Martin Luther King (1929 - 1968)

Pastor, Leading Civil Rights Activist

• Famous Quotes
• I have a dream
• Promised Land
• Right to Vote

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.

King 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, with whom he had four children (two sons and two daughters).
In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In early December, 1955, King lead a nonviolent bus boycott. The boycott lasted 382 days. Just over a year later, on December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During the boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, and he was subjected to personal abuse. And yet, by the end of the boycott, he had clearly emerged as one of the greatest leaders in the fight for racial equality.
In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times. 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 symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.