Martin Luther King Jr

7 Pages 1641 Words

Late in 1956 the United States Supreme Court forced desegregation of the buses. King believed that the boycott proved that "there is a new Negro in the South, with a new sense of dignity and destiny." In 1957 King became the youngest recipient of the Spingarn Medal, an award presented annually to an outstanding black person by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1958 King became president of a group later known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), formed to carry on civil-rights activities in the South. King inspired blacks throughout the South to hold peaceful sit-ins and freedom rides to protest segregatio!
n. A visit to India in 1959 gave King a long-awaited opportunity to study Gandhi's techniques of nonviolent protest. In 1960 King became copastor of his father's church in Atlanta. The next year he led a "nonviolent army" to protest discrimination in Albany, Ga. King was jailed in 1963 during a successful campaign to achieve the desegregation of many publ...