Martin Luther King Jr.

African-American King

On January 15th, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, a very influential mind was born (Marcelo and David B.). This person was Martin Luther King, Jr. As King grew older he began to realize his family's work. They had been part of a long line of pastors at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (Nobel Foundation). He began to realize what was going on in his very eventful life and recognized it as segregation.

He went to segregated middle schools in Georgia and then went on to high school. He was excelling exceedingly well, so they let him skip his ninth and twelfth grade school years. Astonishingly, he graduated at the age of fifteen. He went on to a prestigious African-American college called Morehouse College, which his father and grandfather attended and graduated from (Nobel Foundation). King graduated with a B.A. in Sociology. A few years later he decided to enroll in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. Further education took place and in 1955 King received his Ph. D. from Boston University (Wikipedia). While in Boston, King met, and later married, Coretta Scott. She was unusually intelligent and had many different artistic accomplishments. Later, they would have two sons and two daughters (Nobel Foundation).

After graduating from B.U., King started to fight for a better world. He wanted equal rights to be extended to all people that reside within the United States of America.

Miller -2-

In 1953, King became the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery, Alabama at the young age of twenty-four. On the first of December, 1955, Rosa Parks sat

down instead of following the Jim Crow Laws. She refused to give her seat up to a white man on a bus. King started the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted three-hundred-

eighty-two days. During this boycott, the tension caused had become so great that King's house was bombed and he was arrested on a later date (Wikipedia). Even further, he suffered personal abuse from an assortment of different people and with such; he became noted as an African-American leader in the Civil Rights Movement. This boycott was taken to the United States Supreme Court and they found it unconstitutional to further segregate people on public transportation (Nobel Foundation). They followed this court hearing by prohibiting all racial segregation on any public transport (Wikipedia).

In 1957, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was used to rally the African-American churches of the community to perform non-violent acts in hopes of achieving civil rights for all. This same mentality, non-violent civil disobedience, could be traced back to Mahatma Gandhi, which was successful in all its attributes. During 1961, the F.B.I. began wiretapping King. They believed Communists were trying to get involved with the Civil Rights Movement. When they found no such evidence, they used what they had collected against King to try and take him out of the leadership position (Wikipedia).

King saw the huge importance of this struggle in the American nation. The media made the protests televised events. The now informed public was seeing what was going on in their country. This worked a huge sympathetic factor into King's arguments. This

Miller -3-

media coverage made the Civil Rights Movement the single most important political issue in the early 1960s (Wikipedia).

During the time period of 1957 through 1968, King traveled over six million miles to speak to people of all sorts of religions and ethnicities. He spoke to the curious Americans, which supported him, at over 2,500 different times. In the same time period, he was busy writing five different books as well as numerous articles for various different newspapers and magazines. Also during these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a "coalition of conscience".