Martin
Luther King Jr was born January 15, 1929. 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 well-known Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather
had graduated. 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.Always a strong
worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was a member of the executive committee of the NAACP (National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the leading
organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, in 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, which 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.
King led a
massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the King 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". At the age of thirty-five, King 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, King was assassinated while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee. King was arrested 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 the symbolic leader and a beacon of hope for African Americans.
Sources
http://www.biography.com/people/martin-luther-king-jr-9365086#awesm=~oF0vdS1PTvXh9w
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/martin-luther-king-jr
http://www.thekingcenter.org/about-dr-king
