Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr., originally named Michael King Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta. He was an American Baptist minister and a central figure in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his murder in 1968. King pushed for equal rights for Black Americans and other people of color by using nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to challenge Jim Crow laws and legalized discrimination. As a Black church leader, King organized and took part in marches for voting rights, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights causes. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He also led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Georgia and helped plan the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, where he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, and helped arrange two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 voting rights campaign. These efforts often led to violent confrontations with segregationist authorities. The movement resulted in major legal victories: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. King was arrested multiple times. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover viewed him as a radical and targeted him through COINTELPRO starting in 1963. FBI agents looked into possible communist ties, monitored his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI sent King an anonymous threatening letter, which he believed was meant to push him to suicide. That same year, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent fight against racial inequality. In his later years, King also spoke out against poverty and the Vietnam War. In 1968, King was planning a national protest in Washington, D.C., called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray was convicted of the killing, though conspiracy theories persist. King's death sparked riots across U.S. cities. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was first observed as a holiday in cities and states starting in 1971, with the federal holiday beginning in 1986. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011. King was born Michael King Jr., the second of three children of Michael King and Alberta King. His maternal grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams, was a minister who moved to Atlanta in 1893 and became pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Williams married Jennie Celeste Parks. King’s father, Michael Sr., was born to sharecroppers in Stockbridge, Georgia, likely of Mende descent from Sierra Leone. He attended Morehouse College to study for the ministry. Michael Sr. and Alberta began dating in 1920 and married in 1926. Until Jennie’s death in 1941, the family lived on the second floor of Alberta’s parents’ home, where King was born. King had an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel King. After marrying Alberta, King Sr. became assistant pastor at Ebenezer. When Williams died in 1931, King Sr. took over as pastor, growing the congregation from six hundred to several thousand. In 1934, the church sent him on a trip that included a stop in Berlin for the Baptist World Alliance Congress. He also visited sites linked to Martin Luther. That August, the Congress passed a resolution condemning racial animosity and discrimination against Jews, colored people, and subject races. After returning home, Michael Sr. changed his own name to Martin Luther King and his five-year-old son’s name to Martin Luther King Jr. As a child, King and his siblings read the Bible aloud at their father’s instruction. His grandmother Jennie, whom he called “Mama,” told Bible stories after dinner. His father disciplined the children with whippings, sometimes making them whip each other. King Sr. noted that his son would stand still and cry silently during punishment. Once, King knocked his brother A.D. unconscious with a telephone after A.D. upset their sister. Another time, A.D. slid down a banister and hit Jennie, causing her to fall unresponsive. Thinking she was dead, King blamed himself and jumped from a second-story window, but got up after learning she was alive. King became friends with a white boy whose father owned a business across the street. In September 1935, when both were about six, they started school. King attended Yonge Street Elementary, a school for Black children, while his friend went to a whites-only school.