Martin Luther King Jr. Biography

Martin Luther King Jr. 

"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  — Martin Luther King, Jr. / "I Have A Dream" speech, August 28, 1963

King led the 1963 March in Washington, D.C., from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.

His stirring plea for racial equality and justice was a high point of the massive demonstration. 
   
Early years          

Born as Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. was the middle child of Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King.

The King and Williams families were rooted in rural Georgia. Martin Jr.'s grandfather, A.D. Williams, was a rural minister for years and then moved to Atlanta in 1893.

He took over the small, struggling Ebenezer Baptist church with around 13 members and made it into a forceful congregation.

He married Jennie Celeste Parks and they had one child that survived, Alberta.

Michael King Sr. came from a sharecropper family in a poor farming community. 

He married Alberta in 1926 after an eight-year courtship. The newlyweds moved to A.D. Williams home in Atlanta.

Michael King Sr. stepped in as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church upon the death of his father-in-law in 1931.

He too became a successful minister, and adopted the name Martin Luther King Sr. in honor of the German Protestant religious leader Martin Luther.

In due time, Michael Jr. would follow his father's lead and adopt the name himself.

Young Martin had an older sister, Willie Christine, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King.

The King children grew up in a secure and loving environment.

Martin Sr. was more the disciplinarian, while his wife's gentleness easily balanced out the father's more strict hand.

Though they undoubtedly tried, Martin Jr.’s parents couldn’t shield him completely from racism.

Martin Luther King Sr. fought against racial prejudice, not just because his race suffered, but because he considered racism and segregation to be an affront to God's will.

He strongly discouraged any sense of class superiority in his children which left a lasting impression on Martin Jr.

Growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. entered public school at age 5.

In May, 1936 he was baptized, but the event made little impression on him.

In May, 1941, Martin was 12 years old when is grandmother, Jennie, died of a heart attack.

The event was traumatic for Martin, more so because he was out watching a parade against his parents' wishes when she died.

Distraught at the news, young Martin jumped from a second story window at the family home, allegedly attempting suicide.

King attended Booker T. Washington High School, where he was said to be a precocious student. 

He skipped both the ninth and eleventh grades, and entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at age 15, in 1944.

He was a popular student, especially with his female classmates, but an unmotivated student who floated though his first two years.

Although his family was deeply involved in the church and worship, young Martin questioned religion in general and felt uncomfortable with overly emotional displays of religious worship.

This discomfort continued through much of his adolescence, initially leading him to decide against entering the ministry, much to his father's dismay.

But in his junior year, Martin took a Bible class, renewed his faith and began to envision a career in the ministry.

In the fall of his senior year, he told his father of his decision. 

“But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.” —Martin Luther King Jr.                                                       

Biography

Martin Luther King Jr. 

Civil Rights Activist, Minister (1929–1968)

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and social activist, who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. King, both a Baptist minister and civil-rights activist, had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States, beginning in the mid-1950s. Among many efforts, King headed the SCLC. Through his activism, he played a pivotal role in ending the legal segregation of African-American citizens in the South and other areas of the nation, as well as the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, among several other honors. King was assassinated in April 1968, and continues to be remembered as one of the most lauded African-American leaders in history, often referenced by his 1963 speech, "I Have a Dream."                          

King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929-1968), a black Ameri­can Baptist minister, was the main leader of the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1950's and 1960s. He won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for lead­ing nonviolent civil rights demonstrations.

In spite of King's stress on nonviolence, he often be­came the target of violence. White racists threw rocks at him in Chicago and bombed his home in Montgomery, Alabama. Finally, violence ended King's life at the age of 39, when an assassin shot and killed him.

Some historians view King's death as the end of the civil rights era that began in the mid-1950s. Under his leadership, the civil rights movement won wide support among whites, and laws that had barred integration in the Southern States were abolished. King became only the second American whose birthday is observed as a national holiday. The first was George Washington, the nation's first president.

Early civil rights activities. King was born on Jan. 15,1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. His father was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

King was ordained a minister in 1948. He studied for degrees in divinity and theology, obtaining a doctorate from Boston University in 1955. In Boston, he met Co- retta Scott, a music student. They were married in 1953.

In 1954, King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Bap­tist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

King's civil rights activities began in 1955 with a pro­test against Montgomery's segregated bus system. Black leaders urged blacks to boycott (refuse to use) the city's buses. The leaders formed an organization to run the boycott, and asked King to serve as president.

Terrorists bombed King's home, but King continued to insist on nonviolent protests. Thousands of blacks boycotted the buses for over a year. In 1956, the U.S. Su­preme Court ordered Montgomery to provide equal, in­tegrated seating on public buses. The boycott success won King national fame and identified him as a symbol of Southern blacks' new efforts to fight racial injustice.

With other black ministers, King founded the South­ern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 to expand the nonviolent struggle against racism and dis­crimination. At the time, widespread segregation existed throughout the South in schools, and in transportation, recreation, and such public facilities as hotels and res­taurants. Southern states also used various methods to deprive blacks of their voting rights.

The growing movement. In the 1960's, civil rights protests expanded further. Early in 1963, King and his SCLC associates launched massive demonstrations to protest at racial discrimination in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the South's most segregated cities. Soon after­ward, President John F. Kennedy proposed a wide- ranging civil rights bill to the U.S. Congress.

King and other civil rights leaders then organized a massive march in Washington, D.C. On Aug. 28,1963, over 200,000 Americans, including many whites, gath­ered at the Lincoln Memorial in the capital. The high point of the rally was King's stirring "I Have a Dream" speech, which eloquently defined the moral basis of the civil rights movement.

The movement won a major victory in 1964, when the U.S. Congress passed the civil rights bill that Kennedy and his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, had recommended. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial discrimination in public places and called for equal opportunity in employment and education. King later received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1965, King helped organize protests in Selma, Ala­

bama, against the efforts of white officials there to deny most black citizens the chance to register and vote. Within a few months, the U.S. Congress approved legis­lation eliminating all barriers to Southern blacks' right to vote. By 1965, King had come to believe that American civil rights leaders should pay more attention to the eco­nomic problems of blacks. In 1966, he helped begin a major civil rights campaign in Chicago, his first big ef­fort outside the South. The campaign met resistance from some whites. But eventually Chicago city officials promised to encourage fair housing practices in the city.

Continued violence against civil rights workers in the South frustrated many blacks. Some black leaders urged a more aggressive response to the violence and began to use the slogan "Black Power." King repeated his com­mitment to nonviolence, but disputes among civil rights groups over "Black Power" suggested that King no longer spoke for the whole movement.

In 1967, King became more critical of American soci­ety than ever before. He began to plan a Poor People's Campaign that would unite poor people of all races in a struggle for economic opportunity. Also in 1967, King at­tacked U.S. support of South Vietnam in the Vietnam War (1957-1975).

King's death. While organizing the Poor People's Campaign, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, to sup­port a strike of black refuse collectors. There, on April 4, 1968, King was shot and killed. James Earl Ray, a white drifter and escaped convict, pleaded guilty to the crime in March 1969 and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. People throughout the world mourned King's death. Some months later, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited racial discrimina­tion in the sale and rental of most housing in the United States.

In 1983, the U.S. Congress declared a federal holiday honouring King. The day is celebrated in the United States on the third Monday in January.