High School Essay on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Hi Kazakhstan friends.  This is Gavin Towns, Erin Towns' son.  I had to write a paper for my US History class talking about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The assignment was to create a design for a new $35 Dollar Bill for my history teacher and write a biography about someone who should be on the bill.  I chose Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because he showed great leadership for the African American community, fought for what he believed in using non-violence, showed great courage, and stopped at nothing to achieve his goals.

You study him in Kazakhstan so I am sharing this with you.

Here is my essay:

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deserves to be on the $35 dollar bill because he changed history for millions of African Americans who were treated like they did not belong in this country.  He showed great leadership for the African American community, fought for what he believed in using non-violence, showed great courage, and stopped at nothing to achieve his goals.

Before the Civil Rights Movement, life for African Americans was bad.  After the Civil War, African Americans had the right to vote, but were targets of groups in the south like the Klu Klux Klan.  Most African Americans lived in poverty as sharecroppers and people who left the south came to cities like Chicago and were only allowed to settle in certain areas of the city in bad housing and bad land.  Jobs were not good. Schools were not good.

In the mid 1900’s Segregation was really bad. African Americans had different bathrooms than whites, different housing that was bad compared to whites, jobs that didn’t pay a lot, schools that were not as good as white schools, and public transportation that they had to ride in back.  Lynching was the worst. Lynching is killing someone for something they supposedly did without a legal trial. According to a report called “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” by a group called the Equal Justice Initiative, “4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 800 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.”   Even in some states they passed laws to segregate African Americans. With the children going to different schools, 17 states passed this law back in the 1900’s. In Maryland they made African Americans ride different train cars.

According to Wikipedia, Dr. King’s start to making a difference was in high school were he was part of his debate team and was well known for his public speaking. When Dr. King was thirteen he was the youngest assistant manager for a newspaper out of Atlanta. When Dr. King was 18 he entered the ministry and promised that he would be a rational minister with respecting ideas and even social protests. In 1948 he graduated from Morehouse college with a degree in sociology, but he wanted to keep his education moving forward. He attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. While attending he was elected student body president. He then began his doctoral studies at Boston University and graduated in the year of 1955.   He became a Baptist Minister and head of an organization called The Southern Christian Leadership Conference that tried to bring together groups of African Americans who wanted to change things and stop segregation and violence.

Martin Luther King Jr was a great leader, for example in his “ I Have A Dream” speech he showed great leadership.   What made him a great leader was how smart he was and how much he cared about other people. People followed him because they knew he could change lives forever and make a difference in the world. He made really good speeches that influenced people to do something.   His iconic “I Have A Dream” speech called for an end to racism and called people to follow, “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” This protest that Dr. King organized was a non-violent protest on Washington DC that included over 250,000 people demanding equal jobs.     

Dr. King was a non-violent protester.  The Montgomery bus boycott was the first organized large scale African American demonstration against segregation, the best part of this demonstration was the use of boycott or refusal to ride or move seats. Rosa parks also followed the ways of Dr. King when arrested Rosa parks did not act violently. Another example is the march over the bridge in Selma Alabama to get to Montgomery for voting rights.  Even when the protesters met the police who beat them and made dogs attack them, followers of King were told to not react with violence. According to an article on History, entitled, “Remembering Selma,” they faced a line of police, white people with confederate flags, and police on horseback who attacked.  They stood their ground. And did not fight back. This was because of Dr. King’s ideas about non-violence. This was because of a paper called  "A Statement to the South and Nation," Issued by the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, that “encouraged black Americans ‘to seek justice and reject all injustice’ and to dedicate themselves to the principle of nonviolence ‘no matter how great the provocation.’”

The thing that most people respect about Martin Luther King Jr was his courage in the face of absolute brutality.  Dr. King taught love would defeat hate. In a book he wrote in 1963 titled, Strength to Love, he wrote,  “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”  According to history.com, “Dr. King was arrested 29 times and escaped an assassination attempt ten years before he was killed.”  He marched anyway. He kept going. Senator Robert Kennedy was the man who told people in Indianapolis Indiana about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.  In that speech he told them, “Like Dr. King, replace that violence with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.”

I think that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the perfect person to go on a $35 dollar bill because he fought for what he believed in, using peace and love, and believed that love was the better way.  He was really really courageous, risking his life for others and leading them to make a difference.  The National African American Museum of History and Culture is in Washington D.C. and is dedicated to people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Today, African Americans have more rights than then, but still experience a lot of poverty and discrimination.  If he stopped at nothing for his goals, we can do something like that today to make things better.