19 January 2015 A.D. Martin
Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Day
is remembered on the third Monday of January
Martin Luther King Jr.
Play video
Find out how Martin Luther King’s “I Have
a Dream” speech became an impromptu addition to the March on Washington.
Martin
Luther King Jr.
Introduction
Martin Luther
King Jr. (1929-1968) was a Baptist minister and social activist who played a
key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his
assassination in 1968. Inspired by advocates of nonviolence such as Mahatma
Gandhi, King sought equality for African Americans, the economically
disadvantaged and victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the
driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and
the March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin
Luther King Jr. Day, a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.
Martin Luther
King Jr.: Early Years and Family
The second child
of Martin Luther King Sr. (1899-1984), a pastor, and Alberta Williams King
(1904-1974), a former schoolteacher, Martin Luther King Jr. was born in
Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. Along with his older
sister, the future Christine King Farris (born 1927), and younger brother,
Alfred Daniel Williams King (1930-1969), he grew up in the city’s Sweet Auburn
neighborhood, then home to some of the most prominent and prosperous African
Americans in the country.
The final
section of Martin Luther King Jr.’s eloquent and iconic “I Have a Dream” speech
is believed to have been largely improvised.
A gifted
student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was
admitted to Morehouse College, the alma mater of both his father and maternal
grandfather, where he studied medicine and law. Although he had not intended to
follow in his father’s footsteps by joining the ministry, he changed his mind
under the mentorship of Morehouse’s president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, an
influential theologian and outspoken advocate for racial equality. After
graduating in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity
degree, won a prestigious fellowship and was elected president of his
predominantly white senior class.
King then
enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University, completing his coursework
in 1953 and earning a doctorate in systematic theology two years later. While in
Boston he met Coretta Scott (1927-2006), a young singer from Alabama
who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. The couple wed in
1953 and settled in Montgomery, Alabama, where King became pastor of the Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church. They had four children: Yolanda Denise King (1955-2007),
Martin Luther King III (born 1957), Dexter Scott King (born 1961) and Bernice
Albertine King (born 1963).
Martin Luther
King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
The King family
had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated
city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in
America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of
1954. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks (1913-2005), secretary of the local
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter, refused to
give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested.
Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for 381 days, placing a
severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business
owners. They chose Martin Luther King Jr. as the protest’s leader and official
spokesman.
By the time the
Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in
November 1956, King, heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) and the
activist Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), had entered the national spotlight as an
inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance. (He had also
become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that
January.) Emboldened by the boycott’s success, in 1957 he and other civil
rights activists–most of them fellow ministers–founded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group committed to achieving full equality for
African Americans through nonviolence. (Its motto was “Not one hair of one head
of one person should be harmed.”) He would remain at the helm of this
influential organization until his death.
King and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
In his role as
SCLC president, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled across the country and around
the world, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as
meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders. (During a
month-long trip to India in 1959, he had the opportunity to meet Gandhi, the
man he described in his autobiography as “the guiding light of our technique of
nonviolent social change.”) King also authored several books and articles
during this time.
In 1960 King and
his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as
co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. This new position did not stop King
and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most
significant civil rights battles of the 1960s. Their philosophy of nonviolence
was put to a particularly severe test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963,
in which activists used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation,
unfair hiring practices and other injustices in one of America’s most racially
divided cities. Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil
rights manifesto known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an eloquent
defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized
his tactics.
King Marches for
Freedom
Later that year,
Martin Luther King Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and religious
groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful
political rally designed to shed light on the injustices African Americans
continued to face across the country. Held on August 28 and attended by some
200,000 to 300,000 participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed
moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The march
culminated in King’s most famous address, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech,
a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of
rhetoric. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial–a monument to the
president who a century earlier had brought down the institution of slavery in
the United States—he shared his vision of a future in which “this nation will
rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” The speech and march cemented
King’s reputation at home and abroad; later that year he was named Man of the
Year by TIME magazine and in 1964 became the youngest person ever awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize.
In the spring of
1965, King’s elevated profile drew international attention to the violence that
erupted between white segregationists and peaceful demonstrators in Selma,
Alabama, where the SCLC and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
had organized a voter registration campaign. Captured on television, the brutal
scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country
to gather in Selma and take part in a march to Montgomery led by King and
supported by President Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973), who sent in federal troops
to keep the peace. That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed the right to
vote–first awarded by the 15th Amendment–to all African Americans.
Martin Luther
King Jr.’s Final Years and Assassination
The events in
Selma deepened a growing rift between Martin Luther King Jr. and young radicals
who repudiated his nonviolent methods and commitment to working within the
established political framework. As more militant black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998) rose to prominence,
King broadened the scope of his activism to address issues such as the Vietnam
War and poverty among Americans of all races. In 1967, King and the
SCLC embarked on an ambitious program known as the Poor People’s Campaign,
which was to include a massive march on the capital.
On the evening
of April 4, 1968, King was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of a
motel in Memphis, where he had traveled to support a sanitation workers’
strike. In the wake of his death, a wave of riots swept major cities across the
country, while President Johnson declared a national day of mourning. James
Earl Ray (1928-1998), an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to
the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. (He later recanted his
confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King
family, before his death in 1998.)
After years of
campaigning by activists, members of Congress and Coretta
Scott King, among others, in 1983 President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) signed a bill creating a
U.S. federal holiday in honor of King. Observed on the third Monday of January,
it was first celebrated in 1986.
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