Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the greatest champions of American democracy.
His accomplishments, along with the other leaders and foot soldiers of the long Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movement, include securing voting rights for African-Americans and others deprived of the franchise, ending de jure segregation and tearing down the Jim and Jane Crow white supremacist terror regime, and ensuring that the fundamental human and civil rights of all people, on both sides of the color line, are protected by law in America. Historians and other experts have correctly described these accomplishments as constituting a third American founding and a second Reconstruction.
