Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Christian 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. A black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., 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.
"Martin Luther King" and "MLK" redirect here. For other uses, see Martin Luther King (disambiguation) and MLK (disambiguation).
Martin Luther King Jr.
Position established
April 4, 1968 (aged 39)
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.
- Christine King Farris (sister)
- A. D. King (brother)
- Alveda King (niece)
Baptist minister and activist
- Nobel Peace Prize (1964)
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (posthumous, 1977)
- Congressional Gold Medal (posthumous, 2004)
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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, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who frequently 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; 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. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and King County in Washington was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.
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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).[4][5][6] Michael Jr. had an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel "A. D." King.[7] Alberta's father, Adam Daniel Williams,[8] was a minister in rural Georgia, moved to Atlanta in 1893,[6] and became pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the following year.[9] Williams married Jennie Celeste Parks.[6] Michael Sr. was born to sharecroppers James Albert and Delia King of Stockbridge, Georgia;[5][6] he was of African-Irish descent.[10][11][12] As an adolescent, Michael Sr. left his parents' farm and walked to Atlanta, where he attained a high school education,[13][14][15] and enrolled in Morehouse College to study for entry to the ministry.[15] Michael Sr. and Alberta began dating in 1920, and married on November 25, 1926.[16][17] Until Jennie's death in 1941, their home was on the second floor of Alberta's parents' Victorian house, where King was born.[18][16][17][19]
Shortly after marrying Alberta, Michael King Sr. became assistant pastor of the Ebenezer church.[17] Senior pastor Williams died in the spring of 1931[17] and that fall Michael Sr. took the role. With support from his wife, he raised attendance from six hundred to several thousand.[6][17][20] 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]).[21] He also visited sites in Germany which are associated with the Reformation leader Martin Luther.[21] In reaction to the rise of Nazism, the BWA made 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."[22] After returning home in August 1934, Martin Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King Sr. and his five-year-old son's name to Martin Luther King Jr.[21][23][16][a]
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Martin Luther King of Georgia
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Holy Christian Orthodox Church
Episcopal Church (United States)
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
September 9, 2016, The Christian Cathedral by Timothy Paul Baymon
April 4
January 15 (Episcopalian and Lutheran)