Martin Luther King Jr.

King was born on January 15, 1929, as Michael Luther King Jr.; his name was later changed to Martin. Preaching ran in the family: his grandfather and then his father led Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he would later serve as co-pastor. He attended segregated public schools, finished high school at fifteen, and graduated in 1948 from Morehouse College, as his father and grandfather had. At Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania he was elected president of a mostly white senior class, and at Boston University, where he earned his doctorate in 1955, he met and married Coretta Scott; they had two sons and two daughters. In 1954 he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, already a member of the NAACP’s executive committee.

When Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955, Montgomery’s Black leaders chose the new young pastor to head the Montgomery Improvement Association — partly, Parks later said, because he had not been in town long enough to make enemies. Over a boycott that lasted 382 days his home was bombed and he was arrested and convicted, but in December 1956 Black and white passengers rode Montgomery’s buses as equals. In 1957 he became president of the new Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Over the next eleven years he traveled more than six million miles, spoke more than 2,500 times, and wrote five books; in 1958 he was seriously hurt when a woman named Izola Curry stabbed him.

In April 1963 King brought the SCLC to Birmingham, Alabama, to join a local campaign against the city’s segregation. Defying a court injunction against protests, he decided that he had to go to jail himself — “I have to make a faith act,” he told colleagues — and was arrested on Good Friday and held in solitary confinement. There, in the margins of a newspaper, he wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” answering white clergymen who had condemned the protests. That August he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech to more than 200,000 people at the March on Washington. In 1965, after state troopers beat marchers on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, he led the march from Selma to Montgomery that helped bring the Voting Rights Act. He was arrested more than twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he gave his $54,123 Nobel Prize money to the movement.

King took the ideals of his movement from Christianity and its methods from Gandhi. “Christ showed us the way,” he said, “and Gandhi in India showed it could work.” He spoke of the goal as a “beloved community.” In his last years he insisted that civil rights were incomplete without economic security: in 1967 he announced a Poor People’s Campaign to bring poor Americans of all races to Washington to demand jobs, a fair minimum wage, and education.

King faced criticism from many sides: from segregationists; from more militant activists, such as Malcolm X, who rejected nonviolence; and from allies who disagreed with his tactics — Thurgood Marshall preferred lawsuits to civil disobedience, and some in his own organization thought the Poor People’s Campaign too ambitious and its demands too vague. His decision during the Selma campaign to turn marchers back at the Edmund Pettus Bridge angered some activists.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, King was shot and killed on the balcony of his motel in Memphis, where he had come to support striking sanitation workers. The night before, he had told a rally, “I’ve been to the mountaintop.” Riots broke out in more than a hundred cities. His colleagues carried on the Poor People’s Campaign, building a tent city on the National Mall that spring. Named Time’s Man of the Year in 1963, King became not only the symbolic leader of Black Americans but a world figure; his words and methods continue to inspire movements for justice.