Rainbow Valley is a monthly podcast where your host, Scott takes a look at key events and personalities that shaped one the most influential, vibrant, tumultuous and swinging decades in history. Join us as we celebrate the 1960’s with the stories surrounding the music and news events of the decade that shook the world.

 

On October 14th 1964, African American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in America. At 35 years of age the Georgia born minister was the youngest person to receive the award.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 organized the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. King adhered to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence and promoted nonaggressive civil disobedience to racial segregation. The peaceful protests he led throughout the American South were often met with violence, but King and his supporters persevered, and their nonviolent crusade gained momentum.

A powerful speechmaker, he appealed to Christian and American principles and won increasing backing from the federal government and northern whites. In 1963, he led an enormous March on Washington, and in front of a quarter of a million people , he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” address.

Just prior to Dr King accepting his Nobel Prize,  In 1964, the civil rights movement achieved two of its greatest successes: the ratification of the 24th Amendment, which abolished the poll tax, and the introduction of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public facilities.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race in the United States, but while legally black people were allowed the vote, some southern state officials obstructed their efforts to register. Local groups in Selma had already been agitating for change, but when Dr Martin Luther King chose it as the testing ground for his black voter registration campaign in early 1965, it drew national attention to the Alabama town.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, Rainbow Valley is proud to present the story of Selma to Montgomery – Martin Luther King and the March for Freedom