In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was
jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white
man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws.

The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young
Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr., followed Park’s
historic act of civil disobedience.

“The mother of the civil rights movement,” as Rosa Parks is
known, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913.

She worked as a seamstress and in 1943 joined the Montgomery
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – April 4)

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks  (1913 –  2005)

CARLATA BRADLEY

FROM LEFT: JOHN ALLEN MUHAMMAD, LEE BOYD MALVO

On July 2, 1964,  President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law     
the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony
at the White House.

James Earl Ray (above) an escaped American convict, was arrested 
in London, England, and charged with the assassination of African
American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Rev. King was fatally wounded by a
sniper’s bullet while standing on the balcony outside his second-
story room at the Motel Lorraine.

That evening, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the
sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine
Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports,
and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect:
James Earl Ray.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968)

James Earl Ray (1928 – 1998)

Ray died on April 23, 1998, just 19 days after the 30th
Anniversary of King’s Assassination, at the age of 70,
at the Columbia Nashville Memorial Hospital in Madison,
Tennessee from complications related to kidney disease
and liver failure caused by hepatitis C.

CAMILLE
BOHANNON