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The Reverend DoctorMartin Luther King Jr. | |
---|---|
King in 1964 | |
1st President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference | |
In office January 10, 1957 – April 4, 1968 | |
Preceded by | Position established |
Succeeded by | Ralph Abernathy |
Personal details | |
Born | Michael King Jr. January 15, 1929 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. |
Died | April 4, 1968 (aged 39) Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
Manner of death | Assassination by gunshot |
Resting place | Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park |
Spouse | Coretta Scott (m.1953) |
Children | YolandaMartin IIIDexterBernice |
Parents | Martin Luther King Sr.Alberta Williams King |
Relatives | Christine King Farris (sister)A. D. King (brother)Alveda King (niece) |
Education | Morehouse College (BA)Crozer Theological Seminary (BDiv)Boston University (PhD) |
Occupation | Baptist ministeractivist |
Monuments | Full list |
Movement | Civil rightspeaceanti-war |
Awards | Nobel Peace Prize (1964)Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumous, 1977)Congressional Gold Medal (posthumous, 2004) |
Signature | |
Nickname | MLK |
Martin Luther King Jr.’s voiceDuration: 22 seconds.0:22King giving a press conference at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Recorded August 1964 | |
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
A black church leader, King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights.[1] He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who often responded violently.[2]
King was jailed several times. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI’s COINTELPRO from 1963 forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.[3] On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War.
In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People’s Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was convicted of the assassination, though the King family believes he was a scapegoat. After a 1999 wrongful death lawsuit ruling named unspecified “government agencies” among the co-conspirators,[4] a Department of Justice investigation found no evidence of a conspiracy.[5] The assassination remains the subject of conspiracy theories. King’s death was followed by national mourning, as well as anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the federal holiday was first observed in 1986. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.
Early life and education
Birth
Michael King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta; he was the second of three children born to Michael King Sr. and Alberta King (née Williams).[6][7][8] Alberta’s father, Adam Daniel Williams,[9] was a minister in rural Georgia, moved to Atlanta in 1893,[8] and became pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the following year.[10] Williams married Jennie Celeste Parks.[8] King Sr. was born to sharecroppers James Albert and Delia King of Stockbridge, Georgia;[7][8] he was of Irish and likely Mende (Sierra Leone) descent.[11][12][13] As an adolescent, King Sr. left his parents’ farm and walked to Atlanta, where he attained a high school education,[14][15][16] and enrolled in Morehouse College to study for entry to the ministry.[16] King Sr. and Alberta began dating in 1920, and married on November 25, 1926.[17][18] Until Jennie’s death in 1941, their home was on the second floor of Alberta’s parents’ Victorian house, where King was born.[19][17][18][20] King had an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel “A. D.” King.[21]
Shortly after marrying Alberta, King Sr. became assistant pastor of the Ebenezer church.[18] Senior pastor Williams died in the spring of 1931[18] and that fall, King Sr. took the role. With support from his wife, he raised attendance from six hundred to several thousand.[8][18][22] In 1934, the church sent King Sr. on a multinational trip; one of the stops on the trip was Berlin for the Congress of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA).[23] He also visited sites in Germany that are associated with the Reformation leader Martin Luther.[23] In reaction to the rise of Nazism, the BWA adopted a resolution saying, “This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward colored people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.”[24] After returning home in August 1934, Michael King Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King Sr. and his five-year-old son’s name to Martin Luther King Jr.[23][25][17][a]
Early childhood

At his childhood home, King and his two siblings read aloud the Bible as instructed by their father.[27] After dinners, King’s grandmother Jennie, whom he affectionately referred to as “Mama”, told lively stories from the Bible.[27] King’s father regularly used whippings to discipline his children,[28] sometimes having them whip each other.[28] King Sr. later remarked, “[King] was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him. He’d stand there, and the tears would run down, and he’d never cry.”[29] Once, when King witnessed his brother A.D. emotionally upset his sister Christine, he took a telephone and knocked A.D. unconscious with it.[28][30] When King and his brother were playing at their home, A.D. slid from a banister and hit Jennie, causing her to fall unresponsive.[31][30] King, believing her dead, blamed himself and attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window,[32][30] but rose from the ground after hearing that she was alive.[32]
King became friends with a white boy whose father owned a business across the street from his home.[33] In September 1935, when the boys were about six years old, they started school.[33][34] King had to attend a school for black children, Yonge Street Elementary School,[33][35] while his playmate went to a separate school for white children only.[33][35] Soon afterwards, the parents of the white boy stopped allowing King to play with their son, stating to him, “we are white, and you are colored”.[33][36] When King relayed this to his parents, they talked with him about the history of slavery and racism in America,[33][37] which King would later say made him “determined to hate every white person”.[33] His parents instructed him that it was his Christian duty to love everyone.[37]
King witnessed his father stand up against segregation and discrimination.[38] Once, when stopped by a police officer who referred to King Sr. as “boy”, King Sr. responded sharply that King was a boy but he was a man.[38] When King’s father took him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to sit in the back.[39] King Sr. refused asserting “we’ll either buy shoes sitting here or we won’t buy any shoes at all”, before leaving the store with King.[15] He told King afterward, “I don’t care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.”[15] In 1936, King Sr. led hundreds of African Americans in a civil rights march to the city hall in Atlanta, to protest voting rights discrimination.[28] King later remarked that King Sr. was “a real father” to him.[40]
King memorized hymns and Bible verses by the time he was five years old.[32] Beginning at six years old, he attended church events with his mother and sang hymns while she played piano.[32] His favorite hymn was “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus”; his singing moved attendees.[32] King later became a member of the junior choir in his church.[41] He enjoyed opera, and played the piano.[42] King garnered a large vocabulary from reading dictionaries.[30] He got into physical altercations with boys in his neighborhood, but oftentimes used his knowledge of words to stop or avoid fights.[30][42] King showed a lack of interest in grammar and spelling, a trait that persisted throughout his life.[42] In 1939, King sang as a member of his church choir dressed as a slave for the all-white audience at the Atlanta premiere of the film Gone with the Wind.[43][44] In September 1940, at the age of 11, King was enrolled at the Atlanta University Laboratory School for the seventh grade.[45][46] While there, King took violin and piano lessons and showed keen interest in history and English classes.[45]
On May 18, 1941, when King had sneaked away from studying at home to watch a parade, he was informed that something had happened to his maternal grandmother.[40] After returning home, he learned she had a heart attack and died while being transported to a hospital.[20] He took her death very hard and believed that his deception in going to see the parade may have been responsible for God taking her.[20] King jumped out of a second-story window at his home but again survived.[20][29][30] His father instructed him that King should not blame himself and that she had been called home to God as part of God’s plan.[20][47] King struggled with this.[20] Shortly thereafter, King Sr. decided to move the family to a two-story brick home on a hill overlooking downtown Atlanta.[20]
Adolescence

As an adolescent, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the “racial humiliation” that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure.[48] In 1942, when King was 13, he became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal.[49] In the same year, King skipped the ninth grade and enrolled in Booker T. Washington High School, where he maintained a B-plus average.[47][50] The high school was the only one in the city for African-American students.[18]
Martin Jr. was brought up in a Baptist home; as he entered adolescence he began to question the literalist teachings preached at his father’s church.[47][51] At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school.[52][51] Martin Jr. said that he found himself unable to identify with the emotional displays from congregants who were frequent at his church; he doubted if he would ever attain personal satisfaction from religion.[53][51] He later said of this point in his life, “doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.”[54][52][51]
In high school, Martin King Jr. became known for his public-speaking ability, with a voice that had grown into an orotund baritone.[55][50] He joined the school’s debate team.[55][50] King continued to be most drawn to history and English,[50] and chose English and sociology as his main subjects.[56] King maintained an abundant vocabulary.[50] However, he relied on his sister Christine to help him with spelling, while King assisted her with math.[50] King also developed an interest in fashion, commonly wearing polished patent leather shoes and tweed suits, which gained him the nickname “Tweed” or “Tweedie” among his friends.[57][58][59][60] He liked flirting with girls and dancing.[59][58][61] His brother A.D. later remarked, “He kept flitting from chick to chick, and I decided I couldn’t keep up with him. Especially since he was crazy about dances, and just about the best jitterbug in town.”[58]
On April 13, 1944, in his junior year, King gave his first public speech during an oratorical contest.[62][58][63][64] In his speech he stated, “black America still wears chains. The finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man.”[65][62] King was selected as the winner of the contest.[62][58] On the ride home to Atlanta by bus, he and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so that white passengers could sit.[58][66] The driver of the bus called King a “black son-of-a-bitch”.[58] King initially refused but complied after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did not.[66] As all the seats were occupied, he and his teacher were forced to stand the rest of the way to Atlanta.[58] Later King wrote of the incident: “That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”[66]
Morehouse College
During King’s junior year in high school, Morehouse College—an all-male historically black college that King’s father and maternal grandfather had attended[67][68]—began accepting high school juniors who passed the entrance examination.[58][69][66] As World War II was underway many black college students had been enlisted,[58][69] so the university aimed to increase their enrollment by allowing juniors to apply.[58][69][66] In 1944, aged 15, King passed the examination and was enrolled at the university that autumn.[citation needed]
In the summer before King started at Morehouse, he boarded a train with his friend—Emmett “Weasel” Proctor—and a group of other Morehouse College students to work in Simsbury, Connecticut, at the tobacco farm of Cullman Brothers Tobacco.[70][71] This was King’s first trip into the integrated north.[72][73] In a June 1944 letter to his father King wrote about the differences that struck him: “On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to.”[72] The farm had partnered with Morehouse College to allot their wages towards the university’s tuition, housing, and fees.[70][71] On weekdays King and the other students worked in the fields, picking tobacco from 7:00am to at least 5:00pm, enduring temperatures above 100 °F, to earn roughly USD$4 per day.[71][72] On Friday evenings, the students visited downtown Simsbury to get milkshakes and watch movies, and on Saturdays they would travel to Hartford, Connecticut, to see theatre performances, shop and eat in restaurants.[71][73] On Sundays they attended church services in Hartford, at a church filled with white congregants.[71] King wrote to his parents about the lack of segregation, relaying how he was amazed they could go to “one of the finest restaurants in Hartford” and that “Negroes and whites go to the same church”.[71][74][72]
He played freshman football there. The summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, the 18-year-old King chose to enter the ministry. He would later credit the college’s president, Baptist minister Benjamin Mays, with being his “spiritual mentor”.[75] King had concluded that the church offered the most assuring way to answer “an inner urge to serve humanity”, and he made peace with the Baptist Church, as he believed he would be a “rational” minister with sermons that were “a respectful force for ideas, even social protest.”[76] King graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology in 1948, aged nineteen.[77]
Religious education
See also: Martin Luther King Jr. authorship issues
King enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania,[78][79] and took several courses at the University of Pennsylvania.[80][81] At Crozer, King was elected president of the student body.[82] At Penn, King took courses with William Fontaine, Penn’s first African-American professor, and Elizabeth F. Flower, a professor of philosophy.[83] King’s father supported his decision to continue his education and made arrangements for King to work with J. Pius Barbour, a family friend and Crozer alumnus who pastored at Calvary Baptist Church in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania.[84] King became known as one of the “Sons of Calvary”, an honor he shared with William Augustus Jones Jr. and Samuel D. Proctor, who both went on to become well-known preachers.[85]
King reproved another student for keeping beer in his room once, saying they shared responsibility as African Americans to bear “the burdens of the Negro race”. For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbusch‘s “social gospel”.[82] In his third year at Crozer, King became romantically involved with[86] the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who worked in the cafeteria. King planned to marry her, but friends, as well as King’s father,[86] advised against it, saying that an interracial marriage would provoke animosity from both blacks and whites, potentially damaging his chances of ever pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he could not endure his mother’s pain over the marriage and broke the relationship off six months later. One friend was quoted as saying, “He never recovered.”[82] Other friends, including Harry Belafonte, said Betty had been “the love of King’s life.”[86] King graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity in 1951.[78] He applied to the University of Edinburgh for a doctorate in the School of Divinity but ultimately chose Boston instead.[87]
In 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University,[88] and worked as an assistant minister at Boston’s historic Twelfth Baptist Church with William Hunter Hester. Hester was an old friend of King’s father and was an important influence on King.[89] In Boston, King befriended a small cadre of local ministers his age, and sometimes guest pastored at their churches, including Michael E. Haynes, associate pastor at Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury. The young men often held bull sessions in their apartments, discussing theology, sermon style, and social issues.[citation needed]
At the age of 25 in 1954, King was called as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.[90] King received his PhD on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation (initially supervised by Edgar S. Brightman and, upon the latter’s death, by Lotan Harold DeWolf) titled A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.[91][88]
An academic inquiry in October 1991 concluded that portions of his doctoral dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. However, “[d]espite its finding, the committee said that ‘no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree,’ an action that the panel said would serve no purpose.”[92][88][93] The committee found that the dissertation still “makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship.” A letter is now attached to the copy of King’s dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.[94] Significant debate exists on how to interpret King’s plagiarism.[95]
Marriage and family

While studying at Boston University, he asked a friend from Atlanta named Mary Powell, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, if she knew any nice Southern girls. Powell spoke to fellow student Coretta Scott; Scott was not interested in dating preachers but eventually agreed to allow King to telephone her based on Powell’s description and vouching. On their first call, King told Scott, “I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms,” to which she replied, “You haven’t even met me.” King married Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents’ house, in Heiberger, Alabama.[96] They had four children: Yolanda King (1955–2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (1961–2024), and Bernice King (b. 1963).[97] King limited Coretta’s role in the civil rights movement, expecting her to be a housewife and mother.[98]
More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.