B2-36 · “I Have a Dream”: The Civil Rights Movement

"I Have a Dream": The Civil Rights Movement

On August 28, 1963, about 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Near the end of the day, a 34-year-old Baptist minister from Atlanta put aside his notes and began to speak from the heart. "I have a dream," said Martin Luther King Jr., "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." It became one of the most famous speeches in history.

A divided country

To understand why the speech mattered so much, we have to go back almost a hundred years. Slavery had been abolished in 1865, after the Civil War, but in the Southern states new laws soon separated Black and white Americans. These so-called "Jim Crow" laws meant separate schools, separate restaurants, separate seats on buses and even separate drinking fountains. Black citizens had the right to vote on paper, but in practice they were often prevented from voting by unfair tests, special taxes and violence.

In 1954, the Supreme Court decided in the case Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools for Black and white children were unconstitutional. Many Southern states, however, refused to change. In 1957, nine Black students needed soldiers to protect them on their way into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

One woman on a bus

The movement is often said to have begun with a quiet act of courage. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. She was arrested. In response, Black residents of Montgomery stopped using the city buses. The boycott lasted 381 days, and many people walked miles to work every day. It ended when the courts ruled that segregation on buses was illegal. The young minister who led the boycott was Martin Luther King Jr.

The power of nonviolence

King was inspired by the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. He believed that injustice should be fought without violence, through marches, boycotts and peaceful protests, even when protesters were attacked. In 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, police used fire hoses and dogs against marching children and teenagers. When the pictures appeared on television, many Americans who had ignored the problem were shocked.

Students also played a key role. In 1960, four Black college students sat down at a "whites only" lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave until they were served. Within weeks, similar "sit-ins" had spread to dozens of cities.

Victories and a price

The movement achieved historic changes. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in public places and at work, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed many of the barriers that had kept Black citizens from voting. In 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The price, however, was high. Many activists were beaten, imprisoned or killed. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old.

An unfinished dream?

Today, the third Monday in January is a federal holiday in King's honor, and in 2008 Americans elected their first Black president, Barack Obama. Yet many people point out that inequality has not disappeared: there are still big differences in wealth, education and treatment by the police. The debate about how far the dream has come true continues. But almost everyone agrees that a handful of brave people – a seamstress on a bus, students at a lunch counter, a minister with a dream – changed the history of their country without firing a single shot.