Martin Luther King Jr.

Michael — later Martin — Luther King Jr. was born on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta in January 1929, the son and grandson of Baptist preachers. He skipped two grades, entered Morehouse College at fifteen, took a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University at twenty-six, and accepted the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the same year. In December 1955, weeks after his twenty-sixth birthday, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, and the Montgomery Improvement Association elected King to lead the boycott. The boycott lasted 381 days and ended in a Supreme Court ruling that made segregated buses unconstitutional. Across the next thirteen years he led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was arrested twenty-nine times, wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) defending nonviolent direct action against eight white moderate clergymen, and on 28 August 1963 delivered the I Have a Dream speech to 250,000 marchers on the National Mall — sixteen minutes that reshaped the moral language of American democracy. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 at thirty-five, the youngest male laureate in its history; the Civil Rights Act passed that year and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 after Selma. By 1967 he had broadened his target: against the Vietnam War (in Beyond Vietnam, April 1967, he called the United States 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today'), against poverty, against economic injustice — losing some of his white liberal base in the process. On 4 April 1968, while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, he was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a sniper. He was thirty-nine. His funeral cortège, drawn by two mules, drew 300,000 mourners through Atlanta. Martin Luther King Jr. Day became the only federal holiday named for an African-American.

Martin Luther King Jr. is an Epoch+ Episode

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