The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968) was the charismatic leader of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. He directed the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, which attracted scrutiny by a wary, divided nation, but his leadership and the resulting Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation brought him fame. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate nonviolent protests and delivered over 2,500 speeches addressing racial injustice, but his life was cut short by an assassin in 1968.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Michael King Sr., pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta Williams, a Spelman College graduate and former schoolteacher. King lived with his parents, a sister, and a brother in the Victorian home of his maternal grandparents.
After attending the World Baptist Alliance in Berlin in 1934, King Sr. changed his and his son's name from Michael King to Martin Luther King, after the Protestant reformist. King Sr. was inspired by Martin Luther's courage of confronting institutionalized evil.
King studied sociology and considered law school while reading voraciously. He was fascinated by Henry David Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience" and its idea of noncooperation with an unjust system. King decided that social activism was his calling and religion the best means to that end. He was ordained as a minister in February 1948, the year he graduated with a sociology degree at age 19.
In September 1948, King entered the predominately White Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania. He read works by great theologians but despaired that no philosophy was complete within itself. Then, hearing a lecture about Mahatma Gandhi, he became captivated by his concept of nonviolent resistance. King concluded that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through nonviolence, could be a powerful weapon for his people.
In 1951, King graduated at the top of his class with a Bachelor of Divinity degree. In September of that year, he enrolled in doctoral studies at Boston University's School of Theology.
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a singer studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. The couple married on June 18, 1953.
When King arrived in Montgomery to join the Dexter Avenue church, Rosa Parks, secretary of the local NAACP chapter, had been arrested for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a White man. Parks' December 1, 1955, arrest presented the perfect opportunity to make a case for desegregating the transit system.
E.D. Nixon, former head of the local NAACP chapter, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a close friend of King, contacted King and other clergymen to plan a citywide bus boycott. The group drafted demands and stipulated that no Black person would ride the buses on December 5.
That day, nearly 20,000 Black citizens refused bus rides. Because Black people comprised 90% of the passengers, most buses were empty. When the boycott ended 381 days later, Montgomery's transit system was nearly bankrupt.
On February 1959 he laid six principles, explaining that nonviolence:
-
Is not a method for cowards; it does resist
-
Does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding
-
Is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil
-
Is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back
-
Avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit
-
Is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice
In April 1963, King and the SCLC joined Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in a nonviolent campaign to end segregation and force Birmingham, Alabama, businesses to hire Black people. Fire hoses and vicious dogs were unleashed on the protesters by “Bull” Connor's police officers. King was thrown into jail. King spent eight days in the Birmingham jail as a result of this arrest but used the time to write "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," affirming his peaceful philosophy.
On October 14th, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War.
For his activism, he was the target of multiple assassination attempts, arrested 23 times, and surveilled and harassed by the police. In particular, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover harassed Dr. King by making him a target of COINTELPRO, a secret program where FBI agents spied on, infiltrated, and attempted to discredit "subversive" political movements.
In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an "economic bill of rights" for poor Americans.
Before the plans for the march could come to fruition, however, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee while supporting striking black sanitation workers. James Earl Rey was convicted for the murder, but speculation of government involvement has persisted for decades after his death.
MLK: SPEECHES, SERMONS, ESSAYS, & INTERVIEWS
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
- 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
- 🐱👤 Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
maybe it's just the groups I'm playing with but DnD is fucking BORING
D&D can be pretty boring, you won't find an argument from me.
Sometimes group dynamics can make things painful and slow. Anything from not willing to participate in non-combat RP (this is understandable), to not paying a lick of attention to anything while in combat. Been plenty of times where combat encounters just take for-fucking-ever in between turns because the group is just not interested in fighting, or somehow everyone is thinking about their turn as it lands on their turn. I've taken turns in like less than 10 seconds after another person agonized over their actions for like 10 minutes.
Sometimes inexperienced DMs can run things "poorly" or just end up being disorganized which can lead to a lot of dead time. Group initiative blocks are a DM's friend and I'd be willing to bet most don't use them.
Hope I don't sound like I'm ranting lol
We used to have the issue of people taking too long with their combat turns. GM started to use a timer for each players turn (or said he was) and gave exp bonuses and penalties to players who were on the ball or took way too long. When the GM got flack from players he said that it was a RP deduction because in combat there wouldn't be time to think so much. We ended up losing a couple of players over that campaign but they were annoying in other ways too. Our group as a whole got really good at blasting through combat quickly.
Sounds great. As a DM I find it important, for my fun as well as everyone else's, to have players that are on the same page and want the same kind of game I do.
Nah you're fine, I'm ranting myself. For me it's just that combat is so tedious, which leads to me kind of tuning out as a non-important battle enters its third hour somehow. Sometimes RP can be fun but sometimes it's just...planning stuff. Or ordering food at yet another tavern.
I think in this case it also has to do with the fact that we're playing over Discord, so we lack that direct communication element, though playing in-person has some problems too. Maybe I'm just not a TTRPG guy.
Oof. Discord is hard.
Try some other systems. The powered by the apocalypse games resolve combat real quick and real bloody, for instance. Other systems have entirely narrative combat with maybe a success/fail check once in a while.
playing online is kinda brutal. I do want to look into other systems though because I'm curious. Would probably need to find a different irl group because the one I'm playing with now are pretty strictly DnD
I would tell my players "Mike, it's your turn. Sarah, you're on deck, starting thinking about what Thognor the Destructinator is going to do when your turn comes up". I'd also sometimes put time pressure on people "Okay, your turn, think fast, the enemies are closing in!"
I also resolved combats by having enemies flee or surrender when they were clearly losing to keep things moving. Animals would run away when they were clearly overmatched, people would surrender if they weren't committed to fighting to the death. I also gave xp for solving problems rather than killing people; If the players defeated a few people and then role-played a demand for surrender, and they passed some intimidation checks and it seemed reasonable, the bad guys would give up, negotiate, or flee.
I love ranting about D&D, TTRPGs, and DMing skills and techniques!
I really do not like DnD as a system. Its so combat focused, and I want to do charachter roleplay.
It's not ideal. Pathfinder is somewhat better because they sat down and actually rationalized the system to a degree, but it's still all about the fighting.
For a while I was working on a TTRPG based on the following goals
All the rules fit on one double-sided 8x11 sheet of paper
No dice. You used coin-flips to resolve challenges. That meant anyone could play with literal pocket change
Fast, dirty tactical combat that was very flexible, requiring interpretation and creativity from the players and ref, but could resolve quickly
Simple character building - The whole character fits on a single index card and is defined by several strengths and flaws
It was broadly intended to be suitable for pulp adventure, which is adjacent to cosmic horror, so in addition to your physical health track there was a trauma/mental health track and if your character became sufficiently traumatized they had to be essentially retired. I wanted a "madness" track that actually reflected real trauma instead of the usual nonsense that is used in games with a "madness" track.
Overall it was intended to be nearly without cost for accessibility, very flexible to allow for good role-play, while also having a fun tactical layer because I like tactical combat. And the tactical combat was built flexible because i really like being able to swing from chandeliers, flip a table for cover, or shoot out the lights. A big part of keeping the fight moving was that most enemies were mooks with one "hit point". they were either alive or dead so you didn't need to track their status. Also, mooks all acted at once, with their "to hit" based on the number of them shooting at you rather than each of them rolling separately. That meant it was quicker, you just needed to track the number of mooks shooting, and since any number of mooks up to a certain threshhold would only ever inflict one point of damage per round you could throw hoards of baddies at the players for the to heroically take down. Important NPCs worked the same as regular characters. The GM was also encouraged to have enemies act "rationally", fleeing or surrendering when they were clearly losing, so that combat could be resolved without having to kill everything on the field.