By 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. had already been arrested nearly thirty times, had his home bombed, and received a steady stream of death threats for organizing nonviolent protests against racial segregation across the American South — a level of personal risk most people would find impossible to sustain for years on end.
He insisted, against pressure from more militant voices within his own movement, that the campaign remain strictly nonviolent, even as protesters — including children in Birmingham — were met with police dogs and fire hoses on live television. He believed the moral contrast between peaceful protest and violent response was itself a form of persuasion the whole country would eventually have to reckon with.
In August 1963, he stood before roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people at the March on Washington and delivered an address about the future he hoped for his own children — a speech that became one of the defining moments of the American civil rights movement, broadcast to a national audience.
He was assassinated in 1968 at just thirty-nine years old, having spent his entire adult life organizing under constant threat, never once trading nonviolence for the retaliation that many around him expected and, at times, urged.