Martin Luther King Impact

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In 1816, the third president of the United States, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, and one of our most influential founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, “When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.” (Epstein 291) This is the same pioneer for human rights that within the Declaration of Independence declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence – Text Transcript) However, it is not until a century later that the American people start the movement towards practicing what their founding fathers preached.…show more content…
The result of this landmark order was a mobilization of efforts in obtaining equal rights for blacks, once and for all. Martin Luther King, quite possibly the most influential figure in the civil rights movement, has become a national icon in the history of modern American liberalism. A Baptist minister and organizer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King was profoundly affected by Mahatma Gandhi’s success with non-violent activism. On a trip to India in 1959, King deepened his understanding of non-violent resistance and described it as, “the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.” (King 134) Due to the fact that Martin Luther King chose to use non-violent protests and social activism as his weapon and not an actual weapon, he is considered to be one of the leaders of the more conservative leaders of the civil rights movement. This more conservative approach to attaining civil rights tried to achieve their goals through spreading awareness and winning legislative…show more content…
The paper’s radical stances, incendiary language and exclusive coverage of news pertaining to black injustices resulted in the paper quickly becoming the largest black newspaper in the U.S. During the peak years of the Black Panther Party, the dissident newspaper focused on five major topics: police brutality, violence as self-defense, economics as the most serious form of oppression, Black American genocide by the federal government, and the need to resurrect black manhood (Streitmatter 224). The newspaper sought to stop racial police brutality through a combination of anger driven essays and actual fact-based news stories by residents of black neighborhoods all across the country. Their forceful advocacy brought about the usage of “pig” as a derogatory synonym for “policeman” as well as the idea that only police officers who had been raised in the black ghetto should be allowed to patrol there (Streitmatter 225). As a stark contrast to Martin Luther King’s nonviolence, the more radical Black Panther’s often quoted Malcolm X’s mantra: “The time has come to fight back in self-defense whenever and wherever the black man is being unjustly and unlawfully attacked. If the government thinks
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