Martin Luther King, Jr. was born Michael Luther King, Jr. in January 15,
1929, but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began
the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in
Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then
until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as
co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia,
graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A.
degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro
institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had
graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological
Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a
predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a
fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston
University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and
receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta
Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments.
Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor
of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a
strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by
this time, a member of the executive committee of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading
organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in
December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro
nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the
bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in
honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21,
1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared
unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and
whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was
arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but
at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.
In these years, he led a massive protest
in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world,
providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he
planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as
voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000
people to whom he delivered his address, “l Have a Dream”, he conferred
with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B.
Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least
four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the
Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader
of American blacks but also a world figure.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther
King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.
When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the
prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, while
standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where
he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers
of that city, he was assassinated.
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