The Civil Rights Movement was an exceptionally pivotal period of modern history, granting African Americans and other minorities equivalent legal status to whites. There were many great civil rights leaders and heroes of the time, the most well-known and celebrated being Martin Luther King Jr. King is most notable for his leadership in the March on Washington and his "I Have a Dream" speech. He is perceived by the public eye to be the most influential leader in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Interestingly enough, the ideas of civil disobedience and peaceful protest upon which The Civil Rights Movement was based were not in fact original. This concept is actually accredited to Gandhi, the Indian trailblazer who led India to independence through this nonviolent approach. The parallels that Martin Luther King Jr. drew from Gandhi are quite apparent. Gandhi walked two hundred and forty miles to the ocean to make salt; while Martin Luther King Jr. did not walk quite as far, he walked to create a mass civil disobedience. In King's book, the chapter "The World House" explains that the problems with equality in race, sex, and sexuality in American society are not just isolated to America; the whole world has these issues, and to resolve them we must band together to attack them as a global force. He claims that as long as there are people living in this world who think less of someone else there will always be inequality. This chapter was the reaction to the many oppressive events throughout the history that our culture has witnessed. "We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today" (Carolina Reader 283). We must think forward and face our problems head on and united.

To begin, there were many racist events that led up to the Civil Rights Movement. The obvious beginning of racism in America was the colonial slave trade. At this time, it was not an oppression out of racial hatred, but rather one out of economic and financial need. People who could afford travelling to the colonies brought lower class citizens over to work as rich people's slaves for a certain amount of time. Eventually, the African slave trade made its way over to America and race discrimination began. African Americans were seen as animals, cattle, and workers, but never as human beings. They were used to make white people's lives easier and make them money. They were essentially free labor and the white owners prospered from the slaves' struggles. This was the start to black oppression in the United States and the first event to trigger the Civil Rights Movement (Mintz).

Additionally, even after slavery was abolished following the end of the Civil War, African Americans continued to be oppressed particularly in the Southern states with the emergence of the Black Codes. The primary purpose of these laws was to restrict the freedoms of African Americans. A notable clause of these codes was that local men were now allowed to arrest black people and force them into involuntary labor, a solution to the policy prohibiting slavery. The codes also restricted freed black men to the basic fundamental rights of the nation such as owning land and moving freely around the country. Immediately after slavery was abolished, whites found an alternative method to oppress African Americans, yet another factor sparking the Civil Rights Movement (Black Codes).

Also, another major event that led to the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr.'s commendable acts was the death of Emmett Till. During this period, racism in the south was still very rampant in the United States. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old black boy from Mississippi. While the facts of the occurrence are still disputed, the young boy was in the town square of sorts when either one of two things happened. One account is that he whistled at a married white woman. The second account is that he was simply talking to her in a polite manner. Either way it happened the result was horrific. Nights later, two white men came to where Emmett Till was sleeping and took him to an empty barn where they brutally abused him. The men said they were punishing him for looking at a white woman. After they were done torturing the fourteen-year-old boy they shot him through the head. They then threw his body in to a nearby river with a brick to weigh him down to the bottom. Eventually, his body was discovered and sent to his mother who had raised him. She held an open casket funeral that was so widely publicized it sparked a fire underneath the Civil Rights Movement. The whole world saw the abuse this teenager went through because he was black and it caused outrage across many communities. The call for change was rising faster than ever all thanks to a young black boy's horrendous death, another event that led to Martin Luther King Jr.'s actions in the Civil Rights Movement (Emmett Till).

A fourth event that led to Martin Luther King Jr.'s movements to help the Civil Rights Movement was the enactment of Jim Crow Laws. These were enacted after the black laws and lasted all the way up until 1965. The main purpose of the law was to keep African Americans and whites separated. The phrase that was coined through these laws was "Separate but Equal". The people in power, white men, wanted African Americans to remain segregated. The whites' United States was not even comparable to the United States that African Americans knew. The African American life in the United States was significantly worse than the white life. African Americans had worse education, as the funding that went in to white schools was flagrantly greater than that of which went in to African American schools. Another difference was voting. Many white people tried to restrict African Americans' new right to vote. They invoked literacy tests needed to pass to vote which were easy enough for white people to pass, but because African Americans did not have anywhere near the same education, many of them could not vote. Another restriction on voting was the poll tax invoked in the Jim Crow laws that required a person to pay a certain amount of money before they could place a valid vote. At the time, the majority of African Americans were holding low paying jobs because of racism of the bosses, poor education, and inequality in pay. As a result, many African Americans could not afford to pay this poll tax to vote. These Jim Crow laws also led to the peaceful protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. (Jim Crow Laws). 

In conclusion, many events and experiences effected Martin Luther King Jr. into participating and creating a huge impact in the Civil Rights Movement. "We have inherited a large house, a great 'world house' in which we have to live together   black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu   a family separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace" (Carolina Reader 285). It is clear that Martin Luther King Jr. is writing about how these historic events are not just an African American problem, but they are the world's problem. In order to fix these problems, we must face them united. These are only a select few oppressive actions. Previous knowledge of these historical events allows the reader to understand Martin Luther King Jr.'s "The World House" because the reader knows exactly what he was referring to about the problems in America at the time. By reading this passage the reader can feel the passion that the history behind African American oppression in America brought out in his writing because of my knowledge of past events. The Civil Rights Movement would not be anywhere near as successful as it was without the aid of Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil disobedience and peaceful protests. "We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today" (Carolina Reader).

