Martin Luther King, Jr. Character Analysis

Martin Luther King, Jr. was the most prominent advocate and speaker on behalf of Black civil rights in the 1950s and ‘60s. He appeared alongside Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin in their non-violent racial injustice protests. He delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech at the March on Washington organized by Randolph and Rustin. Like them, King was a biblical realist who believed that, given people’s innate sinfulness, more than education was needed to eradicate racist policies. This meant that he took an aggressive but non-violent approach to activism: he believed that non-violence would coerce the unjust to perform blatant acts of racial hatred, thereby exposing their villainy. Also, like Randolph and Rustin, King believed in staying vigilant against his own potential for becoming corrupt throughout his activism.