Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King

He was born in 1929 and grew up in a family with a religious tradition. Pastor of the Baptist Church, he actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement that defended the right to vote for blacks and the abolition of segregationist laws. Towards 1957 he collaborated in the founding of the pacifist organization Southern Conference of Christian Leadership (SCLC) and promoted meetings and demonstrations always following Thoreau's principles of civil disobedience and those of Gandhi's non-violence. In the early sixties, he proposed a unity of action between his organization and others that proposed a similar fight, as was the case of the National Association for the Progress of Colored People (NAACP). In 1963, as a result of such a confluence of forces, the March on Washington took place, attended by more than 250,000 people. Luther King accompanied his written protests and his interventions in political acts with an intense involvement in pacifist actions (marches, occupations, campaigns, etc.) for which he was imprisoned and fined numerous times. To this inexhaustible activity he joined the struggles against the Vietnam War until his assassination in 1968.