American civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Rarely seen footage of Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967, where he delivered his speech "What Is Your Life's Blueprint?"

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American civil rights leader. Leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and advocate of nonviolent protests of segregation and other anti-civil rights laws. Best known for his speech "I Have a Dream" (1963). Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

The repository contains seven quotes from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

1. Principle: If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

2. Best: If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

 3. Friendship: In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. 

 4. Walter L. Morristivation: You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

 5. Behavior: Life’s most urgent question is: what are you doing for others?

 6.Justice: That old law about an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

 7.Right and Wrong: One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.

The Civil Rights Movement received an infusion of energy with a student sit-in at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four students Ezell A. Blair, Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, an all-black college, sat down at the segregated lunch counter to protest Woolworth's policy of excluding African Americans. The four students purchased small items in other parts of the store and kept their receipts, then sat down at the lunch counter and asked to be served. After being denied service, they produced their receipts and asked why their money was good everywhere else at the store, but not at the lunch counter. These protesters were encouraged to dress professionally, to sit quietly, and to occupy every other stool so that potential white sympathizers could join in. The sit-in soon inspired other sit-ins in Richmond, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta, Georgia. As students across the south began to "sit-in" at the lunch counters of a few of their local stores, local authority figures sometimes used brute force to physically escort the demonstrators from the lunch facilities.

The "sit-in" technique was not new—as far back as 1939, African-American attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker organized a sit-in at the then-segregated Alexandria, Virginia library. In 1960 the technique succeeded in bringing national attention to the movement. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to a rash of student campaigns throughout the South. Probably the best organized, most highly disciplined, the most immediately effective of these was in Nashville, Tennessee. On March 9, 1960 an Atlanta University Center group of students released An Appeal for Human Rights as a full page advertisement in newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and Atlanta Daily World. This student group, known as the Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), initiated the Atlanta Student Movement and began to lead in Atlanta with sit-ins starting on March 15, 1960. By the end of 1960, the sit-ins had spread to every southern and border state and even to Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio.

Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public places. Upon being arrested, student demonstrators made "jail-no-bail" pledges, to call attention to their cause and to reverse the cost of protest, thereby saddling their jailers with the financial burden of prison space and food. In April, 1960 activists who had led these sit-ins held a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[29] SNCC took these tactics of nonviolent confrontation further, to the freedom rides.See also: Greensboro sit-ins and Nashville sit-ins