Martin Luther King, Jr. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Martin Luther King and MLK redirect here. For other uses, see Martin Luther King (disambiguation) and MLK (disambiguation). This is a good article. Click here for more information.Page semi-protected Awards Nobel Peace Prize (1964), Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977, posthumous), Congressional Gold Medal (2004, posthumous) Signature Martin Luther King Jr Signature2.svg Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs. He was born Michael King but his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., changed his name in honor of the German reformer Martin Luther. A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia (the Albany Movement), in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history. On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches and the following year, he took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include poverty and speak against the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled Beyond Vietnam. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor Peoples Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor. In addition, a county was rededicated in his honor. A memorial statue on the National Mall was opened to the public in 2011. Early life and education Kings high school alma mater was named after African-American scholar Booker T. Washington Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King.[1] His legal name at birth was Michael King.[2] Kings father was also born Michael King. The father changed his and his sons names following a 1934 trip to Germany to attend the Fifth Baptist World Alliance Congress in Berlin. It was during this time he chose to be called Martin Luther King in honor of the German reformer Martin Luther.[3] King had Irish ancestry through his paternal great-grandfather.[4][5] Martin, Jr., was a middle child, between an older sister, Willie Christine King, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King.[6] King sang with his church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie Gone with the Wind.[7] King liked singing and music. Kings mother, an accomplished organist and choir leader, took him to various churches to sing. He received attention for singing I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus. King later became a member of the junior choir in his church.[8] King said his father regularly whipped him until he was fifteen and a neighbor reported hearing the elder King telling his son he would make something of him even if he had to beat him to death. King saw his fathers proud and unafraid protests in relation to segregation, such as Martin, Sr. refusing to listen to a traffic policeman after being referred to as boy or stalking out of a store with his son when being told by a shoe clerk that they would have to move to the rear to be served.[9] When King was a child, he befriended a white boy whose father owned a business near his familys home. When the boys were 6, they attended different schools, with King attending a segregated school for African-Americans. King then lost his friend because the childs father no longer wanted them to play together.[10] King suffered from depression throughout much of his life. In his adolescent years, he initially felt some resentment against whites due to the racial humiliation that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure in the segregated South.[11] At age 12, shortly after his maternal grandmother died, King blamed himself and jumped out of a second story window, but survived.[12] King was originally skeptical of many of Christianitys claims.[13] At the age of thirteen, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school. From this point, he stated, doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.[14] However, he later concluded that the Bible has many profound truths which one cannot escape and decided to enter the seminary.[13] Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. He became known for his public speaking ability and was part of the schools debate team.[15] King became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal in 1942 at age 13.[16] During his junior year, he won first prize in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks Club in Dublin, Georgia. Returning home to Atlanta by bus, he and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so white passengers could sit down. King refused initially, but complied after his teacher informed him that he would be breaking the law if he did not go along with the order. He later characterized this incident as the angriest I have ever been in my life.[15] A precocious student, he skipped both the ninth and the twelfth grades of high school.[17] It was during Kings junior year that Morehouse College announced it would accept any high school juniors who could pass its entrance exam. At that time, most of the students had abandoned their studies to participate in World War II. Due to this, the school became desperate to fill in classrooms. At age 15, King passed the exam and entered Morehouse.[15] The summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, an eighteen-year old King made the choice to enter the ministry after he concluded the church offered the most assuring way to answer an inner urge to serve humanity. Kings inner urge had begun developing and he made peace with the Baptist Church, as he believed he would be a rational minister with sermons that were a respectful force for ideas, even social protest.[18] In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a B.A. degree in sociology, and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a B.Div. degree in 1951.[19][20] Kings father fully supported his decision to continue his education. King was joined in attending Crozer by Walter McCall, a former classmate at Morehouse.[21] At Crozer, King was elected president of the student body.[22] The African-American students of Crozer for the most part conducted their social activity on Edwards Street. King was endeared to the street due to a classmate having an aunt that prepared the two collard greens, which they both relished.[23] King once called out a student for keeping beer in his room because of their shared responsibility as African-Americans to bear the burdens of the Negro race. For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbuschs social gospel.[22] In his third year there, he became romantically involved with the daughter of an immigrant German woman working as a cook in the cafeteria. The daughter had been involved with a professor prior to her relationship with King. King had plans of marrying her, but was advised not to by friends due to the reaction an interracial relationship would spark from both blacks and whites, as well as the chances of it destroying his chances of ever pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he could not endure his mothers pain over the marriage and broke the relationship off around six months later. He would continue to have lingering feelings, with one friend being quoted as saying, He never recovered.[22] King married Coretta Scott, on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama.[24] They became the parents of four children: Yolanda King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice King.[25] During their marriage, King limited Corettas role in the civil rights movement and expected her to be a housewife.[26] Doctoral studies See also: Martin Luther King, Jr. authorship issues King then began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Ph.D. degree on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation on A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. An academic inquiry concluded in October 1991 that portions of his dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. However, [d]espite its finding, the committee said that no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. Kings doctoral degree, an action that the panel said would serve no purpose.[27][28][29] The committee also found that the dissertation still makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship. However, a letter is now attached to Kings dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.[30] Ideas, influences, and political stances Religion King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, when he was twenty-five years old, in 1954.[31] As a Christian minister, his main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses. Kings faith was strongly based in Jesus commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God above all, and loving your enemies, praying for them and blessing them. His nonviolent thought was also based in the injuction to turn the other cheek in the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus teaching of putting the sword back into its place (Matthew 26:52).[32] In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King urged action consistent with what he describes as Jesus extremist love, and also quoted numerous other Christian pacifist authors, which was very usual for him. In another sermon, he stated: Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I dont plan to run for any political office. I dont plan to do anything but remain a preacher. And what Im doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man. —King, 1967[33][34] In his speech Ive Been to the Mountaintop, he stated that he just wanted to do Gods will.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 07:18:17 +0000
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