Monday Morning Quote – Martin Luther King, Jr. on Not Bending Your Back

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, today’s Monday Morning Quote is from the man himself—the man with a dream that spearheaded the forward movement of civil rights in America, an activist, clergyman and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent. - Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil Rights Activist and Renowned Orator

Heavily influenced by the philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi and other advocates of nonviolent resistance, Martin Luther King, Jr. employed mass civil disobedience to bring racial discrimination and segregation to the forefront of American politics during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Among his more significant acts of civil disobedience is the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. At the time, the buses in Montgomery, Alabama were segregated: white people sat up front, and black people were forced to sit in back. If a bus was full, the people in the foremost row of the so-called “colored section” were required to relinquish their seats to any new white passengers who boarded the vehicle. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was triggered by the arrest of Rosa Parks, a local black woman, who refused to give up her bus seat for a white man. When the driver threatened to call the police on her, Parks responded, “You may do that.” And he did.

In reaction to Parks’ arrest, Martin Luther King, Jr. was appointed by local ministers to lead the boycott in which a majority of Montgomery’s black community members refused to take public transit. Led by King, the boycotters persisted in their protest for more than a year, and because the majority of the bus system’s paying customers in Montgomery were black, the public transit system shouldered huge losses throughout the duration of the boycott. This eventually led to a Supreme Court ruling in 1956 in which the segregation laws in Alabama were deemed unconstitutional.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott represents only a small fraction of what Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved for American civil rights during his lifetime. Before his assassination in 1968, King’s devotion to equality eventually helped bring about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed acts of racial and gender-based discrimination in America, and brought us one step closer to letting freedom ring.

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