– reached their zenith with his address in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, in which he stood before hundreds of thousands of supporters and declared:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.  I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. 

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character . . . When we allow freedom to ring – when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last.

King’s “I Have a Dream” speech remains one of the most important defining moments of the civil rights movement.  That he would fall to an assassin’s bullet on April 9, 1968, remains one of this nation’s greatest tragedies, as his vision remains elusive.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was important to the Civil Rights Movement in at least two main ways.

First, King was extremely important as a leader of the black community.  King’s leadership and motivational skills were able to push the movement forward.  They were also able to keep the vast majority of the African American activists from acting violently.  King was able to persuade them to adhere to his philosophy of nonviolence.

Second, King was important because he was a visible leader who was relatively acceptable to the white community.  The African American rights movement was always going to need support from white Americans.  There were simply not enough minorities to gain rights without white help.  Therefore, the movement needed leadership that could appeal to whites.  If the movement had been led by someone along the lines of Malcolm X, the white community would have been much less likely to support it.  Therefore, King was key to the movement.

King, then, was important to the Civil Rights Movement because he was able to motivate blacks while, at the same time, being relatively acceptable to many whites.

Martin Luther King was the political leader and the face of the Civil Rights Movement for many Americans. His influence, which was at first through the Southern Christian Leadership Council, was instrumental in both the strategy and the tactics of the movement. Perhaps most significantly, King and other like-minded leaders were able to persuade civil rights activists to adopt a stance of nonviolence. He also, through his speeches and writings, gave the civil rights movement a moral face, framing the movement, as he did in his famous speech to the March on Washington, in terms of liberties that all Americans could claim to believe in. King also, in comparison to other leaders, counseled a relatively moderate approach to civil rights, with rhetoric that emphasized unity and forgiveness that stood in contrast to the rhetoric of emerging black nationalist leaders.