Albuquerque, N.M. • The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. fought for many issues throughout his life as a minister and the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, speaking out against various barriers holding back blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans. Fifty years after his assassination, some of these barriers have fallen — but others remain.
Four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus, King exhorted a crowd at the Holt Street Baptist Church to launch a bus boycott. “Now let us go out to stick together and stay with this thing until the end,” he told the thousands gathered at the church that day in 1955.