Born Michael Luther King, Jr., he later changed his name to Martin Luther King, Jr. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father dedicated his life to serving the church and from 1960 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King acted as co-pastor.
Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated.
After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic accomplishments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the leading organisation of its kind in the nation. By December 1955, he was ready to accept the leadership of the first great Negro non-violent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate.
The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared the laws requiring segregation on buses as unconstitutional, and Negroes and whites should ride the buses as equals. During the days of the boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. He took the ideals for the organisation from Christianity and its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King travelled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action.
During this time he also managed to write five books and many articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience, inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the most symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Arguments still rage about who conspired to assassinate Dr King and a number of similarly notionally "rebellious" liberal figures in the US in that era. The grotesque paranoia of the Causcasian governing paraphernalia is still a firm favourite amongst the majority of neutral observers.
The fog of time and systematic obfuscation of the secret services, the collective statist guilt combined with the barbaric history of demonising descendents of Africans, the startlingly malevolent, centuries evolved interracial hatreds from the European population, renders that any truth about this episode, will never be fully explored with any kind of veracity for fear of a civil explosion from the simmering tensions, which are never far from the surface of US society.
