CLEP US History II

Answer: A - Though he was on the path to becoming the leader of the civil rights movement in 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not directly instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, as he was in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While jailed in April 1963, King wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and later that year he was a featured leader at the March on Washington. In 1965, he led three attempted demonstrations that are collectively remembered as the March from Selma to Montgomery (in Alabama). His April 1968 assassination was the impetus for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, for which he had been providing counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson.