Black History Month-Martin Luther King, Jr

Martin  Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born  Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to  Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors  of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to  1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from  1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin  Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating  from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A.  degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro  institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather  had graduated. After three years of theological study at  Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected  president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded  the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in  graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the  doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he  met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon  intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters  were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter  Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong  worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by  this time, a member of the executive committee of the National  Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading  organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early  in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great  Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the  United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his  presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted  382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the  United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring  segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as  equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home  was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same  time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

 In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian  Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new  leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The  ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its  operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period  between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and  spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there  was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five  books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a  massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention  of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of  conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a  manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in  Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed  the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom  he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with  President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B.  Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at  least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named  Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not  only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world  figure.

 At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the  youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When  notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over  the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights  movement.

 On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of  his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a  protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that  city, he was assassinated.