Apple continues its annual tradition of devoting its homepage to celebrating Martin Luther King Jr day, with a single-sentence quote. This year’s quote is from Stride Toward Freedom, King’s memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott.
True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.
The bus boycott began with a simple action by Rosa Parks, and ended in a groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court ruling …
Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr, Research and Education Institute summarises the events.
Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional.
The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery.
The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed. In Stride Toward Freedom, King’s 1958 memoir of the boycott, he declared the real meaning of the Montgomery bus boycott to be the power of a growing self-respect to animate the struggle for civil rights.
Parks, of course, achieved fame by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, as the law required at the time.
It seems hard to imagine now, but one of the reasons King was elected to lead the campaign, said Parks, was that he wasn’t well-known.
The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies.
King quickly demonstrated the mastery of rhetoric for which he became world famous.
I want it to be known that we’re going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city. And we are not wrong.… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.
The New York Times has a short video op-ed with King’s son, Martin Luther King III, in which he says we must remember that his father’s work was about more than just racial justice.
I think if my father saw the issues of poverty and income inequality that exist today he would be greatly disappointed.
Ahead of the day, Apple expanded Apple Maps with new VolunteerMatch integration, a partnership designed to allow users to easily find ways to volunteer in their communities.
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