Martin Luther King Jr.
1929 – 1968
United States
Baptist minister and leader of the American civil rights movement, from the Montgomery bus boycott to the March on Washington and Selma. He received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
Early life and education
Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Morehouse College in 1948 and a bachelor of divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951. In 1954 he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and in 1955 Boston University awarded him a doctorate in systematic theology.
Montgomery
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, an event that set off a boycott of the city buses. Four days later King was chosen as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led the boycott. The boycott lasted more than a year. In November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a ruling that bus segregation in Montgomery was unconstitutional, and integrated service began that December.
In January 1957 Black ministers from across the South met in Atlanta and named King chairman of the organization that became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
National leadership
The early 1960s brought King's best-known campaigns. During the 1963 Birmingham campaign he wrote the "Letter from Birmingham Jail," dated April 16. On August 28, 1963, he gave the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
On December 10, 1964, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. The Nobel committee honored him "for his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population."
In 1965 the violence of "Bloody Sunday" at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7 was followed by the Selma to Montgomery marches later that month.
Widening the struggle
In his last years King spoke out on the Vietnam War and on poverty. On April 4, 1967, he delivered "Beyond Vietnam" at Riverside Church in New York City. That December he announced plans for a Poor People's Campaign.
Death and legacy
On April 4, 1968, King was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39.
His papers are the subject of a long-running scholarly edition. In 1985 Coretta Scott King invited Stanford historian Clayborne Carson to direct the King Papers Project, now based at Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. The project is publishing The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., a planned 14-volume edition of his letters, sermons, writings and unpublished manuscripts.
Achievements
- 1955–1956: Leads the Montgomery Improvement Association during the Montgomery bus boycott
- 1957: Named chairman of the group that became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
- 1963: Writes the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' and gives the 'I Have a Dream' speech at the March on Washington
- 1964: Receives the Nobel Peace Prize
- 1967: Delivers 'Beyond Vietnam' at Riverside Church and announces the Poor People's Campaign
Related entries
Sources
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, "Major King Events Chronology: 1929–1968" (Scholarly)
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, "About the Institute" (Scholarly)
- The Nobel Prize, "Martin Luther King Jr. – Facts" (Primary source)
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