1. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t just become the leader of the
civil right movement: He helped to start it. In response to Rosa
Parks’ famous refusal to give up her seat on a bus for a white
passenger, King led the black community in Montgomery, Alabama,
in the first nonviolent civil rights demonstration in the United
States in 1955. Their bus boycott lasted for 382 days (that’s
more than a year of finding another way to get to work!), until
the United States Supreme Court ruled that laws segregating
buses were unconstitutional. 2. In his efforts to fight
segregation and inequality, King traveled more than six million
miles and spoke more than 2,500 times. As he noted in his famous
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (read the full text) King served
as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
which had more than 80 affiliated organizations throughout the
South. Why not just telephone, instead of constantly being on
the road? “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned
about what happe