Martin Luther King Jr.

Life and legacy

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers. Raised in the relative comfort of Atlanta's Black middle class, he was nonetheless marked by early encounters with segregation - being told he could no longer play with a white childhood friend, being forced to stand on a bus so white passengers could sit. He entered Morehouse College at fifteen, was ordained a Baptist minister at eighteen, earned a divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and completed a doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University, where he met and married Coretta Scott in 1953.

King was twenty-six and newly installed as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955. Local activists chose King - young, educated, well-spoken, and new enough to Montgomery to have no local enemies - to lead the resulting bus boycott. For 381 days, he organized, fundraised, and inspired Montgomery's Black community while his home was bombed and he was arrested. The boycott's success, ending bus segregation through a Supreme Court ruling, made King a national figure and proved the power of organized nonviolent resistance.

Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy and the Social Gospel tradition, King refined nonviolent direct action into a systematic strategy for confronting segregation. He co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 and led campaigns across the South. The 1963 Birmingham campaign - where police used fire hoses and attack dogs against peaceful demonstrators, including children - shocked the nation's conscience and pressured President Kennedy to propose civil rights legislation. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written in the margins of a newspaper while he was imprisoned, became one of the great documents of American political thought.

On August 28, 1963, King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech to over 250,000 people at the March on Washington, calling for an end to racism in soaring oratory that drew on Biblical language, the Declaration of Independence, and the African American spiritual tradition. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, and King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at age thirty-five - at the time, the youngest man to receive it. The following year, the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and the brutal police attack on marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge (Bloody Sunday) galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In his final years, King expanded his focus to include poverty, economic justice, and opposition to the Vietnam War - positions that cost him allies and popularity. He was planning the Poor People's Campaign when he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking sanitation workers. On the evening of April 4, 1968, King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by James Earl Ray. He was thirty-nine years old. His birthday became a federal holiday in 1986, and his legacy as the moral conscience of the American civil rights movement endures as a global inspiration for nonviolent social change.

Key accomplishments

• Led the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), which ended racial segregation on public transit
• Delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington (August 28, 1963)
• Won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his nonviolent struggle against racial inequality
• Played a central role in passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965)
• Wrote the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963), a foundational text of American political thought

Quotes

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963

The time is always right to do what is right.

Oberlin College commencement address, 1965

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