Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. | |
|---|---|
 King in 1964 | |
| 1st President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference | |
| In office January 10, 1957 – April 4, 1968 | |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Ralph Abernathy |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Michael King Jr. January 15, 1929 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. |
| Died | April 4, 1968 (aged 39) Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Assassination by gunshot |
| Resting place | Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park |
| Spouse(s) | Coretta Scott (m. 1953) |
| Children | |
| Parents | |
| Relatives |
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| Education | |
| Occupation |
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| Known for | |
| Awards |
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| Memorials | Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial |
| Signature |  |
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A Black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolence and civil disobedience. Inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, he led targeted, nonviolent resistance against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in the United States.
King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights.[1] He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who frequently responded violently.[2] King was jailed several times. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963 forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.[3]
On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by national mourning, as well as anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the federal holiday was first observed in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and King County in Washington State was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.
Early life and education[edit]
Birth[edit]
King was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second of three children to Michael King and Alberta King (née Williams).[4][5][6] King had an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel "A.D." King.[7] Alberta's father, Adam Daniel Williams,[8] was a minister in rural Georgia, moved to Atlanta in 1893,[6] and became pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the following year.[9] Williams married Jennie Celeste Parks.[6] King, Sr. was born to sharecroppers, James Albert and Delia King of Stockbridge, Georgia,[5][6] and was of African-Irish descent.[10][11][12] In his adolescent years, King Sr. left his parents' farm and walked to Atlanta where he attained a high school education,[13][14][15] and enrolled in Morehouse College to study for entry to the ministry.[15] King Sr. and Alberta began dating in 1920, and married on November 25, 1926.[16][17] Until Jennie's death in 1941, they lived together on the second floor of Alberta's parents' two-story Victorian house, where King was born.[18][16][17][19]
Shortly after marrying Alberta, King Sr. became assistant pastor of the Ebenezer church.[17] Senior pastor Williams died in the spring of 1931[17] and that fall, King Sr. took the role, where he would in time raise the attendance from six hundred to several thousand.[17][6] In 1934, the church sent King Sr. on a multinational trip, including to Berlin for the meeting of the Congress of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA).[20] He also visited sites in Germany associated with the Reformation leader, Martin Luther.[20] While there, King Sr. and the BWA delegates witnessed the rise of Nazism.[20] In reaction, the BWA issued a resolution stating, "This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world."[21] On returning home in August 1934, King Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King and his five-year-old son's name to Martin Luther King Jr.[20][22][16][lower-alpha 1]
See also[edit]
- US Peace Memorial Foundation, awarding body for the US Peace Prize
References[edit]
- ↑ Jackson 2006, p. 53.
- ↑ Glisson 2006, p. 190.
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedautogenerated1 - ↑ Ogletree, Charles J. (2004). All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education. W. W. Norton & Co. p. 138. ISBN 0-393-05897-2. Search this book on
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Birth & Family". The King Center. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. Archived from the original on January 22, 2013. Retrieved January 22, 2020.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 "Martin Luther King Jr". Biography. A&E Television Networks, LLC. March 9, 2015. Retrieved January 22, 2020.
- ↑ King 1992, p. 76.
- ↑ "Upbringing & Studies". The King Center. Archived from the original on January 22, 2013. Retrieved September 2, 2012. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Oates 1983, p. 6.
- ↑ "King, James Albert". Archived from the original on December 17, 2014. Retrieved June 24, 2014. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Nsenga, Burton (January 13, 2011). "AfricanAncestry.com Reveals Roots of MLK and Marcus Garvey".
- ↑ Nelson, Alondra (2016). The Social Life of DNA. pp. 160–61. ISBN 978-0-8070-2718-9.
Kittles informed King that his Y-chromosome DNA analysis traced to Ireland and his mtDNA analysis associated him with the Mende.
Search this book on
- ↑ Frady 2002, p. 11.
- ↑ Manheimer 2004, p. 10.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Fleming 2008, p. 2.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Frady 2002, p. 12.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 Oates 1983, p. 7.
- ↑ Oates 1983, p. 4.
- ↑ Oates 1983, p. 13.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 Brown, DeNeen L. (January 15, 2019). "The story of how Michael King Jr. became Martin Luther King Jr". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 20, 2019.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 Nancy Clanton, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (January 17, 2020). "Why Martin Luther King Jr.'s father changed their names". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved February 3, 2020.
- ↑ King 1992, pp. 30–31.
- ↑ King 1992, p. 31.
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