Is the library closed too? :) Or are there only no classes?

Regards--
Mary Anne

PS--

I have appended a portion of the Contemporary Authors article, "Martin Luther King Jr." (Gale Group: Jan 2003; accessed through Infotrack/POWER Library, 18 Jan 03), below, in case you might be interested in why he's important enough to have school close in memory of his life and work. He was born in 1929 and was killed in 1968, making him 39 years old. Not a bad resume for such a young man...

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WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Harper, 1958.

The Measure of a Man, Christian Education Press (Philadelphia), 1959, memorial edition, Pilgrim Press, 1968.

Pilgrimage to Nonviolence (monograph; originally published in Christian Century), Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1960.

Letter from Birmingham City Jail, American Friends Service Committee, 1963, published as Letter from Birmingham Jail (also see below), Overbrook Press, 1968, reprinted, Harper, 1994.

Why We Can't Wait (includes Letter from Birmingham Jail), Harper, 1964.

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Harper, 1967, memorial edition with an introduction by wife, Coretta Scott King, Bantam, 1968 (published in England as Chaos or Community?, Hodder & Stoughton, 1968).

(Author of introduction) William Bradford Huie, Three Lives for Mississippi, New American Library, 1968.

(Contributor) John Henrik Clarke and others, editors, Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois, Beacon Press, 1970.

I've Been to the Mountaintop, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, Warner Books, 1998.

A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran, Intellectual Properties Management in association with Warner Books, 1998.

Works represented in anthologies. Contributor to periodicals, including Harper's, Nation, and Christian Century.

SPEECHES
The Montgomery Story, [San Francisco, CA], 1956.

I Have a Dream, John Henry and Mary Louise Dunn Bryant Foundation (Los Angeles), 1963.

Nobel Lecture, Harper, 1965.

Address at Valedictory Service, University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica), 1965.

The Ware Lecture, Unitarian Universalist Association (Boston), 1966.

Conscience for Change, Canadian Broadcasting Co., 1967.

Beyond Vietnam, Altoan Press, 1967.

Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam, [New York], 1967.

A Drum Major for Justice, Taurus Press, 1969.

A Testament of Hope (originally published in Playboy, January, 1969), Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1969

"Sidelights"
"We've got some difficult days ahead," civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., told a crowd gathered at Memphis's Clayborn Temple on April 3, 1968, in a speech now collected in The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. "But it really doesn't matter to me now," he continued, "because I've been to the mountaintop. . . . And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land." Uttered the day before his assassination, King's words were prophetic of his death. They were also a challenge to those he left behind to see that his "promised land" of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last twelve years of his life.
Just as important as King's dream was the way he chose to achieve it: through nonviolent resistance. He embraced nonviolence as a method for social reform after being introduced to the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi while doing graduate work at Pennsylvania's Crozer Seminary. Gandhi had led a bloodless revolution against British colonial rule in India. According to Stephen B. Oates in Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., King became "convinced that Gandhi's was the only moral and practical way for oppressed people to struggle against social injustice."

What King achieved during the little over a decade that he worked in civil rights was remarkable. "Rarely has one individual," noted Flip Schulke and Penelope O. McPhee in King Remembered, "espousing so difficult a philosophy, served as a catalyst for so much significant social change. . . . There are few men of whom it can be said their lives changed the world. But at his death the American South hardly resembled the land where King was born. In the twelve years between the Montgomery bus boycott and King's assassination, Jim Crow was legally eradicated in the South."

The first public test of King's adherence to the nonviolent philosophy came in December, 1955, when he was elected president of the Montgomery [Alabama] Improvement Association (M.I.A.), a group formed to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks, a black woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Planning to end the humiliating treatment of blacks on city bus lines, King organized a bus boycott that was to last more than a year. Despite receiving numerous threatening phone calls, being arrested, and having his home bombed, King and his boycott prevailed. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Montgomery's bus segregation laws illegal and, in December, 1956, King rode on Montgomery's first integrated bus.

"Montgomery was the soil," wrote King's widow in her autobiography, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., "in which the seed of a new theory of social action took root. Black people found in nonviolent, direct action a militant method that avoided violence but achieved dramatic confrontation which electrified and educated the whole nation."

King was soon selected president of an organization of much wider scope than the M.I.A., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.). The members of this group were black leaders from throughout the South, many of them ministers like King. Their immediate goal was for increased black voter registration in the South with an eventual elimination of segregation.

1957 found King drawn more and more into the role of national and even international spokesman for civil rights. In February a Time magazine cover story on King called him "a scholarly . . . Baptist minister . . . who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation's remarkable leaders of men." In March, he was invited to speak at the ceremonies marking the independence from Great Britain of the new African republic of Ghana.

The following year, King's first book, Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, which told the history of the boycott, was published. New York Times contributor Abel Plenn called the work "a document of far-reaching importance for present and future chroniclings of the struggle for civil rights in this country." A Times Literary Supplement writer quoted U.S. Episcopalian Bishop James Pike's reaction to the book: Stride toward Freedom "may well become a Christian classic. It is a rare combination: sound theology and ethics, and the autobiography of one of the greatest men of our time."

In 1959, two important events happened. First, King and his wife were able to make their long-awaited trip to India where they visited the sites of Gandhi's struggle against the British and met with people who had been acquainted with the Indian leader. Second, King resigned as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery so he could be closer to S.C.L.C.'s headquarters in Atlanta and devote more of his time to the civil rights effort.

King's trip to India seemed to help make up his mind to move to Atlanta. The trip greatly inspired King, as Oates observed: "He came home with a deeper understanding of nonviolence and a deep commitment as well. For him, nonviolence was no longer just a philosophy and a technique of social change; it was now a whole way of life."

Despite his adherence to the nonviolent philosophy, King was unable to avoid the bloodshed that was to follow. Near the end of 1962, he decided to focus his energies on the desegregation of Birmingham, Alabama. Alabama's capital was at that time what King called in his book Why We Can't Wait, "the most segregated city in America," but that was precisely why he had chosen it as his target.

In Why We Can't Wait King detailed the advance planning that was the key to the success of the Birmingham campaign. Most important was the training in nonviolent techniques given by the S.C.L.C.'s Leadership Training Committee to those who volunteered to participate in the demonstrations. "The focus of these training sessions," King noted in his book, "was the socio-dramas designed to prepare the demonstrators for some of the challenges they could expect to face. The harsh language and physical abuse of the police and self- appointed guardians of the law were frankly presented, along with the non-violent creed in action: to resist without bitterness; to be cursed and not reply; to be beaten and not hit back."

One of the unusual aspects of the Birmingham campaign was King's decision to use children in the demonstrations. When the protests came to a head on May 3, 1963, it was after nearly 1,000 young people had been arrested the previous day. As another wave of protestors, mostly children and teenagers, took to the streets, they were hit with jets of water from fire hoses. Police dogs were then released on the youngsters.

The photographs circulated by the media of children being beaten down by jets of water and bitten by dogs brought cries of outrage from throughout the country and the world. U.S. president John F. Kennedy sent a Justice Department representative to Birmingham to work for a peaceful solution to the problem. Within a week negotiators produced an agreement that met King's major demands, including desegregation of lunch counters, restrooms, fitting rooms, and drinking fountains in the city and the hiring of blacks in positions previously closed to them.

Although the Birmingham campaign ended in triumph for King, at the outset he was criticized for his efforts. Imprisoned at the beginning of the protest for disobeying a court injunction forbidding him from leading any demonstrations in Birmingham, King spent some of his time in jail composing an open letter answering his critics. This document, called Letter from Birmingham Jail, appeared later in his book Why We Can't Wait. Oates viewed the letter as "a classic in protest literature, the most elegant and learned expression of the goals and philosophy of the nonviolent movement ever written."

In the letter King addressed those who said that as an outsider he had no business in Birmingham. King reasoned: "I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. . . . I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

Another important event of 1963 was a massive march on Washington, D.C., which King planned together with leaders of other civil rights organizations. When the day of the march came, an estimated 250,000 people were on hand to hear King and other dignitaries speak at the march's end point, the Lincoln Memorial. While King's biographers noted that the young minister struggled all night writing words to inspire his people on this historic occasion, when his turn came to speak, he deviated from his prepared text and gave a speech that Schulke and McPhee called "the most eloquent of his career." In the speech, which contained the rhythmic repetition of the phrase "I have a dream," King painted a vision of the "promised land" of racial equality and justice for all, which he would return to often in speeches and sermons in the years to come, including his final speech in Memphis. Schulke and McPhee explained the impact of the day: "The orderly conduct of the massive march was an active tribute to [King's] philosophy of non-violence. Equally significant, his speech made his voice familiar to the world and lives today as one of the most moving orations of our time."

On January 3, 1964, King was proclaimed "Man of the Year" by Time magazine, the first black to be so honored. Later that same year, King's book, Why We Can't Wait, was published. In the book King gave his explanation of why 1963 was such a critical year for the civil rights movement. He believed that celebrations commemorating the 100-year-anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation reminded American blacks of the irony that while Lincoln made the slaves free in the nineteenth century, their twentieth- century grandchildren still did not feel free.

Reviewers generally hailed the work as an important document in the history of the civil rights movement. In Book Week, J. B. Donovan called it "a basic handbook on non-violent direct action." Critic contributor C. S. Stone praised the book's "logic and eloquence" and observed that it aimed a death blow "at two American dogmas--racial discrimination, and the even more insidious doctrine that nourishes it, gradualism."

In December of 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the twelfth American, the third black, and the youngest--he was thirty-five--person ever to receive the award. He donated the $54,600 prize to the S.C.L.C. and other civil rights groups. The Nobel Prize gave King even wider recognition as a world leader. "Overnight," commented Schulke and McPhee, "King became . . . a symbol of world peace. He knew that if the Nobel Prize was to mean anything, he must commit himself more than ever to attaining the goals of the black movement through peace."

The next two years were marked by both triumph and despair. First came King's campaign for voting rights, concentrating on a voters registration drive in Selma, Alabama. Selma would be, according to Oates, "King's finest hour." Voting rights had been a major concern of King's since as early as 1957 but, unfortunately, little progress had been made. In the country surrounding Selma, for example, only 335 of 32,700 blacks were registered voters. Various impediments to black registration, including poll taxes and complicated literacy tests, were common throughout the South.

Demonstrations continued through February and on into early March, 1965, in Selma. One day nearly 500 school children were arrested and charged with juvenile delinquency after they cut classes to show their support for King. In another incident, more than 100 adults were arrested when they picketed the county courthouse. On March 7, state troopers beat nonviolent demonstrators who were trying to march from Selma to Montgomery to present their demands to Alabama governor George Wallace.

Angered by such confrontations, King sent telegrams to religious leaders throughout the nation calling for them to meet in Selma for a "ministers' march" to Montgomery. Although some 1,500 marchers assembled, they were again turned back by a line of state troopers, but this time violence was avoided. King was elated by the show of support he received from the religious leaders from around the country who joined him in the march, but his joy soon turned to sorrow when he learned later that same day that several of the white ministers who had marched with him had been beaten by club-wielding whites. One of them died two days later.

The brutal murder of a clergyman seemed to focus the attention of the nation on Selma. Within a few days, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a televised appearance before a joint session of Congress in which he demanded passage of a voting rights bill. In the speech Johnson compared the sites of revolutionary war battles such as Concord and Lexington with their modern-day counterpart, Selma, Alabama. Although Johnson had invited King to be his special guest in the Senate gallery during the address, King declined the honor, staying instead in Selma to complete plans to again march on Montgomery. A federal judge had given his approval to the proposed Selma-to-Montgomery march and had ordered Alabama officials not to interfere. The five-day march finally took place as hundreds of federal troops stood by overseeing the safety of the marchers.

Later that year, Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law, this time with King looking on. The act made literacy tests as a requirement for voting illegal, gave the Attorney General the power to supervise federal elections in seven southern states, and urged the Attorney General to challenge the legality of poll taxes in state and local elections in four Southern states. "Political analysts," Oates observed, "almost unanimously attributed the voting act to King's Selma campaign. . . . Now, thanks to his own political sagacity, his understanding of how nonviolent, direct-action protest could stimulate corrective federal legislation, King's long crusade to gain southern Negroes the right to vote . . . was about to be realized."

By this time, King was ready to embark on his next project, moving his nonviolent campaign to the black ghettoes of the North. Chicago was chosen as his first target, but the campaign did not go the way King had planned. Rioting broke out in the city just two days after King initiated his program. He did sign an open-housing agreement with Chicago mayor Richard Daley but, according to Oates, many blacks felt it accomplished little.

Discord was beginning to be felt within the civil rights movement. King was afraid that advocates of "black power" would doom his dream of a nonviolent black revolution. In his next book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, published in 1967, he explored his differences with those using the "black power" slogan.

According to New York Times Book Review contributor Gene Roberts, while King admitted in the volume that black power leaders "foster[ed] racial pride and self- help programs," he also expressed regret that the slogan itself produced "fear among whites and [made] it more difficult to fashion a meaningful interracial political coalition. But above all, he [deplored] . . . an acceptance of violence by many in the movement."

In the Saturday Review Milton R. Knovitz noted other criticisms of the movement which King voiced in the book. King saw black power as "negative, even nihilistic in its direction," "rooted in hopelessness and pessimism," and "committed to racial--and ethical--separatism." In America, R. F. Drinan wrote, "Dr. King's analysis of the implications of the black power movement is possibly the most reasoned rejection of the concept by any major civil rights leader in the country."

Where Do We Go from Here touched on several issues that became King's major concerns during the last two years of his life. He expressed the desire to continue nonviolent demonstrations in the North, to stop the war in Vietnam, and to join underprivileged persons of all races in a coalition against poverty.

His first wish never materialized. Instead of nonviolent protest, riots broke out in Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee and more than thirty other U.S. cities between the time King finished the manuscript for the book and when it was published in late summer. By that time, King had already spoken out several times on Vietnam. His first speech to be entirely devoted to the topic was given on April 15, 1967, at a huge antiwar rally held at the United Nations Building in New York City. Even though some of King's followers begged him not to participate in antiwar activities, fearful that King's actions would antagonize the Johnson administration which had been so supportive in civil rights matters, King could not be dissuaded.

In The Trumpet of Conscience, a collection of radio addresses published posthumously, King explained why speaking out on Vietnam was so important to him. He wrote: "I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission--a commission to work harder than I ever worked before for the `brotherhood of man.' This is a calling which takes me beyond national allegiances." Commenting on King's opposition to the war, Coretta King observed that her husband's "peace activity marked incontestably a major turning point in the thinking of the nation. . . . I think history will mark his boldness in speaking out so early and eloquently--despite singularly virulent opposition--as one of his major contributions."

When King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, he was in the midst of planning his Poor People's Campaign. Plans called for recruitment and training in nonviolent techniques of 3,000 poor people from each of fifteen different parts of the country. The campaign would culminate when they were brought to Washington, D.C., to disrupt government operations until effective antipoverty legislation was enacted.

On hearing of King's death, angry blacks in 125 cities across the nation rioted. As a result, thirty people died, hundreds suffered injuries, and more than $30 million worth of property damage was incurred. But, fortunately, rioting was not the only response to his death. Accolades came from around the world as one by one world leaders paid their respects to the martyred man of peace. Eventually, King's widow and other close associates saw to it that a permanent memorial--the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday in the United States--would assure that his memory would live on forever.

In her introduction to The Trumpet of Conscience, Coretta King quoted from one of King's most famous speeches as she gave her thoughts on how she hoped future generations would remember her husband. "Remember him," she wrote, "as a man who tried to be `a drum major for justice, a drum major for peace, a drum major for righteousness.' Remember him as a man who refused to lose faith in the ultimate redemption of mankind."
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