The speech that we had to read for class came from a very important main in the civil rights movement: Martin Luther King, Jr. This was a speech that took place in Montgomery, Alabama after the famous Rosa Parks bus incident. The main points of his speech to the people, I thought, were that of the Rose Parks bus incident and how they have a right to protest under the U.S. Constitution.
Rosa Parks was the woman who was arrested and brought to jail because she sat in the front of the bus, when black Americans were supposed to sit in the back of the bus in the city of Montgomery. as MLK said in his speech, "Now the press would have us believe that she refused to leave the reserved section for Negroes, but I want you to know that there is no reserved section." Mrs. Parks was a good Christian women like many others in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. She didn't put up a fight; she was just standing up for her own rights as a citizen of the United States.
The second main point of this speech would have to be how they have the right to protest because of their constitutional rights. They are people, citizens, of this country and they have just as much of a right to the Constitution as everyone else. That is what MLK is trying to say and advocate. It does say in the constitution that we have the right to assemble (protest) peacefully. All MLK wanted to do was that exactly. He said, "There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and lynched for not cooperating. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the constitution of this nation." All he wanted was peaceful protests. MLK accomplished this by quietly marching through streets and holding rallies such as the one at the Lincoln Memorial, where he delivered the "I have a dream speech."
In the end of everything, MLK just wanted a peaceful end to this horrible age of ignorance.
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