Early life
Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a pastor, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher. King was born and raised in a prosperous middle-class family immersed in the history of Southern Black ministry; both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents both attended college, and King's father had taken over as pastor of Atlanta's illustrious Ebenezer Baptist Church from his father-in-law.
The family resided on Auburn Avenue, sometimes known as "Sweet Auburn," the thriving "Black Wall Street" that, in the years preceding the civil rights movement, was home to some of the largest and most successful Black companies and Black churches in the nation. Young Martin was well-educated and raised in a devoted extended family.
Adolescence
King, a talented student who attended segregated public schools, was accepted to Morehouse College, the school of his father and maternal grandfather, when he was 15 years old. There, he studied medicine and law. King made the decision to enter the ministry because he was certain he would carry on the family business of pastoral care. At the age of 19, he graduated from Morehouse with a bachelor's degree. He subsequently attended at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor of divinity in 1951.
King transferred from Crozer to Boston University, where he studied man's relationship with God to gain a solid foundation for his own theological and ethical tendencies. He received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.”
History in the Making
After the incident on December 1, 1955, in which Rosa Parks, an African American woman, had refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger and as a result was arrested for violating the city's segregation law, the city's small group of civil rights advocates decided to challenge racial segregation on that city's public bus system. King had been pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, for slightly more than a year at that point.
To protest the public transportation system, activists established the Montgomery Improvement Association and named King as their leader. He had the benefit of being a young, educated man who had not yet established any adversaries; he was well-liked, and it was believed that his professional position and family ties would help him find another pastorate if the boycott failed.
These words gave the nation a new perspective, a persuasive speaker, a charismatic leader, and eventually a vibrant new theory of civil resistance. King led the boycott even after his house was set on fire and his family's safety was in jeopardy until the city's buses were integrated a year and a few weeks later.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned the Birmingham campaign, often referred to as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, in early 1963 to draw attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. Young black students and white civic leaders engaged in highly publicized confrontations as the campaign of nonviolent direct action, led by Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others, came to an end. This resulted in the municipal government changing the city's discrimination laws.
King joined other civil rights leaders in organizing the historic March on Washington toward the end of the Birmingham campaign in an effort to unite the diverse forces for nonviolent change and to highlight to the nation and to the world the significance of fixing the U.S. racial crisis. On August 28, 1963, almost 200,000 people of all races peacefully congregated in the Lincoln Memorial's shadow to demand equal justice for all people before the law. The emotional power and prophetic character of King's well-known "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he highlighted his belief that all men will one day be brothers, inspired the audience in this instance.
Just as King had anticipated, his actions had a significant impact on public opinion and led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gave the federal government the power to enforce desegregation of public accommodations and outlawed discrimination in both employment and publicly owned institutions. The Nobel Peace Prize being given to King in Oslo in December brought that eventful year to a close.
Final days
In the spring of 1968, King's plans for a Poor People's March to Washington were derailed by a journey to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of that city's sanitation workers' strike. King appeared to know his time was running out, according to several of his admirers and biographers. I've seen the promised land, King proclaimed in a prophecy to a gathering at Memphis' Mason Temple Church on April 3, the evening before he passed away. I might not accompany you there. But I want you to know this evening that our group will reach the promised land.
King was shot and killed the following day by a sniper when he was standing on the second-story balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where he and his companions were staying. Over 100 cities across the nation experienced rioting and other unrest as a result of the murder. James Earl Ray, a white man who had been charged with the murder, admitted his guilt on March 10 and was given a 99-year jail term.