Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968, was born on January 15, 1929. His leadership was critical to the movement's success in ending legal segregation of African Americans in the South and elsewhere in the country. King rose to national prominence as the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which advocated for nonviolent tactics such as the 1963 March on Washington to achieve civil rights. In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

• Martin Luther King was born into a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the Southern Black ministry's tradition: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist ministers.

• His parents were both college graduates, and King's father had taken over as pastor of Atlanta's prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church from his father-in-law.

• In the years before the civil rights movement, the family lived on Auburn Avenue, also known as "Sweet Auburn," a bustling "Black Wall Street" that housed some of the country's largest and most prosperous Black businesses and churches.

• Martin grew up in a loving extended family and received a good education.

• Despite his secure upbringing, King was subjected to the prejudices that were prevalent in the South at the time.

• He'll never forget when he was about six years old, one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King because the kids were now in segregated schools.

• When King was 15, he enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta as part of a special wartime programme designed to increase enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like King.

• However, before starting college, King worked on a tobacco farm in Connecticut for the summer; it was his first extended stay away from home and his first significant experience with race relations outside of the segregated South.

• He was taken aback by how harmoniously the races coexisted in the North.

• While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, an Alabamian who was studying music at the New England Conservatory. In 1953, they married and had four children.

 

• King had been pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, for just over a year when a small group of civil rights activists in the city decided to challenge racial segregation on the city's public bus system.

• In the aftermath of the incident on December 1, 1955, in which Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger and was arrested for violating the city's segregation law.

• To boycott the public transportation system, activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, with King as their leader.

• He had the advantage of being a young, well-trained man who had yet to make enemies in town; he was well-liked, and it was assumed that his family connections and professional standing would enable him to find another pastorate if the boycott failed.

• The 381-day Montgomery bus boycott galvanised the Civil Rights Movement by demonstrating the potential for nonviolent mass protest.

• The movement drew inspiration from India's civil disobedience experiences.

 

• Recognizing the need for a mass movement to build on the Montgomery victory, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which provided him with a base of operations across the South as well as a national platform from which to speak.

• King gave speeches across the country and met with religious and civil rights leaders both at home and abroad to discuss race-related issues. He and his party were warmly welcomed by India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and others in February 1959, following a brief discussion with Gandhi's followers about Gandhian concepts of peaceful noncompliance (satyagraha).

• In his struggle for freedom, King became increasingly convinced that nonviolent resistance was the most effective weapon available to oppressed people.

• He was arrested with 33 other young people protesting segregation at an Atlanta department store lunch counter in October 1960.

• Although the charges against King were dropped, he was sentenced to Reidsville State Prison Farm on the grounds that he had broken his probation for a minor traffic offence committed several months before.

• The case grew national in scope, with widespread concern for his safety, outrage at Georgia's blatant disregard for the law, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower's failure to intervene.

• King was only released after Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy intervened—an act that was so widely publicised that it was widely believed to have influenced Kennedy's slender election victory eight days later.

• He recognised the power of television to nationalise and internationalise the civil rights movement, and his well-publicized active nonviolence tactics enlisted the support of many African Americans and liberal whites across the country.

• He also received support from Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson's administrations.

 

• When police used dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, King's campaign to end segregation at lunch counters and in hiring practises drew national attention.

• King and a large number of his supporters, including hundreds of schoolchildren, were imprisoned.

• His supporters, however, did not include all of Birmingham's Black clergy, and he was opposed by some white clergy who had issued a statement urging African Americans not to participate in the demonstrations.

• From the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King wrote an eloquent letter outlining his nonviolence philosophy.

 

• On August 28, 1963, a peaceful interracial gathering of over 200,000 people gathered in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice under the law for all citizens. The emotional power and prophetic quality of King's famous I Have a Dream speech, in which he emphasised his faith that all men would one day be brothers, inspired the crowds.

• The rising tide of civil rights agitation had the desired effect on public opinion, resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which authorised the federal government to enforce desegregation of public accommodations and outlawed discrimination in publicly owned facilities and employment.

• The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to King in Oslo in December, capping off an eventful year.

• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed the following year.

 

• On April 4, 1968, a racist fugitive named James Earl Ray shot him to death.

• King remained the most well-known African American leader of his time in the years following his death. The establishment of a national holiday in his honour in the United States, as well as the construction of a King memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., near the Lincoln Memorial, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, confirmed his status as a major historical figure.

• Many states and municipalities have established Martin Luther King Jr. holidays, authorised public statues and paintings, and named streets, schools, and other entities after him.

• Efforts to honour King have centred on his work as a civil rights activist rather than his controversial speeches condemning American intervention in Vietnam and calling for the Poor People's Campaign during his final year.