Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister who became the best-known leader of the modern civil rights movement. From the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 until his assassination in Memphis in 1968, he joined Christian theology to the practice of Gandhian nonviolence, led mass campaigns that helped produce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in his final years turned his attention to poverty and the war in Vietnam.
At a Glance
- Born
- 15 January 1929, Atlanta, Georgia
- Died
- 4 April 1968, Memphis, Tennessee
- Birth name
- Michael King Jr.
- Known for
- Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956); “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963); “I Have a Dream” (1963); Nobel Peace Prize (1964)
- HBCU ties
- Morehouse College (Graduated, B.A. in sociology, 1948)
- Fields
- Civil Rights · Religion
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
He was born Michael King Jr. on 15 January 1929 at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, the second child of the Rev. Michael King, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher whose father had led Ebenezer before him. In 1934 his father changed both their names to Martin Luther King. He grew up in the Sweet Auburn district, the center of Black business and church life in segregated Atlanta.
King entered Morehouse College in September 1944, at fifteen, and received his bachelor’s degree in sociology in June 1948. He was ordained at Ebenezer in February 1948 and went on to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1951. At Boston University he earned a doctorate in systematic theology, conferred in June 1955. In Boston he met Coretta Scott, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music; they married on 18 June 1953 and had four children.
Life and Work
In 1954 King became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. After Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat, local leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and on 5 December elected King, then twenty-six, as its president. The boycott of the city’s buses lasted more than a year; King’s home was bombed in January 1956, and he was arrested and convicted under an anti-boycott law. It ended on 20 December 1956, after the Supreme Court affirmed a federal ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
In January 1957 King and other Black ministers met in Atlanta to found what became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with King as its president, to coordinate nonviolent protest across the South. He published an account of the boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, in 1958, and that September survived a stabbing in Harlem. In February 1959 he and Coretta Scott King travelled to India to study the legacy of Mohandas Gandhi. In 1960 he moved to Atlanta to become co-pastor of Ebenezer with his father. A campaign in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962 ended without clear gains, and King and his colleagues drew lessons from it for the next effort.
In the spring of 1963 SCLC and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights launched a campaign against segregation in Birmingham. King was arrested on Good Friday, 12 April 1963, and in jail wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” dated 16 April, a reply to white clergymen who had called the demonstrations “unwise and untimely.” Televised images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on young marchers in May helped push President John F. Kennedy to propose a civil rights bill. On 28 August 1963 King delivered the closing address, remembered as the “I Have a Dream” speech, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial. The Civil Rights Act was signed on 2 July 1964, and that December King received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
In early 1965 SCLC joined local activists and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in a voting-rights campaign in Selma, Alabama. After state troopers attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 7 March, King led a march from Selma to Montgomery from 21 to 25 March. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on 6 August 1965.
King then carried the movement north and toward economic questions. In 1966 he led the Chicago Freedom Movement against housing discrimination. On 4 April 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, he delivered “Beyond Vietnam,” publicly condemning the war and breaking with the Johnson administration. He began planning a Poor People’s Campaign for economic justice, and in March 1968 went to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. On 3 April he spoke at the city’s Mason Temple; the next evening, 4 April 1968, he was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel and died within the hour. He was thirty-nine.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Legacy
James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to the murder on 10 March 1969 and was sentenced to ninety-nine years; days later he recanted and sought a trial for the rest of his life, and members of the King family came to believe that others were involved. Riots broke out in more than a hundred American cities after the assassination. Congress passed the Fair Housing Act within a week.
King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and, with Coretta Scott King, the Congressional Gold Medal, both posthumously. On 2 November 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed the law creating a federal holiday in his honor on the third Monday of January, first observed in 1986. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall was dedicated on 16 October 2011. His papers are being edited and published by the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. Historians increasingly emphasize the full range of his thought, including his critiques of poverty, militarism, and Northern racism, alongside the familiar language of 1963.
King led a movement that used organized nonviolent protest to force changes in law, and his later critiques of poverty, militarism, and Northern racism show that his vision reached well beyond 1963. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 15 January 1929 Born Michael King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia.
- June 1948 Graduates from Morehouse College.
- 18 June 1953 Marries Coretta Scott.
- 5 December 1955 Elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association as the bus boycott begins.
- January 1957 Helps found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and becomes its president.
- 16 April 1963 Writes the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
- 28 August 1963 Delivers the “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington.
- 10 December 1964 Receives the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
- 21–25 March 1965 Leads the march from Selma to Montgomery.
- 4 April 1968 Assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
Sources and Further Reading
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, “Chronology.” Link
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, “Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).” Link
- National Archives, “Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968).” Link
- Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998).
- Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
- David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986).
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