how did martin luther king changed the world essay

Martin Luther King Essay for Students and Children

500+ Words Essay on Martin Luter King

Martin Luther King Jr. was an African-American leader in the U.S. He lost his life while performing a peaceful protest for the betterment of blacks in America. His real name was Michael King Jr. He completed his studies and attained a Ph.D. After that, he joined the American Civil Right Movement. He was among one of the great men who dedicated their life for the community.

Reason for Martin Luther King to be famous

There are two reasons for someone to be famous either he is a good man or a very bad person. Martin Luther King was among the good one who dedicated his life to the community. Martin Luther King was also known as MLK Jr. He gained popularity after he became the leader and spokesperson of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Martin Luther King was an American activist, minister, and humanitarian. Also, he had worked for several other causes and actively participated in many protests and boycotts. He was a peaceful man that has faith in Christian beliefs and non-violence. Also, his inspiration for them was the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. For his work in the field of civil rights, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was a great speaker that motivated the blacks to protest using non-violence. Also, he uses peaceful strategies like a boycott, protest march , and sit-ins, etc. for protests against the government.

Impact of King

King is one of the renowned leaders of the African-American who worked for the welfare of his community throughout his life. He was very famous among the community and is the strongest voice of the community. King and his fellow companies and peaceful protesters forced the government several times to bend their laws. Also, kings’ life made a seismic impact on life and thinking of the blacks. He was among one of the great leaders of the era.

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Humanitarian and civil rights work

As we know that King was a civic leader . Also, he has taken part in many civil right campaigns and boycotts like the Bus Boycott, Voting Rights and the most famous March on Washington. In this march along with more than 200,000 people, he marched towards Washington for human right. Also, it’s the largest human right campaign in U.S.A. history. During the protest, he gave a speech named “I Have a Dream” which is history’s one of the renowned speeches.

Death and memorial

During his life working as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement he makes many enemies. Also, the government and plans do everything to hurt his reputation. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Every year the US celebrates his anniversary as Martin Luther King Jr. day in the US. Also, they honored kings’ memory by naming school and building after him and a Memorial at Independence Mall.

Martin Luther King was a great man who dedicated his whole life for his community. Also, he was an active leader and a great spokesperson that not only served his people but also humanity. It was due to his contribution that the African-American got their civil rights.

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Martin Luther King Jr.

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 10, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington , which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act . King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day , a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.

When Was Martin Luther King Born?

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia , the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a pastor, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher.

Along with his older sister Christine and younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams, he grew up in the city’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, then home to some of the most prominent and prosperous African Americans in the country.

Did you know? The final section of Martin Luther King Jr.’s eloquent and iconic “I Have a Dream” speech is believed to have been largely improvised.

A gifted student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was admitted to Morehouse College , the alma mater of both his father and maternal grandfather, where he studied medicine and law.

Although he had not intended to follow in his father’s footsteps by joining the ministry, he changed his mind under the mentorship of Morehouse’s president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, an influential theologian and outspoken advocate for racial equality. After graduating in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania , where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree, won a prestigious fellowship and was elected president of his predominantly white senior class.

King then enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University , completing his coursework in 1953 and earning a doctorate in systematic theology two years later. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott, a young singer from Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music . The couple wed in 1953 and settled in Montgomery, Alabama, where King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church .

The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King and Bernice Albertine King.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks , secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for 381 days. The Montgomery Bus Boycott placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners. They chose Martin Luther King Jr. as the protest’s leader and official spokesman.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in November 1956, King—heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin —had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.

King had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that January.

On September 20, 1958, Izola Ware Curry walked into a Harlem department store where King was signing books and asked, “Are you Martin Luther King?” When he replied “yes,” she stabbed him in the chest with a knife. King survived, and the attempted assassination only reinforced his dedication to nonviolence: “The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence if necessary social change is peacefully to take place.”

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Emboldened by the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1957 he and other civil rights activists—most of them fellow ministers—founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group committed to achieving full equality for African Americans through nonviolent protest.

The SCLC motto was “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.” King would remain at the helm of this influential organization until his death.

In his role as SCLC president, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled across the country and around the world, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders.

During a month-long trip to India in 1959, he had the opportunity to meet family members and followers of Gandhi, the man he described in his autobiography as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” King also authored several books and articles during this time.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In 1960 King and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church . This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the 1960s.

Their philosophy of nonviolence was put to a particularly severe test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activists used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation, unfair hiring practices and other injustices in one of America’s most racially divided cities.

Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil rights manifesto known as the “ Letter from Birmingham Jail ,” an eloquent defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.

March on Washington

Later that year, Martin Luther King Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and religious groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful political rally designed to shed light on the injustices Black Americans continued to face across the country.

Held on August 28 and attended by some 200,000 to 300,000 participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

"I Have a Dream" Speech

The March on Washington culminated in King’s most famous address, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of rhetoric.

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial —a monument to the president who a century earlier had brought down the institution of slavery in the United States—he shared his vision of a future in which “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

The speech and march cemented King’s reputation at home and abroad; later that year he was named “Man of the Year” by TIME magazine and in 1964 became, at the time, the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize .

In the spring of 1965, King’s elevated profile drew international attention to the violence that erupted between white segregationists and peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, where the SCLC and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had organized a voter registration campaign.

Captured on television, the brutal scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country to gather in Alabama and take part in the Selma to Montgomery march led by King and supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson , who sent in federal troops to keep the peace.

That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act , which guaranteed the right to vote—first awarded by the 15th Amendment—to all African Americans.

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The events in Selma deepened a growing rift between Martin Luther King Jr. and young radicals who repudiated his nonviolent methods and commitment to working within the established political framework.

As more militant Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael rose to prominence, King broadened the scope of his activism to address issues such as the Vietnam War and poverty among Americans of all races. In 1967, King and the SCLC embarked on an ambitious program known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was to include a massive march on the capital.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated . He was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where King had traveled to support a sanitation workers’ strike. In the wake of his death, a wave of riots swept major cities across the country, while President Johnson declared a national day of mourning.

James Earl Ray , an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King family, before his death in 1998.

After years of campaigning by activists, members of Congress and Coretta Scott King, among others, in 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a U.S. federal holiday in honor of King.

Observed on the third Monday of January, Martin Luther King Day was first celebrated in 1986.

Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

While his “I Have a Dream” speech is the most well-known piece of his writing, Martin Luther King Jr. was the author of multiple books, include “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” “Why We Can’t Wait,” “Strength to Love,” “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” and the posthumously published “Trumpet of Conscience” with a foreword by Coretta Scott King. Here are some of the most famous Martin Luther King Jr. quotes:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.”

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.”

“Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?’”

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How Martin Luther King, Jr.’s multifaceted view on human rights still inspires today

The legendary civil rights activist pushed to ban nuclear weapons, end the Vietnam War, and lift people out of poverty through labor unions and access to healthcare.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. towers over history as a civil rights legend—known for leading the movement to end segregation and counter prejudice against Black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, largely through peaceful protests. He helped pass landmark federal civil rights and voting rights legislation that outlawed segregation and enfranchised Americans who had been barred from the polls through intimidation and discriminatory state and local laws. 

( How the Voting Rights Act was won—and why it’s under fire today .) 

But King knew it would take more to achieve true equality. And so he also worked tirelessly for education, wage equity, peace, housing, and to lift people out of poverty. Some of King’s most iconic speeches and marches were devoted to ending war, dismantling nuclear weapons, and bringing economic justice. As King said after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 , he believed that any “spiritual and moral lag” in humanity was due to racial injustice, poverty, and war. 

His multifaceted view on human rights still inspires today, and on the third Monday in January every year, the United States honors King’s legacy of fighting for equal rights—and standing up for human rights everywhere.

During his lifetime, King’s views often made him unpopular and heralded harsh criticism. At the time of his assassination in 1968, a Harris poll revealed a low approval rating of only about 25 percent among white Americans and 52 percent among Black Americans. But in the decades after he was killed, more Americans came to recognize the enormity of King’s contributions. Communities across the country began to name streets and landmarks after him, and soon a push began to establish a federal holiday in his birth month of January. 

( Subscriber exclusive: Where the streets have MLK’s name .)

In 1983 , over objections from Southern lawmakers, President Ronald Reagan finally signed a bill creating the holiday into law and the first celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day took place in January 1986—although it would take another decade for states such as Arizona and South Carolina to follow suit. 

King’s work continues to influence and inspire activism—particularly in the realm of environmental justice, as studies indicate that climate change disproportionately harms marginalized communities. Here are the many layers of King’s work that the U.S. honors on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. 

He advocated against the use of nuclear weapons

King was adamant that peace was inextricably linked to civil rights. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, major powers like the United States and the U.S.S.R. were aggressively developing and testing nuclear weapons, and several times crept to the brink of warfare that threatened to annihilate the world. 

King made clear the connection between the Black freedom struggle and the need for nuclear disarmament, writes nuclear studies and African American history expert Vincent Intondi in the book African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement . King argued that it would be “rather absurd” to integrate schools and lunch counters but not be concerned with world peace and survival.

King spoke out about nuclear warfare as early as 1957, when he signed onto a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that called for all nations to suspend nuclear tests immediately. When asked about his stance later that same year, King tied the weapons to the whole of war, and argued that they should be banned everywhere.

“It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic,” he told Ebony magazine in an interview. “The principal objective of all nations must be the total abolition of war.”

As part of King’s advocacy for peace and nuclear disarmament, he condemned the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. government had carried out more than a decade earlier to effectively end World War II. Today, Hiroshima is one of the only cities outside North America to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. 

King also used the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962—a 13-day stretch in which the U.S. and Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war over the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba—as an opportunity to connect nuclear disarmament to racial and economic justice. King called for the U.S. government to instead turn its attention and funds to education, Medicare, and civil rights, Intondi writes. He then voiced his support for a nuclear test ban treaty , which was signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. 

He was outspoken against the Vietnam War

King often linked nuclear disarmament with the Vietnam War as it escalated in the 1960s.

King was against the war but initially worried that making his stance public would derail his work to pass the Civil Rights Act and impair his relationship with President Lyndon B. Johnson, according to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University .

But in 1965, the year the first U.S. ground troops were sent to Vietnam, King issued his first public statement, asserting the war was “accomplishing nothing” and calling for a peace treaty.

He tempered his criticism for the next two years to avoid diminishing the impact of his civil rights work, but by 1967, King was active in the anti-war sphere again, attending a march in Chicago before he went on to make his most notable speech on the matter a few days later on April 4.

On that day at the Riverside Church in New York City, King denounced the war for deepening the problems of Black Americans and people living in poverty. He condemned the “madness” of Vietnam as a “symptom of a far deeper malady” that put the U.S. at odds with the aspirations for social justice throughout the world. Just 11 days later, King led 125,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations headquarters in New York as one of the largest peace demonstrations in history.

During the last year of his life , King continued his anti-war work by encouraging grassroots peace activism. On March 31, 1968, five days before he died, King denounced the Vietnam War in his final Sunday sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., saying that it was “one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world.”

King did not live to see the war end. U.S. troops officially pulled out of Vietnam in April 1975 .

He championed union representation and worker’s rights

King's passion for union representation and workers' rights is also an important part of his legacy. Much as he had done with his anti-war speeches, King often tied workers’ rights to the civil rights movement.

“I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice,” King said in a 1958 speech in New York . “Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me.”

In a 1959 interview with Challenge magazine , King acknowledged that labor unions had historically left out Black Americans, but also could be a key to economic justice. He called for Black Americans to organize their economic and political power in the form of labor unions, and he championed ideas in the labor movement, including better working conditions, adequate housing, guaranteed annual income, and access to healthcare.

For years, King continued to call for economic justice, notably at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Before a crowd of 250,000 people, he delivered the legendary “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he called for an end to poverty, especially targeted poverty and discrimination against Black Americans.

One of King’s last actions before his assassination was in support of the labor movement. King’s final days were spent supporting a group of Black sanitation workers striking in Memphis, Tennessee. 

After two workers had been crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck, 1,300 Black workers went on strike for 11 days, seeking an end to a long pattern of neglect and abuse from their management. The strike would’ve ended after the City Council voted to recognize their newly formed union, but the Memphis mayor rejected the vote. King traveled to Memphis to lead a protest march and, on April 3, he spoke to the striking sanitation workers. 

“We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end,” King said . “Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through.”

King was gunned down by an assassin on the balcony of his Memphis hotel the next day. On April 16, the sanitation workers’ union was finally recognized and a better wage was promised—the first of many examples of how King’s legacy would continue to reverberate in the work of those whom he inspired.

He’s inspiring a new generation of environmental activists

Although King’s last act supporting the Black sanitation workers in Memphis was not explicitly an act of environmental justice , it has inspired a generation of activists. The working conditions the sanitation workers had endured were polluted and hazardous—much like the conditions many Black Americans endured in their communities and jobs at the time.

Modern environmental activists have drawn on King’s message: Much as segregation and discrimination were inseparable from poverty, they point out that poor communities of color disproportionately face environmental hazards such as pollution. They also bear the brunt of the harmful effects of climate change, including extreme weather events.

( The origins of environmental justice—and why it’s finally getting the attention it deserves .)

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in the use of federal funds , even gave marginalized people a means to address racial discrimination in environmental matters.  As the environmental justice movement grew, King’s work also inspired the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

His advocacy for people of color to have a voice and power has inspired many communities impacted most by climate change to speak up—and take action. Now, the holiday honoring King is typically observed as a national day of service. Organizations and individuals alike volunteer for their communities, often cleaning up roads or river banks in the name of a man who many believe would be on the forefront of the climate fight if he were still alive today.

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Dr. Martin Luther King's Influence on Today's World

"... whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.".

Posted January 20, 2019 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

“If you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yesterday, I was privileged to take part in the event March on! Hudson in Hudson, New York. This event largely focused on recognizing the importance of the rights of women, included a march down the main street of this historic Hudson Valley town, ending at a park on the river, where various inspirational speakers, including our congressional representative, Antonio Delgado, reminded us of how important it is to be proactive and engaged as citizens in a democracy such as ours.

The temperatures were well below freezing and a giant winter storm was brewing to the west. By the time we got to the bottom of the hill, we could barely feel our fingers or our toes. Even though the conditions were less than pleasant, we were bonded by a common purpose.

In short, we share a common belief that civic engagement matters. And that we, the people, need to be actively engaged in the democratic process at all times. And we embrace the First Amendment, which provides us the right to publicly express our concerns regarding this nation and our government.

A highlight of this event took place when the founder of Move Forward New York (an activist group that focuses on engaging in the civic process to effect positive change in our region), Debra Clinton, spoke about the importance of speaking out and taking action when it comes to advancing human rights. Debra's words added a chill to the event, focusing on the importance of activism in bringing about equality for girls and women—for the benefit of our daughters and granddaughters—for the benefit of our shared future.

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday, Debra ended with Dr. King's quote which starts this essay and which connects explicitly with the mission of Move Forward New York. Debra ended with an activists' battle cry. There is no time for complacency. As engaged citizens who are privileged to live in a democracy such as ours, there is but one option, and that is to move forward.

Dr. King's Legacy and the Modern Activist Movement

Dr. King was, famously, a visionary who was ahead of his time. Dr. King had every single attribute needed to be a charismatic and influential leader . Coming from a religious background, he genuinely encouraged others to inhibit their own selfish interests and to focus on the interests of the greater good. He bonded people together, getting people to see themselves as part of the same shared struggle. He took steps to organize people into groups, understanding the importance of the power of numbers. And he famously—and tragically—gave his life for the cause.

In his famous treatise on human evolution, renowned evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (2007) makes the case that the ability for humans to organize and cooperate beyond lines of kinship sits at the core of what distinguishes Homo sapiens from other hominid species. The greatest leaders of human groups are experts at facilitating such cooperation . Dr. Martin Luther King was such a leader. And organizers and activists today who are looking to effect change would be wise to take a page from Dr. King's book.

Our Work Is Still Cut Out for Us

I wish I could say that the injustices that Dr. King worked so hard to fight have been adequately addressed. But, unfortunately, they have not. Social equality is, in fact, a constant issue in such a diverse nation as ours. Here are some statistics to underscore this point:

• While African Americans comprise only 12% of the US population, the number of African American males who are incarcerated in US prisons greatly exceeds the number of white males in prison. 1
• The homicide rate in the US for African Americans aged 18-34 is nine times higher than it is for whites. 2
• The life expectancy for African Americans in the US is substantially lower than the life expectancy for whites. 2
• The number of women who hold seats in the US House of Congress is 123. In spite of this number being an all-time record high, in perspective, it is actually dismal: Only 23% of House seats are held by women, who comprise more than 50% of the population. 3
• The president of the United States has been famously accused of sexual harassment by more than a dozen women over the course of many years. 4

And this all is, by the way, the tip of the iceberg when it comes to issues connected with social inequality in the United States in 2019.

Bottom Line

As a behavioral scientist and as someone who makes a point to engage in the civic and democratic process, I have to say that Dr. King's vision of true social equality in the United States is still quite far off in the distance. In his lifetime, Dr. King provided a model for effective social activism. He showed us how to call problems out and how to organize to bring about positive change. And he reminded us that democracy and freedom are never free. And that is up to the citizens of a democracy to take part in the process to help advance the greater good. Dr. King told us that moving forward is not an option. It is, rather, an obligation.

Thank you to Dr. Martin Luther King, activist sine qua non, for inspiring this post—and for changing the world for the better.

Acknowledgment: Claps to the primary organizer of March On! Hudson , Gianni Ortiz, founder of Indivisible CD 19 NY , for all your efforts in getting people to engage with the democratic process. Your work matters.

Wilson, D. S. (2007). Evolution for everyone: How Darwin’s theory can change the way we think about our lives. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.

1 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/12/shrinking-gap-between-n… 2 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/health/black-americans-death-rate-cd…

3 https://www.npr.org/2018/11/07/665019211/a-record-number-of-women-will-…

4 https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/14/politics/trump-women-accusers/index.html

Glenn Geher, Ph.D. , is professor of psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is founding director of the campus’ Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program.

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"Faith in Man"

Author : King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Date : February 26, 1956 ?

Location : Montgomery, Ala. ?

Genre : Sermon

Topic : Martin Luther King, Jr. - Career in Ministry

           Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views

In the following two handwritten outlines, King urges his listeners to remain aware of the evil potential of human nature while maintaining faith in the individual's ability to rise above the limitations of heredity, environment, and injustice. In the first outline, King cites two recent events as reasons for holding a pessimistic view of “the nature and destiny of man”: the lynching in 1955 of Emmett Till and the recent rioting at the University of Alabama in response to the admission of the school's first African-American student, Autherine Lucy. He argues however that, despite human shortcomings, Jesus “saw within this sea of humanity not a dead sea of impossibilities, but an ocean of [ infinite ] possibilities and potentialities.” A newspaper report of the sermon quotes King as hopefully predicting that the bus boycott will end in a victory that will ripple out beyond Montgomery: “It will be a victory for justice, a victory for fair play and a victory for democracy.” 1

"Faith in Man" I

• One of the things that we are [ noticing ] witnessing in our age is a growing pessimism concerning the nature and destiny of man. Man has lost faith in himself.  There are  And so many would cry out with the writer who referred to man as “a cosmic accident” 2  Other would affirm with the cynical writer that “man is the supreme clown of creation.” Still others would affirm with Jonathan Swift than “man is the most pernicious little race of odious vermin…” 3
• At many points it is quite understandable why it is difficult for us to have faith in man. Man has often made such a poor showing of himself. Within a generation we have fought two world wars. We have seen man's tragic inhumanity to man. We have looked to Missippii and seen supposedly Christian and civilized men brutally mudering the precious life of a little child 4  We have looked to Alabama and seen a ruthless mob take the precious law of the land and crush it blow of their tragic whims and caprises. 5  We have seen England trampling over India with the iron feet of oppression. We have seen the British and the Dutch and the Belgians and the French crushing Africa with the battering rams of exploitation.
• Yet, in the midst of this Christianity insist that there is hope for man. Christianity has always insisted that man's plight is never so low that it cant be better.
• This was certainly expressed in the life of Jesus. Throughout his ministry Jesus revealed a deep faith in the possibilities of human nature. He saw within this sea of humanity not a dead sea of impossibilities, but an ocean of infinate possibilities and potentialities.
• This is expressed very beautifully in a passage in the  fourth  first chaptr of John. Jesus is presented talking to Peter. Now you remember Peter was undependable, vascilating so fickle in his ever changing moods. But Jesus says to him in substance altough you are Simon now, you will be Peter. It did not look like it. And it was a long time in coming. But it did come. He was saying to Peter “actually you are like sand, but potentially you are a rock.” 6

"Faith in Man" II

• In our age there is a growing pessimism about the nature and destiny of man. Man is fastIy losing faith in himself. Many would be in accord with the writer who spoke of man as the supreme clown of creation. (quote other poets 7
• There was a time where man had to much  Such a pessimistic attitude toward man is far out of line with the Christian religion. Christianity has always insisted that man's plight is never so low that it cant be better. We might go so far as to say that Christianity stands or falls with its power change human nature
• Throughout his ministry Jesus revealed his deep faith in the possibilities of human nature
• Text 8 Jesus knew that God had given man certain creative powers and had endowed him with with high and noble virtues; and that these virtues and powers could be made living realities in the life of man if he properly reponded to the Grace of God.
• Let us state at the outset that there is always the danger of man having to much faith in himself.
• Modern humanism
• Extreme liberal Theology
• Man's faith in Man must never come to the point of the deification of Man.
• Man is a creature. No matter how much he advances cuturally, he is still a creature
• Some deny the possibility of being changed after adolesence
• A belief in man's better self being able to master his evil self
• Many men are environmentalist and hereditary determinist
• A roll of men who have risen above their environment. 9
• Conclusion: If men are willing to submit their wills to God's will and to cooperate with him in his divine purpose, we will be able to turn the world upside down, outside in, and right side up.

1.  The  New York Times  covered King's sermon in an article about the bus boycott and King's 21 February indictment with eighty-eight other leaders of the Montgomery movement on misdemeanor charges (Wayne Philips, “Negro Pastors Press Bus Boycott by Preaching Passive Resistance,”  New York Times , 27 February 1956; Indictment,  State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr., et al. , 21 February 1956, in  Papers  3:132-133).

2.  Cf. C. S. Lewis,  Answers to Questions on Christianity  (Hayes, England: Electric & Musical Industries Fellowship, 1944), p. 10.

3.  Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was an author and Anglo-Irish satirist. King cites the words of King Brobdingnag to Culliver in Swift's  Gulliver's Travels  (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947), p. 140: “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

4.  King refers to the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi.

5.  Students rioted at the University of Alabama on 6 February to protest Lucy's court-ordered admission. The University expelled Lucy, allegedly for her protection. It later reinstated her by order of the court only to expel her again, this time for allegedly making accusations against school officials. The court that had ordered Lucy's reinstatement later upheld the University's actions. For more on Autherine Lucy, see note 2, King to Fred Drake, 7 February 1956, in  Papers  3:128.

6.  Cf.John 1:40-42 ( The Bible: An American Translation; The Old Testament , trans. J. M. Powis Smith; The New Testament, trans. E. J. Goodspeed [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944]). Subsequent cites of biblical verses from Goodspeed's translation of the New Testament are noted as GOODSPEED, in parentheses.

7.  King quoted Psalm 8, Shakespeare's  Hamlet , and Thomas Carlyle's  French Revolution  in an introduction to a similar sermon (see King, “What Is Man?” Sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 11 July 1954, p. 175 in this volume).

8.  King may have used John 1:40-42 (GOODSPEED) as his text, as he did in the previous sermon out‐line, “Faith in Man.”

9.  In another sermon which King filed in the same folder as both versions of “Faith in Man,” he cited Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Abraham Lincoln, John Bunyan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Helen Keller as examples of those who overcame conditions of environment and heredity to make noble contributions to society (King, “Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions,” 26 July 1953, pp. 139-172 in this volume).

Source: "Faith in Man" I: CSKC-INP, Coretta Scott King Collection, In Private Hands, Sermon Files, folder 139.

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How Did Martin Luther King Changed The World Essay

Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision changed the world by empowering African Americans to fight for their rights through nonviolent civil disobedience. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is widely considered one of the greatest speeches in American history. In it, he called for an end to racial segregation and discrimination. His words inspired millions of black Americans to stand up for their rights, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

These laws outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. They also guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. Martin Luther King’s vision changed America for the better and ensured that everyone is treated equally regardless of skin color.

Most of us have dreams, but Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that surpassed most and changed the course of history for African American people. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most prominent African American civil rights leaders during his time. Under his leadership, many important advances were made for equality and justice.

His work towards equality and civil disobedience continues to influence people today. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream was to see the African American people gain equal rights to the white people. Sadly, he was assassinated before he could see his dream come true. However, his vision did change the world in many ways.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech called for an end to discrimination and violence against African Americans. His words inspired many people, both black and white, to work together for change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing segregation in public places and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 giving African Americans the right to vote are just two examples of how Martin Luther King’s vision changed the world.

Today, Martin Luther King’s dream of equality is still being fought for. Although there has been much progress made, there is still more work to be done. Martin Luther King’s vision continues to inspire people all over the world to stand up for what they believe in and fight for change.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an important leader of the civil rights movement who worked hard to change America’s laws and improve the situation for African Americans. He always used peaceful methods in his protests against discrimination, which made him very respected by many people.

Martin Luther King’s vision changed the world by helping to end segregation and racism in America, as well as promoting non-violent protests as a way to achieve change.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. He was an African American Baptist minister and activist who is most well-known for his role in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955. In 1963, Martin Luther King organized and led the March on Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech advocating for racial harmony.

King’s work towards social change began long before the March on Washington though. In December of 1955, Martin Luther King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest segregation on public buses in Alabama. The boycott lasted 381 days and resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregated buses unconstitutional.

In 1957, Martin Luther King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization devoted to peaceful protests for civil rights reform. Under Martin Luther King’s leadership, the SCLC organized multiple campaigns against segregation and racism, including the famous Birmingham Campaign of 1963.

The Birmingham Campaign was a series of nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama that took place between April and May of 1963. The campaign was organized by Martin Luther King and the SCLC in order to draw attention to the injustices faced by African Americans in Birmingham, such as police brutality and racial segregation in public places. The campaign ended with the arrest of over 2,000 people, including Martin Luther King.

While he was in jail, Martin Luther King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which he argued that individuals have a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. The letter became one of the most important documents of the civil rights movement and helped Martin Luther King gain support for his cause.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is unquestionably the most famous and accomplished activist in history. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, as he was originally known, lived for only thirty-nine years on this Earth. He had one of the biggest influences on African-American rights and America itself during his thirty-nine years on earth.

Lower social status groups were treated unfairly during 1954-1968, radiating frustration, racism, hunger and violence throughout the entire society. Martin Luther King Jr., an outstanding hero who used to be a priest, helped African Americans and poor people gain basic human rights after the Civil War. Although he only lived for thirty nine years old, he was deeply influenced by Christianity and allusive of the Bible in both his notion speeches.

Martin Luther King believed that people should not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character, which is also one of the principles in Christianity.

He fought for what he thought was right and changed American society—African-Americans could now get an education, have a job, and vote. Martin Luther King’s speeches were often quoted “I Have a Dream” which is his most famous speech delivered on August 28th, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

In this speech, Martin Luther King Jr. used rhetoric to appeal to both emotion and logic, making it an incredibly effective speech that helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement. By using personal stories and images, he was able to tap into the hearts of his audience and get them to see the world through his eyes.

Martin Luther King’s vision for America was one where all people would be treated equally, regardless of race or gender. This dream has largely been realized in America today, although there is still room for improvement. Thanks to Martin Luther King Jr., we are now closer to achieving true equality in America than ever before. His vision changed the world and continues to inspire people to fight for what they believe in.

Martin Luther King Jr. is a role model for many people because he fought for what he thought was right, even though it was not the popular opinion at the time. He showed that change is possible if enough people come together and stand up for what they believe in. Martin Luther King’s vision for America is one that is still relevant today, and his legacy will continue to inspire people for generations to come.

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How Martin Luther Changed the World

By Joan Acocella

Clang! Clang! Down the corridors of religious history we hear this sound: Martin Luther, an energetic thirty-three-year-old Augustinian friar, hammering his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and thus, eventually, splitting the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church into two churches—one loyal to the Pope in Rome, the other protesting against the Pope’s rule and soon, in fact, calling itself Protestant. This month marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s famous action. Accordingly, a number of books have come out, reconsidering the man and his influence. They differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on is that the hammering episode, so satisfying symbolically—loud, metallic, violent—never occurred. Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened. He remembered drawing up a list of ninety-five theses around the date in question, but, as for what he did with it, all he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop. Furthermore, the theses were not, as is often imagined, a set of non-negotiable demands about how the Church should reform itself in accordance with Brother Martin’s standards. Rather, like all “theses” in those days, they were points to be thrashed out in public disputations, in the manner of the ecclesiastical scholars of the twelfth century or, for that matter, the debate clubs of tradition-minded universities in our own time.

If the Ninety-five Theses sprouted a myth, that is no surprise. Luther was one of those figures who touched off something much larger than himself; namely, the Reformation—the sundering of the Church and a fundamental revision of its theology. Once he had divided the Church, it could not be healed. His reforms survived to breed other reforms, many of which he disapproved of. His church splintered and splintered. To tote up the Protestant denominations discussed in Alec Ryrie’s new book, “ Protestants ” (Viking), is almost comical, there are so many of them. That means a lot of people, though. An eighth of the human race is now Protestant.

The Reformation, in turn, reshaped Europe. As German-speaking lands asserted their independence from Rome, other forces were unleashed. In the Knights’ Revolt of 1522, and the Peasants’ War, a couple of years later, minor gentry and impoverished agricultural workers saw Protestantism as a way of redressing social grievances. (More than eighty thousand poorly armed peasants were slaughtered when the latter rebellion failed.) Indeed, the horrific Thirty Years’ War, in which, basically, Europe’s Roman Catholics killed all the Protestants they could, and vice versa, can in some measure be laid at Luther’s door. Although it did not begin until decades after his death, it arose in part because he had created no institutional structure to replace the one he walked away from.

Almost as soon as Luther started the Reformation, alternative Reformations arose in other localities. From town to town, preachers told the citizenry what it should no longer put up with, whereupon they stood a good chance of being shoved aside—indeed, strung up—by other preachers. Religious houses began to close down. Luther led the movement mostly by his writings. Meanwhile, he did what he thought was his main job in life, teaching the Bible at the University of Wittenberg. The Reformation wasn’t led, exactly; it just spread, metastasized.

And that was because Europe was so ready for it. The relationship between the people and the rulers could hardly have been worse. Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, was dying—he brought his coffin with him wherever he travelled—but he was taking his time about it. The presumptive heir, King Charles I of Spain, was looked upon with grave suspicion. He already had Spain and the Netherlands. Why did he need the Holy Roman Empire as well? Furthermore, he was young—only seventeen when Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses. The biggest trouble, though, was money. The Church had incurred enormous expenses. It was warring with the Turks at the walls of Vienna. It had also started an ambitious building campaign, including the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. To pay for these ventures, it had borrowed huge sums from Europe’s banks, and to repay the banks it was strangling the people with taxes.

It has often been said that, fundamentally, Luther gave us “modernity.” Among the recent studies, Eric Metaxas’s “ Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World ” (Viking) makes this claim in grandiose terms. “The quintessentially modern idea of the individual was as unthinkable before Luther as is color in a world of black and white,” he writes. “And the more recent ideas of pluralism, religious liberty, self-government, and liberty all entered history through the door that Luther opened.” The other books are more reserved. As they point out, Luther wanted no part of pluralism—even for the time, he was vehemently anti-Semitic—and not much part of individualism. People were to believe and act as their churches dictated.

The fact that Luther’s protest, rather than others that preceded it, brought about the Reformation is probably due in large measure to his outsized personality. He was a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic. Above all, he was intransigent. To oppose was his joy. And though at times he showed that hankering for martyrdom that we detect, with distaste, in the stories of certain religious figures, it seems that, most of the time, he just got out of bed in the morning and got on with his work. Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks.

Luther was born in 1483 and grew up in Mansfeld, a small mining town in Saxony. His father started out as a miner but soon rose to become a master smelter, a specialist in separating valuable metal (in this case, copper) from ore. The family was not poor. Archeologists have been at work in their basement. The Luthers ate suckling pig and owned drinking glasses. They had either seven or eight children, of whom five survived. The father wanted Martin, the eldest, to study law, in order to help him in his business, but Martin disliked law school and promptly had one of those experiences often undergone in the old days by young people who did not wish to take their parents’ career advice. Caught in a violent thunderstorm one day in 1505—he was twenty-one—he vowed to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that if he survived he would become a monk. He kept his promise, and was ordained two years later. In the heavily psychoanalytic nineteen-fifties, much was made of the idea that this flouting of his father’s wishes set the stage for his rebellion against the Holy Father in Rome. Such is the main point of Erik Erikson’s 1958 book, “ Young Man Luther ,” which became the basis of a famous play by John Osborne (filmed, in 1974, with Stacy Keach in the title role).

Today, psychoanalytic interpretations tend to be tittered at by Luther biographers. But the desire to find some great psychological source, or even a middle-sized one, for Luther’s great story is understandable, because, for many years, nothing much happened to him. This man who changed the world left his German-speaking lands only once in his life. (In 1510, he was part of a mission sent to Rome to heal a rent in the Augustinian order. It failed.) Most of his youth was spent in dirty little towns where men worked long hours each day and then, at night, went to the tavern and got into fights. He described his university town, Erfurt, as consisting of “a whorehouse and a beerhouse.” Wittenberg, where he lived for the remainder of his life, was bigger—with two thousand inhabitants when he settled there—but not much better. As Lyndal Roper, one of the best of the new biographers, writes, in “ Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet ” (Random House), it was a mess of “muddy houses, unclean lanes.” At that time, however, the new ruler of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, was trying to make a real city of it. He built a castle and a church—the one on whose door the famous theses were supposedly nailed—and he hired an important artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, as his court painter. Most important, he founded a university, and staffed it with able scholars, including Johann von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustinian friars of the German-speaking territories. Staupitz had been Luther’s confessor at Erfurt, and when he found himself overworked at Wittenberg he summoned Luther, persuaded him to take a doctorate, and handed over many of his duties to him. Luther supervised everything from monasteries (eleven of them) to fish ponds, but most crucial was his succeeding Staupitz as the university’s professor of the Bible, a job that he took on at the age of twenty-eight and retained until his death. In this capacity, he lectured on Scripture, held disputations, and preached to the staff of the university.

He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis. He called his problem his Anfechtungen —trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. Years later, commenting on his reading of Scripture as a young friar, Luther spoke of his rage at the description of God’s righteousness, and of his grief that, as he was certain, he would not be judged worthy: “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.”

There were good reasons for an intense young priest to feel disillusioned. One of the most bitterly resented abuses of the Church at that time was the so-called indulgences, a kind of late-medieval get-out-of-jail-free card used by the Church to make money. When a Christian purchased an indulgence from the Church, he obtained—for himself or whomever else he was trying to benefit—a reduction in the amount of time the person’s soul had to spend in Purgatory, atoning for his sins, before ascending to Heaven. You might pay to have a special Mass said for the sinner or, less expensively, you could buy candles or new altar cloths for the church. But, in the most common transaction, the purchaser simply paid an agreed-upon amount of money and, in return, was given a document saying that the beneficiary—the name was written in on a printed form—was forgiven x amount of time in Purgatory. The more time off, the more it cost, but the indulgence-sellers promised that whatever you paid for you got.

Actually, they could change their minds about that. In 1515, the Church cancelled the exculpatory powers of already purchased indulgences for the next eight years. If you wanted that period covered, you had to buy a new indulgence. Realizing that this was hard on people—essentially, they had wasted their money—the Church declared that purchasers of the new indulgences did not have to make confession or even exhibit contrition. They just had to hand over the money and the thing was done, because this new issue was especially powerful. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar locally famous for his zeal in selling indulgences, is said to have boasted that one of the new ones could obtain remission from sin even for someone who had raped the Virgin Mary. (In the 1974 movie “ Luther ,” Tetzel is played with a wonderful, bug-eyed wickedness by Hugh Griffith.) Even by the standards of the very corrupt sixteenth-century Church, this was shocking.

In Luther’s mind, the indulgence trade seems to have crystallized the spiritual crisis he was experiencing. It brought him up against the absurdity of bargaining with God, jockeying for his favor—indeed, paying for his favor. Why had God given his only begotten son? And why had the son died on the cross? Because that’s how much God loved the world. And that alone, Luther now reasoned, was sufficient for a person to be found “justified,” or worthy. From this thought, the Ninety-five Theses were born. Most of them were challenges to the sale of indulgences. And out of them came what would be the two guiding principles of Luther’s theology: sola fide and sola scriptura .

Sola fide means “by faith alone”—faith, as opposed to good works, as the basis for salvation. This was not a new idea. St. Augustine, the founder of Luther’s monastic order, laid it out in the fourth century. Furthermore, it is not an idea that fits well with what we know of Luther. Pure faith, contemplation, white light: surely these are the gifts of the Asian religions, or of medieval Christianity, of St. Francis with his birds. As for Luther, with his rages and sweats, does he seem a good candidate? Eventually, however, he discovered (with lapses) that he could be released from those torments by the simple act of accepting God’s love for him. Lest it be thought that this stern man then concluded that we could stop worrying about our behavior and do whatever we wanted, he said that works issue from faith. In his words, “We can no more separate works from faith than heat and light from fire.” But he did believe that the world was irretrievably full of sin, and that repairing that situation was not the point of our moral lives. “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger,” he wrote to a friend.

The second great principle, sola scriptura , or “by scripture alone,” was the belief that only the Bible could tell us the truth. Like sola fide , this was a rejection of what, to Luther, were the lies of the Church—symbolized most of all by the indulgence market. Indulgences brought you an abbreviation of your stay in Purgatory, but what was Purgatory? No such thing is mentioned in the Bible. Some people think that Dante made it up; others say Gregory the Great. In any case, Luther decided that somebody made it up.

Guided by those convictions, and fired by his new certainty of God’s love for him, Luther became radicalized. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints. He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he (Frederick) had founded at Wittenberg. He vowed to protect this troublemaker.

Things came to a head in 1520. By then, Luther had taken to calling the Church a brothel, and Pope Leo X the Antichrist. Leo gave Luther sixty days to appear in Rome and answer charges of heresy. Luther let the sixty days elapse; the Pope excommunicated him; Luther responded by publicly burning the papal order in the pit where one of Wittenberg’s hospitals burned its used rags. Reformers had been executed for less, but Luther was by now a very popular man throughout Europe. The authorities knew they would have serious trouble if they killed him, and the Church gave him one more chance to recant, at the upcoming diet—or congregation of officers, sacred and secular—in the cathedral city of Worms in 1521. He went, and declared that he could not retract any of the charges he had made against the Church, because the Church could not show him, in Scripture, that any of them were false:

Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything.

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The Pope often errs! Luther will decide what God wants! By consulting Scripture! No wonder that an institution wedded to the idea of its leader’s infallibility was profoundly shaken by this declaration. Once the Diet of Worms came to an end, Luther headed for home, but he was “kidnapped” on the way, by a posse of knights sent by his protector, Frederick the Wise. The knights spirited him off to the Wartburg, a secluded castle in Eisenach, in order to give the authorities time to cool off. Luther was annoyed by the delay, but he didn’t waste time. That’s when he translated the New Testament.

During his lifetime, Luther became probably the biggest celebrity in the German-speaking lands. When he travelled, people flocked to the high road to see his cart go by. This was due not just to his personal qualities and the importance of his cause but to timing. Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him once he got going. Among the quincentennial books is an entire volume on his relationship to print, “ Brand Luther ” (Penguin), by the British historian Andrew Pettegree. Luther’s collected writings come to a hundred and twenty volumes. In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him.

By producing them, he didn’t just create the Reformation; he also created his country’s vernacular, as Dante is said to have done with Italian. The majority of his writings were in Early New High German, a form of the language that was starting to gel in southern Germany at that time. Under his influence, it did gel.

The crucial text is his Bible: the New Testament, translated from the original Greek and published in 1523, followed by the Old Testament, in 1534, translated from the Hebrew. Had he not created Protestantism, this book would be the culminating achievement of Luther’s life. It was not the first German translation of the Bible—indeed, it had eighteen predecessors—but it was unquestionably the most beautiful, graced with the same combination of exaltation and simplicity, but more so, as the King James Bible. (William Tyndale, whose English version of the Bible, for which he was executed, was more or less the basis of the King James, knew and admired Luther’s translation.) Luther very consciously sought a fresh, vigorous idiom. For his Bible’s vocabulary, he said, “we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street,” and, like other writers with such aims—William Blake, for example—he ended up with something songlike. He loved alliteration—“ Der Herr ist mein Hirte ” (“The Lord is my shepherd”); “ Dein Stecken und Stab ” (“thy rod and thy staff”)—and he loved repetition and forceful rhythms. This made his texts easy and pleasing to read aloud, at home, to the children. The books also featured a hundred and twenty-eight woodcut illustrations, all by one artist from the Cranach workshop, known to us only as Master MS. There they were, all those wondrous things—the Garden of Eden, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel—which modern people are used to seeing images of and which Luther’s contemporaries were not. There were marginal glosses, as well as short prefaces for each book, which would have been useful for the children of the household and probably also for the family member reading to them.

These virtues, plus the fact that the Bible was probably, in many cases, the only book in the house, meant that it was widely used as a primer. More people learned to read, and the more they knew how to read the more they wanted to own this book, or give it to others. The three-thousand-copy first edition of the New Testament, though it was not cheap (it cost about as much as a calf), sold out immediately. As many as half a million Luther Bibles seem to have been printed by the mid-sixteenth century. In his discussions of sola scriptura , Luther had declared that all believers were priests: laypeople had as much right as the clergy to determine what Scripture meant. With his Bible, he gave German speakers the means to do so.

In honor of the five-hundredth anniversary, the excellent German art-book publisher Taschen has produced a facsimile with spectacular colored woodcuts. Pleasingly, the book historian Stephan Füssel, in the explanatory paperback that accompanies the two-volume facsimile, reports that in 2004, when a fire swept through the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, in Weimar, where this copy was housed, it was “rescued, undamaged, with not a second to lose, thanks to the courageous intervention of library director Dr. Michael Knoche.” I hope that Dr. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. I don’t know what the price of a calf is these days, but the price of this facsimile is sixty dollars. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. Master MS’s Garden of Eden is full of wonderful animals—a camel, a crocodile, a little toad—and in the towns everyone wears those black shoes like the ones in Brueghel paintings. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear. Even if you don’t understand German, you can sort of read them.

Among the supposedly Biblical rules that Luther pointed out could not be found in the Bible was the requirement of priestly celibacy. Well before the Diet of Worms, Luther began advising priests to marry. He said that he would marry, too, if he did not expect, every day, to be executed for heresy. One wonders. But in 1525 he was called upon to help a group of twelve nuns who had just fled a Cistercian convent, an action that was related to his reforms. Part of his duty to these women, he felt, was to return them to their families or to find husbands for them. At the end, one was left, a twenty-six-year-old girl named Katharina von Bora, the daughter of a poor, albeit noble, country family. Luther didn’t want her, he said—he found her “proud”—but she wanted him. She was the one who proposed. And though, as he told a friend, he felt no “burning” for her, he formed with her a marriage that is probably the happiest story in any account of his life.

One crucial factor was her skill in household management. The Luthers lived in the so-called Black Monastery, which had been Wittenberg’s Augustinian monastery—that is, Luther’s old home as a friar—before the place emptied out as a result of the reformer’s actions. (One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on.) It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. Käthe, as Luther called her, made it livable, and not just for her immediate family. Between ten and twenty students lodged there, and the household took in many others as well: four children of Luther’s dead sister Margarete, plus four more orphaned children from both sides of the family, plus a large family fleeing the plague. A friend of the reformer, writing to an acquaintance journeying to Wittenberg, warned him on no account to stay with the Luthers if he valued peace and quiet. The refectory table seated between thirty-five and fifty, and Käthe, having acquired a large market garden and a considerable amount of livestock (pigs, goats), and now supervising a staff of up to ten employees (maids, a cook, a swineherd, et al.), fed them all. She also handled the family’s finances, and at times had to economize carefully. Luther would accept no money for his writings, on which he could have profited hugely, and he would not allow students to pay to attend his lectures, as was the custom.

Luther appreciated the sheer increase in his physical comfort. When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man. More important, he began to take women seriously. He objects, in a lecture, to coitus interruptus, the most common form of birth control at the time, on the ground that it is frustrating for women. When he was away from home, he wrote Käthe affectionate letters, with such salutations as “Most holy Frau Doctor” and “To the hands and feet of my dear housewife.”

Among Käthe’s virtues was fertility. Every year or so for eight years, she produced a child—six in all, of whom four survived to adulthood—and Luther loved these children. He even allowed them to play in his study while he was working. Of five-year-old Hans, his firstborn, he wrote, “When I’m writing or doing something else, my Hans sings a little tune for me. If he becomes too noisy and I rebuke him for it, he continues to sing but does it more privately and with a certain awe and uneasiness.” That scene, which comes from “ Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval ” (Oxford), by the German historian Heinz Schilling, seems to me impossible to improve upon as a portrait of what it must have been like for Luther to have a little boy, and for a little boy to have Luther as a father. Luther was not a lenient parent—he used the whip when he felt he needed to, and poor Hans was sent to the university at the age of seven—but when, on his travels, the reformer passed through a town that was having a fair he liked to buy presents for the children. In 1536, when he went to the Diet of Augsburg, another important convocation, he kept a picture of his favorite child, Magdalene, on the wall of his chamber. Magdalene died at thirteen. Schilling again produces a telling scene. Magdalene is nearing the end; Luther is holding her. He says he knows she would like to stay with her father, but, he adds, “Are you also glad to go to your father in heaven?” She died in his arms. How touching that he could find this common-sense way to comfort her, and also that he seems to feel that Heaven is right above their heads, with one father holding out a hand to take to himself the other’s child.

One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies. When Hans finally learned to bend his knees and relieve himself on the floor, Luther rejoiced, reporting to a friend that the child had “crapped in every corner of the room.” I wonder who cleaned that up—not Luther, I would guess—but it is hard not to feel some of his pleasure. Sixteenth-century Germans were not, in the main, dainty of thought or speech. A representative of the Vatican once claimed that Luther was conceived when the Devil raped his mother in an outhouse. That detail comes from Eric Metaxas’s book, which is full of vulgar stories, not that one has to look far for vulgar stories in Luther’s life. My favorite (reported in Erikson’s book) is a comment that Luther made at the dinner table while in the grip of a depression. “I am like a ripe shit,” he said, “and the world is a gigantic asshole. We will both probably let go of each other soon.” It takes you a minute to realize that Luther is saying that he feels he is dying. And then you want to congratulate him on the sheer zest, the proto-surrealist nuttiness, of his metaphor. He may feel as though he’s dying, but he’s having a good time feeling it.

The group on which Luther expended his most notorious denunciations was not the Roman Catholic clergy but the Jews. His sentiments were widely shared. In the words of Heinz Schilling, “Late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews.” But Luther despised them dementedly, ecstatically. In his 1543 treatise “On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of Christ,” he imagines the Devil stuffing the Jews’ orifices with filth: “He stuffs and squirts them so full, that it overflows and swims out of every place, pure Devil’s filth, yes, it tastes so good to their hearts, and they guzzle it like sows.” Witness the death of Judas Iscariot, he adds: “When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss . . . and afterwards together they ate the shit.” The Jews’ synagogues should be burned down, he wrote; their houses should be destroyed. He did not recommend that they be killed, but he did say that Christians had no moral responsibilities to them, which amounts to much the same thing.

This is hair-raising, but what makes Luther’s anti-Semitism most disturbing is not its extremity (which, by sounding so crazy, diminishes its power). It is the fact that the country of which he is a national hero did indeed, quite recently, exterminate six million Jews. Hence the formula “ From Luther to Hitler ,” popularized by William Montgomery McGovern’s 1941 book of that title—the notion that Luther laid the groundwork for the slaughter. Those who have wished to defend him have pointed out that his earlier writings, such as the 1523 pamphlet “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” are much more conciliatory in tone. He seemed to regret that, as he put it, Christians had “dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs.” But making excuses for Luther on the basis of his earlier, more temperate writings does not really work. As scholars have been able to show, Luther was gentler early on because he was hoping to persuade the Jews to convert. When they failed to do so, he unleashed his full fury, more violent now because he believed that the comparative mildness of his earlier writings may have been partly responsible for their refusal.

Luther’s anti-Semitism would be a moral problem under any circumstances. People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. But when one adds the historical factor—that, in Luther’s case, the judgment is being made five centuries after the event—we hit a brick wall. At the Nuremberg trials, in 1946, Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of the Jew-baiting newspaper Der Stürmer , quoted Luther as the source of his beliefs and said that if he was going to be blamed Luther would have to be blamed as well. But, in the words of Thomas Kaufmann, a professor of church history at the University of Göttingen, “The Nuremberg judges sat in judgment over the mass murderers of the twentieth century, not over the delusions of a misguided sixteenth-century theology professor. . . . Another judge must judge Luther.” How fortunate to be able to believe that such a judge will come, and have an answer.

Luther lived to what, in the sixteenth century, was an old age, sixty-two, but the years were not kind to him. Actually, he lived most of his life in turmoil. When he was young, there were the Anfechtungen . Then, once he issued the theses and began his movement, he had to struggle not just with the right, the Roman Church, but with the left—the Schwärmer (fanatics), as he called them, the people who felt that he hadn’t gone far enough. He spent days and weeks in pamphlet wars over matters that, today, have to be patiently explained to us, they seem so remote. Did Communion involve transubstantiation, or was Jesus physically present from the start of the rite? Luther, a “Real Presence” man, said the latter. Should people be baptized soon after they are born, as Luther said, or when they are adults, as the Anabaptists claimed?

When Luther was young, he was good at friendship. He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him. (Hence the fifty-seat dinner table.) As he grew older, he changed. He found that he could easily discard friends, even old friends, even his once beloved confessor, Staupitz. People who had dealings with the movement found themselves going around him if they could, usually to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Always sharp-tongued, Luther now lost all restraint, writing in a treatise that Pope Paul III was a sodomite and a transvestite—no surprise, he added, when you considered that all popes, since the beginnings of the Church, were full of devils and vomited and farted and defecated devils. This starts to sound like his attacks on the Jews.

His health declined. He had dizzy spells, bleeding hemorrhoids, constipation, urine retention, gout, kidney stones. To balance his “humors,” the surgeon made a hole, or “fontanelle,” in a vein in his leg, and it was kept open. Whatever this did for his humors, it meant that he could no longer walk to the church or the university. He had to be taken in a cart. He suffered disabling depressions. “I have lost Christ completely,” he wrote to Melanchthon. From a man of his temperament and convictions, this is a terrible statement.

In early 1546, he had to go to the town of his birth, Eisleben, to settle a dispute. It was January, and the roads were bad. Tellingly, he took all three of his sons with him. He said the trip might be the death of him, and he was right. He died in mid-February. Appropriately, in view of his devotion to the scatological, his corpse was given an enema, in the hope that this would revive him. It didn’t. After sermons in Eisleben, the coffin was driven back to Wittenberg, with an honor guard of forty-five men on horseback. Bells tolled in every village along the way. Luther was buried in the Castle Church, on whose door he was said to have nailed his theses.

Although his resting place evokes his most momentous act, it also highlights the intensely local nature of the life he led. The transformations he set in motion were incidental to his struggles, which remained irreducibly personal. His goal was not to usher in modernity but simply to make religion religious again. Heinz Schilling writes, “Just when the lustre of religion threatened to be outdone by the atheistic and political brilliance of the secularized Renaissance papacy, the Wittenberg monk defined humankind’s relationship to God anew and gave back to religion its existential plausibility.” Lyndal Roper thinks much the same. She quotes Luther saying that the Church’s sacraments “are not fulfilled when they are taking place but when they are being believed.” All he asked for was sincerity, but this made a great difference. ♦

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Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, written by Lyndal Roper, is a unique account of the reformer’s character. She shows us Luther as a person who saw himself as God’s chosen prophet. Through the disposition of touching narratives, she is attentive to the revealing details that provide distinction. Her Luther is complex, extraordinary, and can be revolting.

Complexity and Contradictions in Luther’s Character

Inside luther’s mind: a study by roper.

Roper is successful in bringing the reader inside Luther’s mind in a hasty way with a sharp eye. It is the person of Martin Luther who is the object of her investigation (xxvi-xxvii). And what emerges is a “difficult hero” (410). Her examination of Luther confronts his astonishing achievements and jaw-dropping flaws.

Luther wrote: “I who ought to have become a martyr have reached the point where I am now making martyrs of others,” after meeting his colleague and friend Andreas von Karlstadt, whose broken relationship with Luther is movingly told (306). No words show us more powerfully the person and the course of the Reformation he initiated. The movement that had started with faith alone, scripture alone and the freedom of a Christian soon found itself burning books, drowning Anabaptists, and accusations of heresy.

The Dual Nature of the Reformer

Roper finds the contrary impulses and convulsions of the Reformation in its most significant figure. Luther loved playing with words and paradoxes. He held on to contrasting views, and his instincts were frequently contradictory. Roper builds her account of Luther around his character, body, and spirit to show the reformer’s many ambiguities and enigmatic responses and to frame the Reformation as a whole. She follows Luther’s emotional transformation through the religious upheavals of the time (many of which he caused). As noted, she allows Luther’s voice to be heard, yet she gleans from the insights and perceptions of his friends and foes, including his Catholic opponents.

The truth was difficult to grasp in Luther’s day. He reviled anyone, including friends and supporters, whom he thought disagreed with him. To Luther, he alone had revealed the popes as antichrists and defied the emperor at the Diet of Worms in 1521. No one was his equal, and no questioning of his authority, real or apparent, failed to incur his wrath. Even his Philip Melanchthon, who always had to apply ointment to those castigated by Luther, at one point thought he would be driven from Wittenberg.

In body and soul, Luther saw himself as a martyr for the Gospel and believed that no one could stop his path to destiny. Martyrdom, however, was not to be his fate. Luther died peacefully in his bed after enjoying the protection of the Saxon electors for most of his reforming career.

Luther’s Spiritual Journey

Between 1518 and 1525, Luther was the publishing star of Europe. His works flooded German lands, which made him the most well-known person in the Empire. His message was arresting and compelling: he preached about a God who freely and graciously saved through faith in Jesus Christ and liberated from any necessity to win their salvation. His translation of the Bible shaped not only a confession but culture. Luther offered the balm of spiritual assurance to those made anxious and fearful by their inability to appease an angry God, as he famously had once been. His spiritual autobiography of the devout yet tortured monk who came to find peace in God through scripture was a model that could be followed by peasants and noblewomen.

Roper directs us to Luther’s early years. The role of his father, Hans Luder, was formative. The “young Luther” (as he later refashioned his name) inherited many of his father’s characteristics and rebelled against them. He was to defy his father with his decision to abandon the path to a career as a lawyer and instead enter an Augustinian monastery.

Roper vividly describes a working culture that left a deep impression on the young Luther, turning him against the dishonesty of profit-seeking entrepreneurs and embedding in him a sense of the fragility of human existence. Roper invites us to consider how the world of his hometown of Mansfeld and Luther’s father led the young man to a vision of the utter dependence of humanity on the benevolence of God, who would, in turn, emerge as the paternal figure he sought. Luther never entirely left behind his parental influences: he mourned his father when he died, and later in life, he said that his father-like mentor Johann von Staupitz was the one who gave him all.

There was a restlessness in Luther, who sought the comfort and discipline of paternal authority, a consolation he was only to find in a God who took salvation out of human hands, a God who was both judge and father. In the end, Luther assumed the role of the father that he had so evidently sought in others. As a reformer, head of a large household, and pastor, he embraced the dispensing of advice and guidance, shaping the lives of others as he saw fit.

From an early age, Luther was compassionate and self-critical, whose emotional stability was both molded and unbalanced in the monastery. He staggered in guilt, although there was little in his conduct to reproach. He exhausted his mentor Staupitz by confessing for up to six hours at a time, believing that God judged and hated him. As Roper points out, the Gotha sermon of 1515 was delivered by a person in deep despair (60–62). Staupitz encouraged the tortured monk to undertake doctoral work and then to take a position at Wittenberg.

Staupitz made Luther, but soon he moved beyond his spiritual father to become his own person, an independence that he defended all his life. Staupitz recast Luther and gave him a new identity. One of Luther’s remarkable qualities was an ability to reinvent himself, often by identifying with biblical characters such as Joshua, David, or, crucially, Christ. Having emerged from Staupitz’s mentoring, Luther ensured that he never again owed any debts, that all forms of relationship are marked by domination, not supplication.

Luther’s Spiritual Development

As “Luther the reformer” emerged, Roper tells us that there was a gradual development during the years 1518–1519 that shaped his theology- one grounded in Luther’s deep and powerful meditation on scripture. He moved away from Staupitz’s teaching toward a spirituality more rooted in God’s justification of humans by grace alone, which arose from Luther’s dramatic encounter with Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Just as Luther was discovering the freedom wrought by God in liberating humans from works of righteousness, the darker elements of his personality appeared. Following the Ninety-Five Theses of 1517 and Rome’s moves against him, Luther came to see himself as a martyr, a conviction that drove him forward and, in his mind, separated him from his friends and colleagues. God had chosen him, and only he could fulfill the mission for which he felt called.

The most innovative quality of Roper’s biography is in teaching us about Luther’s embodiment of thought and belief. Against Zwingli and others, Luther argued for the bodily presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. The significance of the debate between Luther and the Sacramentarians often is not seen, but Roper, remarking that it “engaged Luther’s deepest psychological drives,” persuasively argues that the conflict is essential to understanding the Wittenberg professor (275).

Luther rejected all attempts to separate body and spirit to celebrate the sacrament of the table as a memorial for what Christ had done on the cross. For Luther, God is present with us. How? That was less important and, in the end, a mystery. The divine did not shun the fleshly. Luther was no ascetic, and he basked in the incarnate nature of salvation.

Luther’s Late Years and Attitude Toward Jews

Notoriously, Luther turned on Jews with his execrable On the Jews and Their Lies (1543). Roper rejects traditional arguments that seek to explain the raw hatred in print either as a product of its times or as reflective of Luther’s disappointment about the course of the Reformation. His damning words went beyond traditional Christian hostility to Jews, for antisemitism was integral to the reformer’s thought from an early stage. His call for the eradication of Jews made many a colleague and friends cringe. Roper does not hesitate to suggest the link between Luther’s rage and its appropriation of Protestant identity (395).

Concluding Thoughts

Reading Lyndal Roper’s biography offers a unique look into Luther. We see the freedom of the Christian in Luther’s intensely personal struggle for spiritual fulfillment. We encounter a person of alarming obscurities – one who had wrestled with the devil and frequently lost. In her exploration of Luther’s spirit and body- and the sixteenth-century world they inhabited – Roper has shown us that Luther was human after all.

• Roper, Lyndal. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. Random House, 2017.
• Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, Fortress Press, 1955-1986.
• Hendrix, Scott H. Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer. Yale University Press, 2015.
• Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. Doubleday, 1992.
• Pettegree, Andrew. Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation. Penguin Press, 2015.
• Iserloh, Erwin. The Theses Were Not Posted. Translated by Jared Wicks, T. Jefferson Press, 1983

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what did martin luther do in response to the church selling indulgences?

He wrote a paper to attack to the Church even going as far as calling them corrupt for their actions.

Explanation:

im pretty sure his paper was called '95 Theses to the door of All Saints'. The church also responded to this paper,  Pope Leo X calling him a hieratic

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Details : Who was the 13th and final state of the Confederation?

What do the arguments that Smith, Emerson, and Butters present about capitalism have in common? All see capitalism as a way for the United States to control trade. All see capitalism as having few benefits and many drawbacks. All see capitalism as empowering people to take control of their lives. All see capitalism as justifying government involvement in the economy

Because they all want power of their work and lives.

They really wanted to empower people beyond their limits, teasing people takes out their best and make them know themselves better.

what is A.O.C and D.O.C​

AOC: Alliance of Civilizations - UN anti-extremism organization or

Architect of the Capital - a US Agency

DOC: Duty of Care - Legal obligation imposed on an individual requiring adherence to a standard of reasonable care

Explain 2 reasons the African immigrants differed from the other groups

Explanation:  

1. African immigrants differed from the other groups because of their ethnicity, which was and still persists in some places to be considered inferior to the other races and this was the main reason why the scourge of slavery occurred.

2. They did not have economic resources as used to happen with other immigrants since they had more obstacles to obtain them because of the multiple discriminatory impositions on the part of the white people.

Portuguese traders introduce the concept of slavery to aftica true or false

Answer: Kinda.

Slavery had been in Africa before this point. Portugal was the first European nation to get slaves from Africa, but various leaders in Africa had other African slaves before this.

Details : Portuguese traders introduce the concept of slavery to aftica true

when did the Holocaust happen? ​

between 1941 and 1945

If im not mistaking it was 1945, what r ur answer choices?

Exit Quiz: Plans for Reconstruction Clash What significant question would passage of the Fourteenth Amendment address? A. How will slavery be outlawed in the United States? B. Who should have the right to vote in a democratic republic? c. Who should have access to publicly funded education? D. Who is included as a citizen of the United States?

Who is included as a citizen of the United States? is the significant question would passage of the Fourteenth Amendment address. Hence, option D is correct.

What is Reconstruction ?

From 1865 until 1877, a number of US administrations tried to rebuild society, particularly in the former Confederate states, by establishing and safeguarding the legal rights of the newly freed black population . Reconstruction is the term used to describe this time .

Following the American Civil War , during the Reconstruction era, the nation struggled with how to treat African Americans lawfully and how to reintegrate the seceded states into the Union .

Following the conclusion of the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era ran from 1865 to 1877. Its main objective was to restore the southern states' full political participation in the Union .

Thus, option D is correct.

For more information about Reconstruction, click here:

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What makes Zoroaster an influential figure?

where are the answer choice

Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra) was an important religious figure in ancient Persia (present-day Iran and surrounding areas), whose teachings became the foundation of a religious movement named Zoroastrianism, a tradition that would largely dominate Persia until the mid-7th century CE, when Islam gained ascendancy in the region after the fall of the Sasanian Empire, the last pre-Islamic Persian empire.

The largest settlement of the Mound Builders was a. Mesa Verde. c. Cahokia. b. Pueblo Bonito. d. Seneca. Please select the best answer from the choices provided Answer is C on edg.

Details : The largest settlement of the Mound Builders wasa.Mesa Verde.c.Cahokia.b.Pueblo

who founded america

The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the year 1492 started the European colonization of the Americas. Most colonies were formed after 1600, and the early records and writings of Johnathan Winthrop make the United States the first nation whose most distant origins are fully recorded.

Hello! The answer to your question would be as followed:

The person that "founded America" would be named Christopher Columbus.

But people disagree saying that the people who were already living on American land found it first.

But, for the sake of it, just say Christopher Columbus

Who had no role in Johnson’s reconstruction plan of the South?

1. What might a citizen say in the presence of a sovereign ruler? Why?

Citizens do not have any say before a sovereign rule. This is because the ruler does not have any trust with the government and wants the power to be at the hand of individuals who are ready to do things as they please.

Nevertheless, citizens themselves liberal since their relationship is not a subject to the general ruling of the government. Naturally, sovereign citizens are true believers, they enters into the movement buying conspiracies that promised them faster fix of their problems.

A citizen say only those things which pleases the ruler.

A citizen can't say anything in the presence of a sovereign ruler because all the powers are present in the hand of one person and no one question him about his actions so if a citizen say anything that make him unhappy then the citizen will be punished for his action of speaking. It is the democracy in which citizen can represents their ideas and say its point of view before the head of the government so we can conclude that the citizen can't speak before the sovereign ruler.

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to what extent was columbus exchange good?​

The primary positive effect of the Columbian exchange was the introduction of New World crops, such as potatoes and corn, to the Old World. The most significant negative effects were the transmission of African populations into slavery and the exchange of diseases between the Old and New World. Hope this helps you out!

Details : to what extent was columbus exchange good?

How did the south Atlantic system affect the British economy

The South Atlantic system tied the entire economy of British colonies in a circular system. The British sold guns to Africans in exchange for slaves. The slaves were sold to the colonies and worked in the  sugar and tobacco plantations that brought wealth to entire British economy

Natural pearls cause and effect

What is the fundamental difference between the progressivist view and the revisionist interpretation?

The progressivism: It is a philosophy based on progress, which includes advances in science, technology, and social organisation, these aspects are very important for human development conditions, actions for a better future.

The revisionist view: It is a re-interpretation of historical evidence. It challenges the existing view of history records.  

By re-visioning, the written history, new ideas, discoveries, facts, and different interpretations create a revised history.

Eddie mabo life and death essay asap. before tmr

Details : Eddie mabo life and death essay asap. before tmr

In what extent does formal education lead to wealth creation? Give 10 reasons.

Formal Education doesn’t always lead to wealth creation in all aspect.

10 reasons which states that formal education doesn’t necessarily lead to wealth creation:-  

1) Formal education teaches us to prepare for the exams that we need to pass to achieve good marks.

2) Formal education is a part of one’s success but not solely the only reason behind it. It doesn’t excel you in all life exams.

3) Formal education doesn’t teach us the personal passion that one should have to achieve wealth.

4) It helps in learning the means of wealth creation but doesn’t teach the hard-work and perseverance to attain it.

5) Formal education is of no use if we don’t apply it in our life.

6) The formal education doesn’t give the vision to attain the principles of life that one should follow in wealth creation.

7) Formal education is necessary to acquire a job or business but one need the intelligence to retain it.

8) We can only learn from formal education but can’t learn the act to achieve success.

9) It doesn’t teach creativity, one should be talented to gain wealth

10)  It doesn’t teach us patience that we need to achieve anything.

I need an essay on Eddie Mabo’s life and death. asap

Eddie Koiki Mabo was born on 29 June, 1936, on the island of Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait. His mother died giving birth and he was adopted by his uncle, Benny Mabo. His surname was changed from Sambo to Mabo and from an early age, Koiki was taught about his family’s land.

In 1959, he moved to Townsville in Queensland and held a variety of jobs including working on pearling boats, cutting cane and as a railway fettler.  He married Bonita Neehow, an Australian-born South Sea Islander, and they had ten children.

He was an activist in the 1967 Referendum campaign and helped found the Townsville Aboriginal and Islander Health Service. The issue of land rights became a focus for his energy in 1974, while working on campus as a gardener at James Cook University.

In 1973, Koiki became co-founder and director of the Townsville ‘black community school' - one of the first in Australia. The school commenced with ten students, in an old Catholic school building in the heart of inner city Townsville. Disenchanted with the approach to Indigenous education within the Queensland State Education system, Eddie volunteered to work for half pay to help establish the school.

The School was regarded with open hostility within the general Townsville community including the Queensland education department, local newspaper and some local politicians. The then State Minister for Education denounced the motives of the student’s parents declaring their attitudes as racist and the school as ‘apartheid in reverse.’

At its peak in the late 1970s forty five students were enrolled at the school. In 1975, Koiki was asked to join the National Aboriginal Education Committee (NAEC), an advisory body to the Commonwealth Education Department and he served on the committee for three years.

In 1981, Koiki gave his first speech at a land rights conference at the James Cook University explaining the traditional land ownership and inheritance system that his community followed on Mer Island. A lawyer in the audience noted the significance of Koiki’s speech and suggested there should be a test case to claim land rights through the court system.

Perth based solicitor Greg McIntyre agreed to take the case, representing Mabo and recruited barristers, the late Ron Castan and Bryan Keon-Cohen. Greg McIntyre and Koiki both applied successfully for research grants from AIATSIS to conduct research for the case.

On 20 May 1982, Koiki and fellow Mer Islanders - Reverend David Passi, Celuia Mapo Salee, Sam Passi and James Rice began their legal claim for ownership of their lands on the island of Mer with the High Court of Australia. With Koiki as the first named plaintiff, the case became known as the ‘Mabo Case’.

Ten years later, on 3 June 1992, the High Court of Australia decided in favour of Eddie Koiki Mabo and his fellow plaintiffs.

The judgments of the High Court inserted the legal doctrine of native title into Australian law. In recognising the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their islands in the eastern Torres Strait, the Court also held that native title existed for all Indigenous peoples in Australia who held rights in their lands under their own laws and customs prior to the assertion of British sovereignty and establishment Colonies across the continent from 1788.

The new doctrine of native title replaced a 17th century doctrine of terra nullius on which British claims to possession of Australia were justified on a wrongful legal presumption that Indigenous peoples had no settled law governing occupation and use of lands. In recognising that Indigenous people in Australia had prior rights to land, the Court held that these rights, where they exist today, will have the protection of the Australian law until those rights are legally extinguished.

Unfortunately, Eddie Koiki Mabo did not live to see the fruits of his life-time commitment and passion. He passed away from cancer aged fifty-six on 21 January 1992.

The High Court decision in the ‘Mabo case’ altered the foundation of land law in Australia. In the following year, the Native Title Act 1993 was passed through the Australian Parliament and opened the way for further claims of traditional rights to land and compensation.

CHANGE THIS UP SOME AND DO NOT JUST COPY THIS BECAUSE I GOT IT OFF A WEBSITE AND I DON'T WANT YOU IN TROUBLE FOR PLAGIARISM

Why are popes considered successors of Peter

How did the Dawes act replace the reservations system

Details : How did the Dawes act replace the reservations system

brainliest to the person who answers correctly first equality of all men was said by whom: a. locke b. hobbes c. montesquieu d. rousseau e. all of the above please give me the correct answer and thank you.

E) All of the above.

All four men were personals of government and all made the statement of equality.

List two economic effects of the Black Death?

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