pe. The inciting incident came in 1955, after the arrest of one Rosa Parks, a middle-aged seamstress who had also once been a secretary for the local NAACP chapter, refused to follow the law that obligated Negroes to give their bus seats up to any white passenger who wanted them (Lewis, 1970). In response, Dr. King organized the Montgomery Improvement Association, which supervised the famed Montgomery bus boycott that thrust him into sudden and lasting national and international prominence; he was named Time's Man of the Year in 1958. The boycott by blacks of Montgomery's public-transportation system lasted for more than a year and resulted in the desegregation of the bus line (King, 1958) and is considered the provenance of the late-20th-century civil rights movement.
King explains the value of civil disobedience as a tool of social change and the role that religious leaders should play in it. Citing the Montgomery case in particular, he claims a species of divine inspiration and legitimation for these actions more generally.
There is something about the protest that is suprarational; it cannot be explained without a divine dimension. . . . Whatever the name, some extra-human force labors to create a harmony out of the discords of the universe. There is a creative power that works to pull down mountains of evil and level hilltops of injustice (King, 1958, pp. 69-70).
This pattern of thought was to mark King's entire career as a civil rights leader. Between 1957 and 1968, as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King engaged in a series of protests, demonstrations, speeches, and lobbying efforts that aimed at enlisting the US government in overturning discriminatory laws.
King spearheaded notable successes that changed the content and form of law and custom throughout the United States, gathering thousands of like-minded persons of good will--black and white, rich and poor--along the way. Targeting segregatio...