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Martin
Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born
Michael Luther King, Jr., 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 been 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 accepted the pastorale 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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