Who was Martin Luther King Jr.?

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, who used nonviolent direct action to fight segregation and racial inequality from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, and his father later changed both their names to honor the German Protestant reformer Martin Luther. King studied at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, where he earned a doctorate in systematic theology in 1955. He had married Coretta Scott in June 1953 and accepted his first pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954.

King's national leadership began on December 5, 1955, four days after Rosa Parks's arrest, when local Black leaders chose him to head the Montgomery Improvement Association and lead the bus boycott. The 381-day boycott ended in victory on December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional. King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in January 1957 and became its president, using the Black church as the organizational base of the southern civil rights movement.

He drew his philosophy from the Sermon on the Mount, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and the example of Mohandas Gandhi, whom he had studied during a 1959 visit to India. King led major campaigns in Albany, Georgia in 1961, Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, and Selma, Alabama in 1965. His Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in April 1963 while imprisoned for marching, defended civil disobedience as a moral duty against unjust laws.

On August 28, 1963, he delivered his I Have a Dream speech to about 250,000 people at the March on Washington, calling for a nation where children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. King received the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1964 in Oslo, Norway, becoming the youngest recipient at age 35. He spoke against the Vietnam War in 1967, broadening his focus from civil rights to economic justice and peace.

He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers. His birthday became a federal holiday in 1986.