Martin Luther King

Michael Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. A few years later he changes his name to Martin Luther King, Jr. At the age of fifteen he received the B. A. degree fromMorehouse College in 1948. He was awarded the B.D. in 1951 with a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 andreceiving the degree in 1955. He met his wife Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments in Boston. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights he became members of the executive committee of the NationalAssociation for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. In December, 1955 he accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration ofcontemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the lawsrequiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, he was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time heemerged as a Negro leader of the first rank. In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoningcivil rights movement. He also wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In 1957-1968 he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providingwhat he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as...