Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael Luther King Jr. in Atlanta and was later renamed Martin. He grew up as the middle child of Michael, later Martin Luther, King Sr. and Alberta Williams King in a comfortable middle-class family rooted in the Southern Black ministry. His father was pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King later served as co-pastor, and his maternal grandfather had also been a Baptist preacher there.

King attended segregated public schools in Georgia and entered Morehouse College in 1944 at age 15. He initially considered medicine and law, but the influence of Morehouse president Benjamin Mays helped lead him toward the ministry. King graduated from Morehouse in 1948, earned a bachelor of divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, and received a doctorate from Boston University in 1955. At Crozer, he studied the philosophy of nonviolence associated with Mahatma Gandhi and was elected president of a predominantly white senior class.

King became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. After Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger, local civil rights activists selected King to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association and its boycott of the city bus system.

The boycott lasted 381 days according to the King Center and 382 days in the Nobel biography. King faced arrest, personal abuse, and the bombing of his home, but continued directing the campaign. After the United States Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional, Montgomery buses were desegregated in December 1956. During this period, King’s marriage to Coretta Scott connected his public leadership with a family partnership that continued throughout his career.

In 1957, King helped establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization created to coordinate nonviolent campaigns across the South. He became its first president and held that position until his assassination in 1968. The organization drew its ideals from Christianity and its operational methods from Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance.

King’s work with the SCLC made him the dominant national leader of the civil rights movement during its most consequential decade. He traveled more than six million miles, delivered more than 2,500 speeches, wrote five books and numerous articles, and was arrested more than 20 times. In 1960, he returned to Atlanta to serve as co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father while continuing to lead the national movement.

In 1963, King led a nonviolent campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, against racial segregation in department stores and discriminatory hiring practices. Police used dogs and high-pressure water hoses against marchers, and the televised violence produced national outrage. King was arrested after demonstrating in defiance of a court order.

While imprisoned, he wrote "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in response to critics who urged African Americans to wait for justice. The letter explained his commitment to peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and direct action. It later became one of the most widely studied texts of the civil rights movement and was described by the King Center as a manifesto of his philosophy and tactics.

Later in 1963, King was one of the principal leaders of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which drew about 250,000 people to the National Mall. At the Lincoln Memorial, he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, an address that became the most famous work of his career. Time magazine named him Man of the Year for 1963, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 at age 35, becoming the youngest recipient at that time.

King supported voter registration drives in Selma, Alabama, and helped lead the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. The campaign contributed to passage of the Voting Rights Act that year. From 1965 through 1968, he broadened his focus to economic justice, poverty, housing, and international peace. He opposed the Vietnam War and began planning the Poor People’s Campaign, a multiracial movement intended to press for economic change. He also supported sanitation workers in Memphis who were seeking union representation and better pay.

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray was identified as the shooter, and King died about an hour later at St. Joseph’s Hospital. His death provoked violence in cities across the United States, while his funeral in Atlanta drew prominent leaders from different racial and political backgrounds.

Coretta Scott King founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in 1968 as a living memorial dedicated to continuing his work. King’s birthday became a federal holiday, first observed nationally in 1986, and the Lorraine Motel later became the National Civil Rights Museum. He was memorialized in the United States and around the world through holidays, public monuments, streets, parks, churches, and educational programs.