Documentation on Martin Luther KING, civil rights legend
Photo of Martin Luther KING (1929-1968)
Jawaharlal Nehru
“Who was Martin Luther King, Jr.?”, National Geographic (updated January 2023)
A civil rights legend, Dr. King fought for justice through peaceful protest—and delivered some of the
20th century's most iconic speeches.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is a civil rights legend. In the mid-1950s, King led the movement
to end segregation and counter prejudice in the United States through the means of peaceful protest.
His speeches—some of the most iconic of the 20th century—had a profound effect on the national
consciousness. Through his leadership, the civil rights movement opened doors to education and
employment that had long been closed to Black America.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King for his
commitment to equal rights and justice for all. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it’s
called Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In January 2000, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in
all 50 U.S. states. Here’s what you need to know about King’s extraordinary life.
Early life
Though King's name is known worldwide, many may not realize that he was born Michael King, Jr. in
Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. His father, Michael King, was a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta. During a trip to Germany, King, Sr. was so impressed by the history of Protestant
Reformation leader Martin Luther that he changed not only his own name, but also five-year-old
Michael’s.
1
His brilliance was noted early, as he was accepted into Morehouse College, a historically Black school
in Atlanta, at age 15. By the summer before his last year of college, King knew he was destined to
continue the family profession of pastoral work and decided to enter the ministry. He received his
Bachelor’s degree from Morehouse at age 19, and then enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in
Chester, Pennsylvania, graduating with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. He earned a doctorate
in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955.
King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of
Heiberger, Alabama. They became the parents of four children: Yolanda King (1955–2007), Martin
Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (b. 1961), and Bernice King (b. 1963).
Becoming a civil rights leader
In 1954, when he was 25 years old, Dr. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama. In March 1955, Claudette Colvin—a 15-year-old Black schoolgirl in
Montgomery—refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, which was a violation of Jim Crow
laws, local laws in the southern United States that enforced racial segregation.
King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the
case. The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
briefly considered using Colvin's case to challenge the segregation laws, but decided that because she
was so young—and had become pregnant—her case would attract too much negative attention.
Nine months later on December 1, 1955, a similar incident occurred when a seamstress named Rosa
Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. The two incidents led to the
Montgomery bus boycott, which was urged and planned by the President of the Alabama Chapter of
the NAACP, E.D. Nixon, and led by King. The boycott lasted for 385 days.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy are shown "integrating" one of the first buses in
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. This scene is from the striking three-hour feature film, <i>King: A
Filmed Record</i>.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with a "7080" sign across his chest for a police mugshot, after his arrest for
directing a city-wide boycott of segregated buses.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta, daughter Yolanda, 5, and Martin Luther III, 3, play piano
in their Montgomery, Alabama living room.
Leaders of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. From right to left:
Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Eugene Carson Blake, Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Matthew Ahmann,
and John Lewis.
This photo captures the brief, and only, meeting between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the
halls of the U.S. Capitol. They were observing a Senate filibuster of the Voting Rights Act.
Arrested after trying to dine at whites-only restaurants in Saint Augustine, Florida, Martin Luther
King, Jr. sits with Reverend Ralph Abernathy in the St. John's County Jail in June 1964.
King’s prominent and outspoken role in the boycott led to numerous threats against his life, and his
house was firebombed. He was arrested during the campaign, which concluded with a United States
District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle (in which Colvin was a plaintiff) that ended racial segregation
2
on all Montgomery public buses. King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure
and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.
Fighting for change through nonviolent protest
From the early days of the Montgomery boycott, King had often referred to India’s Mahatma Gandhi
as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”
In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights activists
founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to harness the organizing power of Black
churches to conduct nonviolent protests to ultimately achieve civil rights reform. The group was part
of what was called “The Big Five” of civil rights organizations, which included the NAACP, the National
Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress on Racial Equality.
Through his connections with the Big Five civil rights groups, overwhelming support from Black
America and with the support of prominent individual well-wishers, King’s skill and effectiveness
grew exponentially. He organized and led marches for Blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor
rights, and other basic civil rights.
On August 28, 1963, The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom became the pinnacle of King’s
national and international influence. Before a crowd of 250,000 people, he delivered the legendary “I
Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That speech, along with many others
that King delivered, has had a lasting influence on world rhetoric.
In 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights and social justice activism. Most of
the rights King organized protests around were successfully enacted into law with the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Economic justice and the Vietnam War
King’s opposition to the Vietnam War became a prominent part of his public persona. On April 4,
1967—exactly one year before his death—he gave a speech called “Beyond Vietnam” in New York
City, in which he proposed a stop to the bombing of Vietnam. King also suggested that the United
States declare a truce with the aim of achieving peace talks, and that the U.S. set a date for
withdrawal.
Ultimately, King was driven to focus on social and economic justice in the United States. He had
traveled to Memphis, Tennessee in early April 1968 to help organize a sanitation workers’ strike, and
on the night of April 3, he delivered the legendary “I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, in which
he compared the strike to the long struggle for human freedom and the battle for economic justice,
using the New Testament's Parable of the Good Samaritan to stress the need for people to get
involved.
Assassination
But King would not live to realize that vision. The next day, April 4, 1968, King was gunned down on
the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by James Earl Ray, a small-time criminal who had
escaped the year before from a maximum-security prison. Ray was charged and convicted of the
3
murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison on March 10, 1969. But Ray changed his mind after three
days in jail, claiming he was not guilty and had been framed. He spent the rest of his life fighting
unsuccessfully for a trial, despite the ultimate support of some members of the King family and the
Reverend Jesse Jackson.
The turmoil that flowed from King’s assassination led many Black Americans to wonder if that dream
he had spoken of so eloquently had died with him. But, today, young people around the world still
learn about King's life and legacy—and his vision of equality and justice for all continue to resonate.
“From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream”, History Extra
(December 2005)
A simple act of defiance by Rosa Parks in 1955 triggered one of the most celebrated civil rights
campaigns in history. John Kirk examines how the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 launched the
career of Martin Luther King Jr and changed the face of modern America
Rosa Louise Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress in a department store in downtown Montgomery,
Alabama, boarded her bus home as usual after work on 1 December 1955. As the bus became
crowded, white driver J Fred Blake told Parks and other black passengers to vacate their seats.
Segregation laws dictated that white passengers had priority. The blacks duly moved. Except for
Parks. She sat silently still. “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to call the police and have you arrested,”
Blake shouted at her. “You may do that,” Parks calmly replied. Blake left the bus and returned with
two policemen. “Why don’t you stand up?” one of the officers asked Parks. “Why do you push us
around?” Parks answered. “I do not know,” said the officer, “but the law is the law and you are under
arrest”. She was taken off to the city jail.
Parks’s arrest would have major ramifications. It led to a 13-month boycott of city buses in one of the
longest mass mobilisations of a black population ever witnessed in the United States. The boycott’s
church-based community activism and ministerial leadership, together with its spirit of non-violence,
4
would become hallmarks of the civil rights movement over the next decade. Moreover, by thrusting
26-year-old Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr into the national spotlight, it provided a new leader for a
new era of black activism.
Parks’s act of defiance and the bus boycott were not without historical precedent. When segregation
ordinances were passed in southern cities in the late 19th and early 20th century, a number of
southern black populations, including Montgomery’s, had organised short-lived boycotts of public
transport. Since the 1940s, the growing population of southern cities had increased the amount of
inter-racial contact and conflict on city buses. In 1953, blacks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, boycotted
buses for about a week until whites agreed to modify existing segregation practices. But the Parks
case was different. It unfolded in the aftermath of a lawsuit brought by the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1954, in which the US Supreme Court had handed
down a landmark ruling.
In Brown v Board of Education, the court outlawed segregation in schools and thereby undermined
its legal legitimacy in other areas. The initiative swung decisively towards blacks. Yet southern whites
were determined not to give in. Many vowed a campaign of massive resistance to desegregation
through legal and even extra-legal measures. In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy, Emmett Till,
was brutally murdered by whites in Mississippi for allegedly answering back to a white woman. Till’s
murder was indicative of the charged post-Brown racial climate and caused national outrage by
graphically illustrating the terror and violence that underpinned segregation.
Brown polarised southern race relations. In the past, there had been limited room for manoeuvre and
negotiation over segregation practices at a local level. Brown largely put an end to that by raising the
stakes. To blacks, it signalled that the time was right to press their case for racial reform. To whites, it
signalled the need not to concede one inch of the segregated order. It was within this changing
context of race relations that the Montgomery bus boycott unfolded.
Two people in Montgomery’s black community were responsible for the bus boycott. One was Edgar
Daniel (ED) Nixon, a train porter, union leader, and social and political activist. He had been a friend of
Parks’s for a number of years and he was the one who arranged to bail her out of jail. The other was
Jo Ann Robinson, a college teacher and head of the city’s Women’s Political Council. Nixon and
Robinson agreed to organise a one-day bus boycott to protest Parks’s treatment. Robinson took
charge of publicising the boycott and Nixon arranged a mass meeting to rally support.
