Martin Luther King Jr.

Michael King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second child of Michael King Sr., pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher. After a 1934 trip to Germany, the elder King changed both his own name and his son's to Martin Luther, honoring the Protestant reformer ^[1]. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, a center of Black business and church life in segregated Atlanta, and young Martin grew up watching his father and maternal grandfather lead one of the city's most prominent congregations ^[2].

King was a quick student. He skipped two grades at Booker T. Washington High School and entered Morehouse College at fifteen, in 1944. There the college president, Benjamin Mays, a theologian and outspoken critic of segregation, became a lasting influence. King graduated in 1948 with a degree in sociology and, despite early doubts about the emotionalism of the Black church, chose the ministry ^[1].

He went north to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he graduated at the top of his class in 1951, then began doctoral work in systematic theology at Boston University. During these years he read widely, from Walter Rauschenbusch's social gospel writings to the campaigns of Mohandas Gandhi, whose use of nonviolent mass protest against British rule impressed him deeply ^[3]. Boston University awarded him a PhD in 1955 ^[2].

In 1954, at twenty five, King accepted the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Anyone asking who was Martin Luther King Jr. before December 1955 would have heard of a promising young preacher, nothing more. That changed when Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Local activists organized a boycott of the city buses, and King, new to town and unentangled in local rivalries, was elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association ^[4].

The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days. Black residents walked, carpooled, and endured harassment; King's home was bombed in January 1956. The protest ended in victory when the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling, in Browder v. Gayle, that bus segregation was unconstitutional ^[4]. Montgomery made King a national figure and confirmed his belief that disciplined nonviolence could defeat segregation.

In 1957 King joined other Black ministers to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), based in Atlanta, and served as its president for the rest of his life. He traveled constantly, gave hundreds of speeches a year, and in 1959 visited India to study the Gandhian movement firsthand ^[3]. In 1960 he moved back to Atlanta to co-pastor Ebenezer Baptist Church alongside his father while directing SCLC campaigns across the South ^[2].

Any honest account of Martin Luther King Jr. achievements begins in Birmingham, Alabama. In the spring of 1963 the SCLC launched Project C, a campaign of marches, sit-ins, and boycotts against one of the most rigidly segregated cities in the country. Arrested on Good Friday, King wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail, a defense of civil disobedience addressed to white clergy who had called the protests untimely ^[5]. When police commissioner Eugene 'Bull' Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on demonstrators, many of them schoolchildren, the photographs shocked the nation and pushed the Kennedy administration toward comprehensive civil rights legislation ^[4].

On August 28, 1963, King addressed roughly 250,000 people at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. His closing improvisation, the 'I Have a Dream' passage delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, became one of the most famous pieces of American oratory ^[1]. The following year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing segregation in public accommodations and employment discrimination. That December, at 35, King received the Nobel Peace Prize, then the youngest recipient in its history ^[6].

Voting rights came next. In early 1965 the SCLC joined local organizers in Selma, Alabama, where fewer than two percent of eligible Black residents were registered. On March 7, state troopers attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a day remembered as Bloody Sunday. King led a completed march from Selma to Montgomery weeks later under federal protection, and in August President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ^[4]. Within a few years, Black voter registration across the Deep South rose dramatically.

King met Coretta Scott, an Alabama native studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music, while he was a doctoral student in Boston. They married on June 18, 1953, at her family home near Marion, Alabama, with King's father performing the ceremony ^[2]. The couple had four children: Yolanda (1955), Martin Luther III (1957), Dexter (1961), and Bernice (1963). Coretta Scott King was an activist in her own right and, after her husband's death, founded the King Center in Atlanta and led the long campaign for a national holiday in his honor ^[7].

The movement exacted a heavy personal price. King was arrested about thirty times, stabbed by a mentally ill woman in Harlem in 1958, and lived under constant death threats. The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, wiretapped his phones and hotel rooms for years and attempted to discredit him, surveillance that a Senate committee later documented and condemned ^[8]. Friends described a man given to self-doubt and exhaustion who nonetheless kept a demanding schedule of preaching, fundraising, and organizing until the end of his life ^[3].

After Selma, King turned toward problems the early movement had barely touched: urban poverty, slum housing, and economic inequality. In 1966 he moved his family into a Chicago tenement to dramatize housing discrimination in the North. The Chicago Freedom Movement met fierce resistance; King said the hostility of white crowds there matched anything he had seen in Mississippi or Alabama, and the campaign produced only limited agreements ^[4].

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his death, King delivered 'Beyond Vietnam' at Riverside Church in New York, publicly condemning the American war in Vietnam. The speech cost him allies in the Johnson administration, drew criticism from major newspapers, and split civil rights leadership, but King refused to retreat, arguing that war spending was draining resources from the poor ^[5]. That winter he announced the Poor People's Campaign, a plan to bring poor Americans of all races to Washington to demand an economic bill of rights ^[7].

In March 1968 King went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support 1,300 striking Black sanitation workers. On the night of April 3 he gave his final address, the 'Mountaintop' speech, at Mason Temple. The next evening, April 4, 1968, he was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel and was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at age 39 ^[1]. James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to the murder in 1969. Riots broke out in more than 100 American cities in the days that followed ^[8].

Few figures in modern history have moved so quickly from controversy to consensus. In 1983 Congress established Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday observed on the third Monday of January; all fifty states recognized it by 2000 ^[7]. The Lorraine Motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum, and a granite memorial to King opened on the National Mall in Washington in 2011, the first there honoring an African American ^[6].

His intellectual legacy is equally durable. The Letter from Birmingham Jail is taught in schools of law, theology, and rhetoric, and his fusion of Christian ethics with Gandhian nonviolence has shaped protest movements from South Africa to Eastern Europe ^[3]. Scholars continue to publish his sermons and papers through the King Papers Project at Stanford University, and every serious Martin Luther King Jr. biography must reckon with both the public icon and the more radical critic of poverty and war he became in his final years ^[5].

Among the plainest Martin Luther King Jr. facts is this: in thirteen years of public life, without holding any office, he helped end legal segregation in the American South and secured voting rights for millions. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004 ^[6].