I Have a Dream...

El sueño de Martin Luther King, Jr. era que sus cuatro hijos pudiesen vivir un día en una nación que no los juzgara por el color de su piel. Pero ,¿qué más sabes acerca de MLK  ? Practica tu inglés y descubre algo más acerca de este personaje que ya es leyenda.

 Early life

 King was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, Martin Luther King, Sr., was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and encouraged (animó, alentó ) his son to go into the ministry.(hacerse clérigo ) King entered college when he was only fifteen and received a degree in sociology in 1948. King, realising that the ministry would  be a good platform from which to address social issues (tratar temas sociales) , became a minister that same year.

King went on to study theology, first in Pennsylvania and then in Massachusetts, and received a doctorate from Boston University. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a music student from Alabama. The couple lived in Montgomery, Alabama, and King became pastor of a local church there in 1954. In Montgomery, King started on the road to becoming the nation’s most prominent leader in the fight for civil rights.

The Civil Rights Movement

 In 1860, there were about 4 million slaves (esclavos) , many of them from Africa, living in the South of the United States. They were working in the region’s agricultural industries. Slavery was abolished in the U.S. following the American Civil War (1861-1865) but discrimination still existed. The slaves were freed (liberados)  but blacks were generally not treated as equals. In some Southern states, laws restricted blacks’ use of public services. For example, blacks sometimes were obligated to sit at the back of a bus and there were many “whites only” restaurants and hotels that did not serve blacks. The blacks did not have the same opportunities as whites when looking for work or housing.(vivienda)  Blacks who challenged (desafiaban)  the social structure of the whites were sometimes treated unfairly by the police or, in some cases, lynched by angry mobs.(turba,grupos de gente) A political solution seemed out of reach as blacks didn’t have the right to vote in many areas.

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