 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at a press conference at the Capitol, Washington, D.C., March 26, 1964. |
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In 1957, King was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution. King also directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "I Have a Dream". He was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times.
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