Martin Luther King Jr.
The Dream and the Mountain
On 28 August 1963, a Baptist preacher from Atlanta stood before 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial and spoke the words that would define the century: "I have a dream." Martin Luther King Jr. was thirty-four years old. He had already led a 381-day bus boycott that broke segregation in Montgomery, survived the bombing of his home, been stabbed in the chest by a deranged woman in Harlem, and been arrested more times than he could count. Within five years he would be dead — shot on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of thirty-nine. In the decade between Montgomery and Memphis, he led the most consequential nonviolent movement in American history, forced the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, won the Nobel Peace Prize at thirty-five, and changed the conscience of a nation that had held his people in chains for three centuries.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
1929–1968
Born on 15 January 1929 at 501 Auburn Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia. His father, Martin Luther King Sr. ('Daddy King'), was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. His mother, Alberta Williams King, was the daughter of the church's previous pastor. He was assassinated on 4 April 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of thirty-nine.
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Arrested twenty-nine times for acts of civil disobedience, from the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to the Memphis sanitation workers' campaign in 1968. His most famous incarceration — Birmingham City Jail in April 1963 — produced one of the great documents of American political thought.
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Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 14 October 1964, making him the youngest recipient at that time. He donated the entire $54,123 prize money to the civil rights movement. 'I do not consider this merely an honour to me personally,' he said, 'but a tribute to the disciplined, wise restraint and majestic courage of the millions of gallant Negro and white persons of goodwill.'
250,000
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963 drew an estimated 250,000 people to the National Mall — the largest demonstration in American history at that time. Approximately 60,000 were white. The march was broadcast live on national television to an audience of millions.
Civil rights movement, nonviolent resistance, 'I Have a Dream' speech, Nobel Peace Prize
Defining Events
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
When Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus, the twenty-six-year-old King was chosen to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association and the boycott that followed. For 381 days, fifty thousand Black residents of Montgomery walked, carpooled, and rode mules rather than take the city buses. King's house was bombed on 30 January 1956. He stood on the porch, calmed the armed crowd that had gathered, and said: 'We must meet hate with love.' The Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle on 13 November 1956. The boycott ended in victory on 20 December.
Letter from Birmingham Jail
Arrested on Good Friday, 12 April 1963, during the Birmingham campaign, King wrote his most famous prose on scraps of newspaper, the margins of a legal pad, and sheets of toilet paper smuggled into his cell. The 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' was a response to eight white clergymen who had called the demonstrations 'unwise and untimely.' King's answer — seven thousand words on the moral obligation to disobey unjust laws — became one of the foundational documents of American political thought, quoted alongside Jefferson and Lincoln.
The March on Washington
A quarter of a million people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King was the last speaker of the day. Mahalia Jackson shouted from behind him: 'Tell them about the dream, Martin!' He set aside his prepared text and improvised the peroration that would become the most famous speech of the twentieth century. 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.' President Kennedy watched on television and said: 'He's damn good.'
Timeline
Born on Auburn Avenue
Martin Luther King Jr. was born on 15 January 1929 at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia — a street known as 'Sweet Auburn,' the prosperous heart of Black Atlanta. His father, Martin Luther King Sr., was the formidable pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. His mother, Alberta Williams King, was the daughter of the church's founding pastor. He was originally named Michael, after his father; both changed their names to Martin Luther in 1934, after the elder King visited Germany and was inspired by the Protestant reformer.
Morehouse College at Fifteen
Entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at the age of fifteen, having skipped the ninth and twelfth grades. He initially resisted following his father into the ministry, considering careers in medicine and law. Under the influence of Morehouse president Benjamin Mays — a scholar and mentor who demonstrated that Christian faith could be intellectually rigorous and socially engaged — King accepted his calling and was ordained at eighteen.
Marriage to Coretta Scott
Married Coretta Scott on 18 June 1953 at her parents' home in Marion, Alabama. Coretta was a gifted soprano studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. Daddy King performed the ceremony. They would have four children: Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter, and Bernice. Coretta would become a formidable activist in her own right, carrying the movement forward for decades after his death.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955. King, newly arrived as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. The boycott lasted 381 days. King's home was bombed. He was arrested. The Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional. King emerged, at twenty-seven, as the leader of a national movement.
Birmingham and the March on Washington
The Birmingham campaign in April and May confronted the most segregated city in America. Bull Connor's police turned fire hoses and attack dogs on demonstrators, including children. The images broadcast worldwide shamed the nation and forced President Kennedy to propose what became the Civil Rights Act. In August, King delivered 'I Have a Dream' to 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial.
Civil Rights Act and Nobel Prize
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and education. In October, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at age thirty-five — the youngest recipient. He donated the entire prize to the movement.
Selma and the Voting Rights Act
On 7 March 1965 — 'Bloody Sunday' — Alabama state troopers attacked six hundred marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma with tear gas and billy clubs. Television cameras broadcast the violence to a horrified nation. King led a second march to the bridge on 9 March. The Selma to Montgomery march finally reached the state capital on 25 March, with 25,000 marchers. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on 6 August 1965.
Memphis and the Mountaintop
King travelled to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. On 3 April, he delivered his final speech: 'I've been to the mountaintop. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.' The next evening, 4 April 1968, he was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by James Earl Ray. He was thirty-nine years old.
Key Figures
Coretta Scott King
The woman who stood beside Martin Luther King Jr. through every bombing, every arrest, every death threat, and every night he did not come home. Coretta Scott was a gifted musician studying at the New England Conservatory when a mutual friend introduced them on a blind date in Boston in 1952. She gave up a promising career in music to join his mission. She raised four children while her husband was jailed, surveilled, and threatened with death. After his assassination, she spent the next four decades building the King Center in Atlanta, campaigning for the federal holiday in his honour, and extending the movement to oppose apartheid, poverty, and nuclear weapons. She was not merely the wife of a great man. She was a great woman who chose to share his fight.
Ralph Abernathy
Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest friend, confidant, and partner in the civil rights movement from the very beginning. Ralph David Abernathy was pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery when the bus boycott began in 1955. He and King were arrested together, marched together, jailed together, and nearly died together. Abernathy was inside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel when King was shot on the balcony — he ran out and held his friend as he bled. He succeeded King as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and led the Poor People's Campaign to Washington in the summer of 1968. Their friendship was one of the great partnerships in the history of social movements: King was the visionary, Abernathy the organiser, and neither was complete without the other.
The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. lived thirty-nine years. In the thirteen years between the Montgomery bus boycott and the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he led a movement that dismantled the legal architecture of American apartheid, forced the passage of the two most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and changed the moral vocabulary of the nation. He was not perfect — he knew it, and said so. He was surveilled, blackmailed, and hunted by his own government. He was criticised by moderates for moving too fast and by radicals for not moving fast enough.
But he held to the conviction that nonviolent resistance could bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, and the laws on the books and the holiday that bears his name suggest he was right. Read his story in his own words in the first-person ePub.
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