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THE HISTORY CAT
Unit 19: The Civil Rights Movement
1945-1970
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Birmingham Protests Lesson Plan | Grades 7-12
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, into a world that most of us cannot begin to imagine, because, thanks to people like Dr. King, that world no longer exists. Since the end of Reconstruction, white supremacists had put a lot of thought into keeping black people separate and inferior. Jim-Crow laws segregated drinking fountains, schools, parks, jail cells, restaurants, churches, buses, library books, the list goes on… But often the worst part of segregation for black people wasn’t what was written in the books. Every black person in the South had been warned by their parents on how to interact with the strange white world that could turn ugly and violent if you said or did the wrong thing. Keep your eyes down when talking to a white person, always say “yes, sir”, never argue with a white person, get off the sidewalk if a white person was walking passed you...
Walking this tightrope was exhausting and humiliating but defying it could get you arrested or killed. Every southern black person had that moment when they were forced to look into the ugly face of racism. King’s moment happened when he was on a bus returning from a school oratorical contest. Some white passengers boarded the crowded bus and King and his teacher were forced to stand in the aisle for the rest of their two-hour ride to Atlanta. The bus driver even swore at them for not moving fast enough. King never forgot that anger that burned inside him on that day.
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Civil Disobedience: Fighting Hate with Love
Every black person in the South had that moment when they were forced to stare into the ugly face of racism. King’s moment happened when he was on a bus returning from a school oratorical contest. Some white passengers boarded the crowded bus, and King and the teachers were forced to stand in the aisle for the rest of their two-hour ride to Atlanta. King never forgot the anger that burned inside him on that day. It helped shape his belief that dignity, opportunity, and full participation in American life—not separation—were the only real tools strong enough to build lasting freedom.
In 1957, King helped to create the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) with longtime friend Ralph Abernathy. Its purpose was to bring the fight against segregation throughout the South. Unlike the NAACP, who fought segregation in the courts, the SCLC was dedicated to civil disobedience, openly defying local laws that conflicted with federal laws and the U.S. Constitution.
But the SCLC was more than a protest machine. King pushed it to strengthen local communities—organizing voter registration drives, leadership workshops, and campaigns that linked integration to better schools, safer neighborhoods, and economic fairness. He argued that the country’s future depended on Black and white Americans working together, not apart, because integrated change carried more power than isolated victories.
While most of us try to avoid being arrested, King saw it as a powerful tool of civil disobedience. Time and again, King and his followers met violence with willpower. King had been inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, who had led India to independence in a 30-year fight against the British Empire by using non-violent resistance. Like Gandhi, King and his followers used prison to their advantage. King was arrested no less than 25 times, almost always for trumped-up charges like “disturbing the peace” or “trespassing.” King refused to pay the fines and instead chose to spend his time in jail.
When newspapers ran photos of police officers roughly arresting King on clearly bogus charges, this only served to gain sympathy for the movement. And the more Americans saw those images, the more they understood King’s message: that a just society couldn’t be built on segregation, fear, or intimidation, but on shared responsibility and a community strong enough to welcome everyone into its future.
Dr. Martin Luther King explains his reasons for using non-violence.
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The March on Birmingham
The year 1963 became a turning point for the Civil Rights Movement as people began putting civil disobedience into action on a scale never before seen in American history. All across the South, segregation was under attack. Organizations were springing up all over the place using King as their inspiration. Buses, schools, and lunch counters were being desegregated. It was only a matter of time before Jim Crow finally took his last vile breath. Like a wounded cat backed into a corner, segregationists went on the defensive and 1963 became one of the most violent years of the movement as segregationists struck back with everything they had to stop the tide of change.
In April, King brought the fight to the city of Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most segregated cities in America. The city of Birmingham --nicknamed 'Bombingham' because of how many black homes and churches that had been firebombed-- was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. The city leaders were so racist in fact that the KKK tried to ban a children's book because it contained pictures of white and black rabbits playing together! It has been estimated that one-third of the city leaders and police were either Klan members themselves or at least sympathetic to the group. Into this hate-filled atmosphere, the civil rights movement planned its next march.
King's SCLC trained volunteers in the methods of nonviolent protest. In small groups, they entered “whites only” areas and each time were arrested. The SCLC would bail them out and the protesters would soon be back out on the streets until they were arrested again. 95% of the 1000 marchers were arrested. To add insult to injury the students were expelled for skipping school, it took a federal court order to get them re-enrolled. As the lead agitator, King was arrested and tossed into solitary confinement. It took a call from President Kennedy himself, to get King released. However, the flood of volunteers had slowed to a trickle.
Then the unexpected happened. Students, some of them just children, stepped forwarded and volunteered to march. Reluctantly, King agreed to let them march. Malcolm X spoke out against putting children into such a dangerous situation. But 1,100 students were eagerly waiting to do their part.
On May 2, students across the city walked out of class. Many were arrested but the next day, even more, took their place. This time a line of the fireman with high-pressure hoses was waiting to repulse them. As the marchers reached Ingram Park they were ordered to turn back. Some onlookers began throwing bottles and rocks at the police. The police ordered the fire department to use high-pressure hoses to push them back. Then the police commissioner, Bull Connor, gave the order to unleash snarling German shepherds. The march had turned into chaos, but the national media was there capturing every second. Segregation had been unmasked for the whole world to see
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The Most Famous Speech in America
King’s defining moment came as he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of a crowd of 250,000 people and delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech”. On August 28, 1963, a quarter million Americans, black and white, gathered at the Washington Monument and made their way eight blocks to the Lincoln Memorial. King was the last speaker of the all-day event. He opened with the prepared speech, but everything changed when gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson shouted from the crowd “tell ‘em about the dream”.
King’s most famous part of his speech was mostly improvised on the spot. King drew from similar speeches that he had given many times before. But like a good plate of nachos, all the ingredients came together that afternoon to create a masterpiece. King spoke about his dream of one day living in a country that could set aside its differences on race and work together as brothers and sisters. He envisioned a future America where people would be judged based on their character, not their skin color and called on everyone listening to make that happen. The crowd, stretching back for a mile to the east, was electrified. Grown men cried and the cheer of the crowd rose to a roar.
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"The Most Dangerous Negro in America"
As leader of the movement to end racial injustice in America, King naturally made enemies. Not surprisingly, King faced a constant barrage of death threats from white supremacists and Klan leaders. The work he did was thankless and frustrating. Trying to change people’s attitudes is often like that. However, not all of the threats that King faced came from the Klan. The FBI and CIA began monitoring King’s activities closely after the 1963 “March on Washington.” These were the days of the “Red Scare” when communist plots were everywhere. Or at least that’s what many in the government believed.
The government bugged his hotel rooms and offices, and sent in undercover operatives to spy on SCLC activities. An FBI memo called King “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” Instead of finding evidence of anything illegal, federal agencies collected recordings, handwritten notes, travel logs—anything they could use to track his influence and the people he worked with. Agents watched who he met, what cities he visited, and even who donated to his movement.
When no proof of “un-American activities” appeared, the FBI turned to pressure tactics, using wiretaps to capture private conversations and then mailing King an anonymous letter—later linked to the Bureau—that accused him of being a “fraud” and tried to damage his reputation. The goal wasn’t law enforcement; it was control. They wanted to weaken King’s moral authority, divide the movement, and make Americans question the man whose message was changing the country.
In the end, the government’s surveillance said more about the fear inside Washington than anything King ever did. His power didn’t come from violence or conspiracy—it came from millions of ordinary people who were no longer willing to accept second-class citizenship.
One of the thousands of pages in Martin Luther King Jr's FBI file.
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The Assassination of King
Martin Luther King Jr. once had told his wife Coretta that he didn’t expect to live to see his 40th birthday. Lately, King had become obsessed, according to his friends, about his own death. It’s not hard to see why. America in the 1960s was wracked by violence. President Kennedy had been killed by an assassin’s bullet in 1963. Church bombings, police beatings, and riots were becoming a common feature in the news headlines. Dr. King didn’t know it, but when he arrived in Memphis on the night of April 3, 1968, he had less than 24 hours before his prediction was to come true. He was 39 years old.
King was in Memphis, Tennessee in his latest campaign to make poverty a national issue. Leaders of the black community in Memphis appealed to King to come and lead a march of city sanitation workers, who had just gone on strike to protest their low pay and lack of benefits. King was already busy with planning the Poor People’s Campaign, but just couldn’t say no to the plight of downtrodden workers, and so, King dropped everything and flew up from Atlanta. That night he gave his ‘Mountaintop speech’ to a small crowd of 2,000 people who had braved the bad weather to hear the famous orator speak. It would be his last public address.
As King looked out at the faces of his supporters and told them that he hoped to live a long life, but it was all up to God’s will. The next evening King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by James Earl Ray who fired his sniper rifle from the window of a rundown boarding house across the street. Ironically, the murder of the leader of the American non-violent movement sparked race riots from Los Angeles to New York that left more than 2600 people injured.
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Why It Matters
Dr. King's message of non-violence was slow to bring about change and didn’t magically transform everyone’s sense of responsibility overnight—but his method forced Americans to confront injustice they could no longer ignore. When people saw children blasted with fire hoses, peaceful marchers thrown in jail, or King himself dragged off on bogus charges, the old “that’s just how things are” excuse stopped working. It pushed many Americans—especially those who hadn’t taken a side—to realize they had a stake in what kind of country they lived in.
The ripple effect didn’t stop with the civil rights movement. King’s approach shaped how people everywhere learned to push for change—farmworkers demanding fair treatment, women fighting workplace discrimination, students marching against war, and countless others who believed that a moral stand carried more strength than a violent one. King’s legacy isn’t just the dream he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s the blueprint he left behind: ordinary people using peaceful pressure to force a country to live up to the promises it wrote on paper.
Digging Deeper
Use the article to answer the questions below.
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Why did Martin Luther King Jr. believe nonviolent protest was the best way to fight for civil rights?
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How did King’s leadership help the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
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What message did King express in his “I Have a Dream” speech?
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Why was King arrested in Birmingham, and what point did he make in his Letter from Birmingham Jail?
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Why did the FBI monitor Martin Luther King Jr., and how did the government view his activism during the Civil Rights Movement?
Copy and paste the questions onto a Word or Google Doc
Civil Rights Advice Column drops students into real Civil Rights–era problems and challenges them to choose whether Martin Luther King Jr. or the Black Panthers has the better strategy for each one. By responding to four advice-style letters and rewriting one from the opposite point of view, students see how each leader’s approach shaped the fight for justice.
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