Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
My name is Dr. C and I'm a TESL -certified English teacher.
I teach English online to students who are learning it as a second language.
I created this podcast with the goal of it becoming a resource for you to help you with your fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge of American culture.
On today's episode, I would like to focus on the American culture aspect.
If you're listening or watching this episode when it comes out, it is January 15th and it is Martin Luther King Jr.
Day here in the United States.
Martin Luther King Jr.
was a transformative figure.
He is probably one of the most important people in the history of the United States and is easily one of the most recognizable Americans from the last century.
Because of this, and because of the role he played here in the U .S., there is a federal holiday that is celebrated every January.
We get a date off in honor of Martin Luther King and because of the work that he did here in the U .S.
I would like to talk a little bit about Martin Luther King because I don't know if all of you know about him or why he's so important here to us Americans.
On today's episode, I want to go over his early days and some of his earliest achievements as a civil rights leader.
If you don't know a lot about the history of the U .S., there was a lot of racial discrimination.
And that discrimination and that systematic discrimination existed really recently.
You can argue that it still occurs today, but the very extreme examples of it were within people's lifetimes.
And Martin Luther King was a civil rights leader.
He fought against this discrimination and helped change a lot of the practices in the U .S.
So with that, let's begin and let's talk about Martin Luther King Jr.
First, let's talk about Martin Luther King's name.
So his full name is Martin Luther King Jr., which is a lot to say.
A lot of times people will just call him Martin Luther King and leave out the junior part.
People will also say MLK for his initials or Dr.
King. If you hear any of these terms, they're all referring to Martin Luther King Jr.
And Martin Luther King Jr.
is just a shortened, abbreviated way of saying his name.
A little bit about his history.
So Martin Luther King was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia.
If you don't know where Georgia is, it's in the southern part of the United States.
And he was born in Atlanta.
His parents were Martin Luther King Sr.
So that is why he is a junior because he was named after his father.
And his mother was Alberta Williams King.
Now both of his parents were educated.
He grew up in a middle -class family.
His parents were very involved in church.
And his father was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
This church is a church that Martin Luther King himself later became a pastor of.
And the church is still in existence.
The current pastor, Ralph Raphael Warnock, is actually one of the senators from the state of Georgia.
So the church is still in existence.
It still has active members.
And you can go and visit it if you would like.
Martin Luther King was a very intelligent child.
In part because of his parents.
His mother actually taught him to read before he even started school.
So when he did start in school, he was advanced for his age.
Because of his intelligence and because of his advanced learning, he actually skipped two grades in school.
In the United States, high school is a period of four years.
It's your ninth through twelfth year of school.
And it's usually about age 13 to age 17 or 18, around there.
Martin Luther King actually ended up skipping his first year, his ninth grade year, which we call the freshman year.
And his twelfth year, which is what we call the senior year.
Because of this, he actually started college when he was 15 years old.
Now that is young for someone to begin college here in the U .S.
I will say personally, I was 17 when I started college.
And people are usually around that age.
17, 18, 19 is common.
So 15 is young. The college that he went to was Morehouse College.
Now, originally, Martin Luther King did not want to go to Morehouse College.
But he was convinced to go because his father and his grandfather were both alumni from that college.
That means they both went there and graduated from Morehouse.
Morehouse was a traditionally all -male black college.
Now, you might not have heard this term before, historically black college and university.
This gets abbreviated to be HBCU.
And it is a string of colleges or universities here in the United States that were historically or traditionally black only.
The reason is because of this history of segregation in the United States.
Segregation was a period of time, an ugly period of time in U .S.
history where people were separated based on race.
So white people and black people were not allowed to intermingle, especially in the South.
This gets associated a lot with the South, but it was present in other areas of the U .S.
And because of that, there were whites -only schools and blacks -only schools.
Blacks -only shops, whites -only shops, blacks -only drinking values.
Fountains, whites -only drinking fountains, etc.
This led to a completely different school system for African -American students, and that's what led to the rise of historically black colleges.
This is where people who had African -American descent or people of African -American descent could go to a college or university and not have to deal with any type of segregation issues because everyone there was black.
Now again, when we're talking about this period of time and we're talking about segregation, it is most associated with the South, which is where Martin Luther King was born, that's where he was raised, and that's where he did most of his activism.
However, it was not just in the South.
This was a systemic issue.
Even though it wasn't as prevalent, we would say, so not as common or not as extreme as in the South, it still did exist.
For example, my family is from California.
My grandparents were of Mexican descent.
Their parents were from Mexico, and so they were Mexican -Americans.
Now when they were growing up in the 1930s, which is around the time Martin Luther King Jr.
was growing up, there were public swimming pools that they were not allowed to go swim in.
They could not swim with white people.
The only day that they were allowed to go to these swimming pools was right before the swimming pool was cleaned.
The Mexican people were allowed to go swimming when there was no white people there, and right before the pool got cleaned because it was thought that they were dirty and their dirtiness wouldn't contaminate the white people because the pool would get cleaned after they swam in it, and then white people
would be able to use the pool after it was cleaned and there was no contamination, as we would say.
Again, disgusting, horrific time in U .S.
history, and it's embarrassing to really even think that that occurred, but historically that's what happened, and that's the type of culture that was in the U .S.
at this time when Martin Luther King was growing up.
He experienced the segregation, he experienced harassment and racial injustice, and that's what he saw around him, especially because he was growing up in Georgia.
Now when Martin Luther King went to Morehouse College, he studied in sociology.
He became very interested in the philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and his passive resistance that he helped lead in India, and also he became interested in the teachings of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau.
He ended up becoming the president of the student body in his sophomore year, which would have been his second year at Morehouse College, and he was also a member of the debate team and of the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha.
So you can see he was very involved with his schooling, and he eventually graduated and got his degree in sociology.
He graduated in 1948, and then went on to study theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.
He earned his bachelor's degree in divinity in 1951 from Crozer, and then when he was there, he actually got the Crozer fellowship for graduate study at Boston University.
This led him to go to Boston, where he studied to get his PhD degree in systematic theology from Boston University.
During this time, he was exposed to a lot of liberal theology that had to do with Christians and Christian thinking, fighting systemic injustice and racial discrimination, and this really opened his mind to what was possible and ways how people should act and means of fighting back against racial discrimination and social injustice.
It was also during this time that he met his future wife, Coretta Scott.
She was a young woman from Alabama, and she was studying music at the New England Conservatory of Music.
They met and eventually married in 1953.
Martin Luther King got his doctorate and started to become more and more involved in the civil rights movement.
Now, a major part of the civil rights movement occurred in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama.
What happened was, at the time, buses in the South were segregated based on race, just like so many other things.
What happened was that Black people and white people could be on the bus at the same time.
However, Black people were segregated to the back of the bus.
If you hear something being referred to as the back of a bus, it's a very racial term, a very discriminatory term, and it's referring to this whole concept.
If white people were on the bus and the bus was full, it was expected that a Black person should stand up and give their seat up so the white person could sit down and they would have to remain standing.
I know this sounds crazy.
It's horrific, but it's what happened.
So in 1955, there was this woman called Rosa Parks, and we will do an episode on Rosa Parks because she deserves her own episode.
Her story is a very important story in the history of the United States and in the Civil Rights Movement.
What happened was, she was on the bus, and a white man came onto the bus.
She refused to give up her seat.
She remained sitting instead of standing up for this man, and because of that, she was arrested.
The police arrested her for not giving up her seat on the bus.
Crazy to think about that that occurred just in 1955, which is not that long ago, but that's what happened.
So she was arrested, and it sparked this huge backlash.
Civil rights leaders came into Montgomery to point out the craziness, the ridiculousness of this segregation and to really bring attention to this issue.
There was a committee that was formed that was called the Montgomery Improvement Association, and it was founded by civil rights leaders, including Dr.
King. Dr. King was elected to become the spokesperson and the head of this organization, and the entire purpose was to help organize a response to this incident with Rosa Parks.
Dr. King was elected because of his oratorship, we would say, which means that he was able to give really good speeches.
He was really good at communication.
He was very intelligent.
He was well -spoken, and he had this key idea of creating nonviolent protests.
Again, because of his studies and because of how much he studied Mahatma Gandhi, he was really interested in social justice and nonviolent protests, and that's what they helped organize.
They organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott is what it sounds like.
It was a boycott. It was where people who were African -American were encouraged to no longer use the bus system in Montgomery.
Instead, they were asked to either walk, ride a bike, carpool, or use a black -owned taxi.
During this time, of course, the amount of riders on the bus system decreased, the amount of profits that the bus company was getting decreased, but the whole entire purpose was really to be a nonviolent form of protest, to show how important African -American bus riders were and to show that they would no longer
put up with this racial segregation.
This bus boycott lasted for a year, and the entire African -American community really supported it and stayed together and did not use the bus system during that year.
How the bus boycott ended was that there was a lawsuit that was filed that argued that the segregation on buses was unconstitutional.
What that means is that it was against the Constitution of the United States and should be illegal.
This lawsuit made its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court is the highest court here in the United States.
In November of 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that yes, segregation on public buses was unconstitutional and was no longer allowed to happen.
This was a major victory for the civil rights movement.
Not only did it get a Supreme Court ruling that changed the way the bus system was run, but it also served as a model.
Other cities, other civil rights leaders were able to use the Montgomery bus boycott as an outline, as a plan that they could implement in their cities so they could enact change.
It really showed the power that people had when they stood together and the change that could come from this type of nonviolent protest.
Because of that, the Montgomery bus boycott is considered to be a major event in the civil rights movement here in the United States.
It is what launched MLK into the public spotlight.
Because he was the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association and because he was the face of this Montgomery bus boycott, he got a lot of national attention.
It put him in the spotlight for the first time.
It really showed his work as a civil rights activist and it's considered to be the first major accomplishment of his civil rights career.
If you know anything about Martin Luther King, you know that there's a lot more to do with his social justice and his civil rights work.
It seems unfair to put all of his life into one episode.
Because of that, I am going to stop this episode here and we'll continue on and talk more about MLK in the coming episodes in the future.
Like I said, he is one of the most important figures here in the history of the United States.
He transformed the way American society currently is.
And because of that, I really want to give his life the justice that it deserves and do multiple episodes so we can talk more about what it was that he did and why he's considered to be so important.
I hope you learned a little bit about his history, his early days, and his first major accomplishment.
I wanted to do this episode as my way of honoring him on MLK Day and show why he is so important to us Americans.
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