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Martin Luther King, Jr., 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. |
