Welcome to disney's magic of storytelling podcast, brought to you by wake med children's, because inside every child is a story waiting to be told.
Our storyteller is abc 11 anchor, dewan hogard, national geographic kids, martin luther king jr.
By kitson jazinka.
Who is martin luther king jr.
Can you imagine a world where laws kept black and white people apart?
Where black children couldn't swim in the same pools as white children or go to the same schools?
A place where laws made it hard for black people to vote, or where a black person had to stand up on a bus so a white person could sit down.
This world was real and it happened in the United States.
Martin Luther King Jr. worked hard to change rules so they would be the same for whites and blacks.
He didn't do it by fighting.
He helped change unfair laws by making people think.
He did it by making people feel.
He did it with his words.
Lots of black people and white people helped Dr. King protest those laws.
This made many people angry because they didn't want change.
But in the end the protesters won and the rules changed forever.
Growing up, dr king was born in 1929 in atlanta, georgia.
He was named after his father.
He was called ml.
Small but strong ml rode bikes with his brother and sister.
Ml's father was the minister of a church.
He taught his children to stand up for what is right.
He taught them to speak out against what is wrong.
He taught them that all people deserve justice, which means that they should be treated fairly.
When he was six, ML's best friend told him he was no longer allowed to play with ML.
Why?
Because ML was black and his friend was white.
Segregation laws were meant to keep black people and white people apart.
They kept kids apart, too.
ML felt bad.
Why wasn't he good enough to play with his friend?
ML's mother told him he was just as good as anybody else, and she told him the world was wrong.
He wiped his tears.
Then ML promised that one day he would change the world.
In his time, Martin Luther King Jr. was a boy in the late 1930s.
Many things were different from how they are today.
Like transportation.
Most people still traveled by horse and buggy.
Only some people were lucky enough to have cars.
Cities.
Some of New York City's famous skyscrapers were finished in the 1930s.
Two of them are the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center.
Money.
Candy bars cost about a penny.
That doesn't sound like much, but dollars and pennies were worth a lot more back then.
U.S. events.
Many people did not have jobs during the time called the Great Depression.
Most people had very little money.
Toys and free time.
Children played board games and listened to programs on the radio for fun.
School.
Times were tough.
Some families couldn't afford to send their kids to school.
Books, clothes, and shoes were too expensive.
Away with words.
ML grew up listening to sermons in church.
He learned how powerful words can be used to help people understand ideas.
When ML was 14, he entered a speech contest.
He put his anger about the unfairness of separate rules for white people and black people into words.
He made people think.
He made them feel.
The judges loved his speech, and he won.
On the bus ride home from the speech contest, the driver told ML and his teacher to give up their seats to white people.
ML had to stand for two hours.
He was mad, but he didn't say anything.
He knew he could be arrested, hurt, or even killed if he did.
A student of peace.
ML worked hard in school.
He finished college when he was 19 years old.
He moved to the northeastern U.S. and continued in school.
He wanted to be a minister like his father.
In 1952, ML met Coretta Scott and fell in love.
They got married and moved south to Alabama.
There, ML worked as a minister.
By 1955, he had gone as far as you can go in school.
He had earned the title doctor.
Now, He was Dr. King, helping others.
The Kings moved back to the South to work for equal rights.
They saw that not much had changed for black people there.
They still couldn't swim in pools or go to school with whites.
They still had to stand on buses so white people could sit.
In Alabama, Dr. King had a chance to help.
A bus driver told a woman named Rosa Parks to give up her seat to a white person.
But she didn't get up.
Rosa Parks was arrested because she had broken the law.
Lots of people went to a meeting to decide what to do.
Maids, janitors, and other working people rode the buses.
They asked people not to ride buses until blacks and whites had the same rules.
They called it a boycott.
They put Dr. King in charge because he had a way with words.
For more than a year, Black people walked.
They took cabs.
They even rode mules to get around.
The boycott was not easy.
But finally, the people listened.
Black people and white people would have the same rules on buses.
Unfortunately, many white people did not follow the new rules.
Dr. King went all over the country giving speeches.
He talked about injustice and civil rights.
He made people think.
He made people feel, and he asked people to join him in protest for change.
Blacks and whites marched together to protest bad laws.
They went to places where only whites were allowed.
A lot of them got arrested.
Angry people called them names.
Sometimes the marchers were hurt or even killed.
Newspapers, television, and radio reported it all.
People around the country were mad.
They saw how bad it was to have separate rules.
One person who saw what was going on was President John F. Kennedy.
The president wanted to show that he agreed the rules should be the same for blacks and whites.
So he invited Dr. King to visit him at the White House.
Peaceful protest.
Dr. King wanted to make the world a better place.
He did this with peace, not hate or violence.
People sometimes hurt him, but Dr. King did not hurt them back.
He fought back with peaceful protests and powerful words.
Eight awesome facts about Dr. King.
One.
Dr King and his father were both named Michael King, but his father changed their names in 1934.
Two, once Dr. King was hit with a brick during a peaceful march.
He didn't fight back.
He kept walking.
Three, Dr. King liked to dance.
Four, Dr. King learned good ideas from a man in India named Gandhi.
He used peaceful protest to fight unfair laws.
Five, Dr. King gave 2,500 speeches during the last 11 years of his life.
Six, the statue of Dr. King at his memorial in Washington, D.C. is huge.
Its head weighs 27 tons.
Seven, Dr. King told people to love each other like brothers and sisters.
And eight Dr King and Coretta.
Scott King had four children Yolanda, Martin Luther III, Dexter and Bernice.
Dr. King's dream.
It was August 28th, 1963. in Washington DC.
In the same city where our country makes its laws, a huge crowd of people, black and white, cheered.
They had come to stand with Dr. King and protest bad laws.
Everyone in the crowd wanted the same rules for white people and black people.
Dr. King's voice boomed as he gave his most famous speech called, I Have a Dream.
Dr. King's dream was for all people to be treated the same.
Hard times.
Three months after Dr. King's speech, President Kennedy was assassinated.
It was a hard time for the United States.
But the next president, Lyndon Johnson, kept working to change the rules.
Dr King in his own words.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
His final years.
The rules did change in 1964 and again in 1965.
Laws were now the same for black people and white people, but not everyone followed the new rules right away.
For the next several years, Dr. King and many others kept working.
Dr. King gave speeches.
He planned peaceful protests, He helped others.
In 1968, Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee.
He was helping black garbage collectors protest for better pay.
But angry people still did not want change.
A man with a gun assassinated Dr. King.
Black and white people around the world were very sad.
They had lost a man who made them think and feel.
They had lost a man who helped make our world a better place, with peace and justice.
But Dr. King left us his words to remember him by.
A Memorial to Peace.
You can visit a national memorial to Dr. King.
It is in Washington, D.C.
There you can read his words about his hope that people could live together peacefully and with justice.
You can also stand next to a 30-foot statue of him.
It is called the stone of hope.
From far away the stone of hope looks gray, but up close it is really many colors.
The colors stand for all the different people in the world.
That's because dr king stood up for our right to all be treated fairly.
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