The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968) was the charismatic leader of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. He directed the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, which attracted scrutiny by a wary, divided nation, but his leadership and the resulting Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation brought him fame. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate nonviolent protests and delivered over 2,500 speeches addressing racial injustice, but his life was cut short by an assassin in 1968.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Michael King Sr., pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta Williams, a Spelman College graduate and former schoolteacher. King lived with his parents, a sister, and a brother in the Victorian home of his maternal grandparents.
After attending the World Baptist Alliance in Berlin in 1934, King Sr. changed his and his son's name from Michael King to Martin Luther King, after the Protestant reformist. King Sr. was inspired by Martin Luther's courage of confronting institutionalized evil.
King studied sociology and considered law school while reading voraciously. He was fascinated by Henry David Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience" and its idea of noncooperation with an unjust system. King decided that social activism was his calling and religion the best means to that end. He was ordained as a minister in February 1948, the year he graduated with a sociology degree at age 19.
In September 1948, King entered the predominately White Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania. He read works by great theologians but despaired that no philosophy was complete within itself. Then, hearing a lecture about Mahatma Gandhi, he became captivated by his concept of nonviolent resistance. King concluded that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through nonviolence, could be a powerful weapon for his people.
In 1951, King graduated at the top of his class with a Bachelor of Divinity degree. In September of that year, he enrolled in doctoral studies at Boston University's School of Theology.
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a singer studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. The couple married on June 18, 1953.
When King arrived in Montgomery to join the Dexter Avenue church, Rosa Parks, secretary of the local NAACP chapter, had been arrested for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a White man. Parks' December 1, 1955, arrest presented the perfect opportunity to make a case for desegregating the transit system.
E.D. Nixon, former head of the local NAACP chapter, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a close friend of King, contacted King and other clergymen to plan a citywide bus boycott. The group drafted demands and stipulated that no Black person would ride the buses on December 5.
That day, nearly 20,000 Black citizens refused bus rides. Because Black people comprised 90% of the passengers, most buses were empty. When the boycott ended 381 days later, Montgomery's transit system was nearly bankrupt.
On February 1959 he laid six principles, explaining that nonviolence:
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Is not a method for cowards; it does resist
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Does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding
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Is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil
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Is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back
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Avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit
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Is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice
In April 1963, King and the SCLC joined Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in a nonviolent campaign to end segregation and force Birmingham, Alabama, businesses to hire Black people. Fire hoses and vicious dogs were unleashed on the protesters by “Bull” Connor's police officers. King was thrown into jail. King spent eight days in the Birmingham jail as a result of this arrest but used the time to write "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," affirming his peaceful philosophy.
On October 14th, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War.
For his activism, he was the target of multiple assassination attempts, arrested 23 times, and surveilled and harassed by the police. In particular, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover harassed Dr. King by making him a target of COINTELPRO, a secret program where FBI agents spied on, infiltrated, and attempted to discredit "subversive" political movements.
In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an "economic bill of rights" for poor Americans.
Before the plans for the march could come to fruition, however, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee while supporting striking black sanitation workers. James Earl Rey was convicted for the murder, but speculation of government involvement has persisted for decades after his death.
MLK: SPEECHES, SERMONS, ESSAYS, & INTERVIEWS
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There are things you can do like getting certifications and learning how to interview/market yourself better. There are ceilings that don't exist for you by virtue of a degree that you should keep in mind for perspective. I know I've struggled with getting a foothold after graduating and it's a common problem.
Do you have a repertoire of projects? Any contributions to open source projects? A certification like sales force or A+ (or whatever that is)? Do you have a specialization like computational biology, cyber security, software engineering, or networking (or 3 different resumes that imply as much)? Have you read anything on the process of getting hired?
Ooh, thanks for replying. To tell the truth I am a complete and utter babby when it comes to getting a "real" job. I've had minimum wage and temporary seasonal jobs, and the reason I'm returning is because at the moment, it feels like tech or any STEM field are the ONLY industries that are hiring.
At the risk of self-doxxing, I'm in a state where I'm trying to unloser myself and I have no idea how to market myself better. I always get insecure because I know whatever I apply for, there's always hundreds of people better that are applying for the same job. Even if they're not, employers are way too picky to settle for little 'ol me, especially with the tech layoffs where they're all vying for industry vets to fill entry level roles. But if I'm being delusional please tell me that I am. Unfortunately, I don't have any projects as I completely abandoned CS after I dropped out before. I have made some very barebones things like a calculator and a weather app, but I had to follow a youtube video for every little detail, so I doubt they count. Every time I try to code on my own, I never get anything done.
However, I do have a particular interest in computational biology on account that I like biology, and I would love to pursue it. I just know that whether I like it or not, coding is an incredibly useful skill not just to get hired, but to do some stuff personally, so maybe I should look into bioinformatics programs. The one caveat is that I worry this would hurt my chances of finding jobs in either the technology or scientific industries.
I would love to learn to create some genuinely interesting, useful stuff without the enshittified aesthetic of tech you see everywhere.
The intellectual rigor of a "real" job makes it so your education far outpaces how hard you have to think 99 times out of 100. So keep in mind that you're vying for jobs where you are 110% qualified to push the red button and sometimes the blue button when it lights up wherever you go. If you can manage to beat a Zelda game without a guide, you can manage the communication and critical thinking required for an entry level job. The rest is advertising yourself as such and persuading the person talking to you (likely the manager who is responsible for some project for the company) that you're 1) not going to give them a headache when they leave you alone with the means of production 2) going to be pleasant to be around 3) going to reliably show up and get the work done. If you are babby, your main charge is to make sure that these things are true. Between having the necessary minimum qualifications and these three things, you should be able to get something going.
I'm always going to have a complex about people being "too picky to settle," but a real obstacle for a manager looking to bring someone on for a project is that they don't know whether you as a fresh graduate are going to show up drunk on the job or you're speed running self-sufficiency in any role they give you. I have seen projects, and projects that have more than enough money behind them mind you, rot from the inside out because they brought people on via nepotism who don't know up from down and don't care to learn. Necessarily, you need to show up and make them recognize that you have your eye on the ball. And, as I've been reading, this isn't sympathy for their position, it's empathy. If you're ever going to negotiate and get what you want, being antagonistic isn't going to help. You'll need to see it from their point of view, regardless of whether you agree with them.
There's no project that's going to get you between minimum wage to 2 million dollars a year that is going to bar you from using YouTube and Google as you figure shit out. It's always useful to make a YouTube project as a way of demonstrating your problem solving ability+coachability while creating a portfolio. Taking 3-5 extra hours going above and beyond the instructions and making something awesome is the cherry on top.
I couldn't personally speak on computational biology vs bioinformatics, but you should look at job postings for either one so you can rush the minimum requirements for them (even then, an interview in the place where you find out what they really need, there's every chance a job listing's requirements are faker than the conversation between the people who made it).