to a federal government that preferred not to act, and it worked: the images produced a federal civil rights bill within months.
King set the reasoning out in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in the margins of a newspaper in response to white clergymen urging patience. It contains the movement's sharpest political argument, that the greater obstacle was not the open racist but the moderate who preferred order to justice and kept counseling delay, and the observation that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor and must be demanded.
Washington, August 1963
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom brought a quarter of a million people to the Mall. King's prepared text was competent. The passage everyone remembers, beginning I have a dream, was largely improvised after the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out to him to tell them about the dream.
The Civil Rights Act followed in 1964, outlawing segregation in public accommodations and employment discrimination. King received the Nobel Peace Prize that year at thirty-five. The Selma marches in 1965, and the beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, produced the Voting Rights Act, which finally gave federal enforcement to a right that had existed on paper since 1870 and been nullified in practice across the South ever since.
The Cold War dimension
There is a geopolitical layer that is easy to miss and that the movement understood perfectly.
American segregation was a serious foreign policy liability. Soviet propaganda used it relentlessly, newly independent African and Asian states noticed it, and African diplomats in Washington were refused service in restaurants on the road to the capital. The State Department filed briefs supporting desegregation on explicitly national-security grounds. Some historians argue the Cold War is a substantial part of why federal action finally came when it did.
This cut both ways. The same logic that made the government want the problem solved made it want the solution to look orderly, and King was under constant FBI surveillance and harassment, including a notorious anonymous letter urging him to kill himself.
The last years, and the echo
The King of the last three years is not the one on the commemorative stamps. He came out against the Vietnam War in a speech at Riverside Church exactly a year before his death, calling his own government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, and lost much of his establishment support for it. He turned to economic questions, launching a Poor People's Campaign, and was in Memphis supporting a sanitation workers' strike when he was killed.
That later King is routinely sanded off. The version preserved in public memory is the one who dreamed of children judged by character, and not the one who said that a nation spending more on military defense than on social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
The reason he matters beyond the United States is that the method traveled. He had taken it from Gandhi and adapted it, and it went on to Northern Ireland's civil rights marches, to South Africa, to Eastern Europe in 1989, and to every movement since that has calculated that visible, disciplined restraint in the face of visible force is the strongest weapon the weak possess.