Martin Luther King, Jr.'S Doctrine of Human Dignity‪.‬

Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up in a well-to-do family in Atlanta, Georgia. Notwithstanding this, King did not escape indirect and direct encounters with one of the cruelest enemies of human dignity--racism. As a young boy he witnessed the racist mistreatment of his father by a White shoe salesman (King, 1958, 19) and by a White policeman (Ibid., 20). Around the age of six, when he' had started school, he was told by the parents of his White friend that he could no longer play with him. King recalled this as his first encounter with racism (Carson, 1992, 362; also King, 1958, 18-19). A number of times he saw members of the Ku Klux Klan riding through black neighborhoods trying to intimidate the residents. In addition, he had witnessed police brutality, "and watched Negroes receive the most tragic injustice in the courts" (King, 1958, 90). Moreover, while in high school, there was a nasty incident on a return bus trip from Dublin, Georgia, where he won an oratory contest. Because of segregation laws, King and his teacher were disrespectfully ordered by the bus driver to give their seats to White patrons. When King hesitated, the driver began cursing at him and his teacher. Urged by his teacher to get up, because it was the law, King recalled that they stood all the way back to Atlanta. He said: "That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life" (King, 1998, 10). As if this were not enough, King recalled that, just before he entered Morehouse College, he spent the summer working on a tobacco farm in Connecticut. He was thrilled by the fact that he could move about freely and eat wherever he wanted. However, it was hurtful to have to return to a segregated South. He reflected on how it made him feel to have to move to a Jim Crow car on the return trip to Atlanta. It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation's capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta. The first time that I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood. I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect (King, 1998, 11-12).