Martin luther king

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Martin Luther King was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. His exact address was # 501 Auburn Avenue, Atlanta Georgia, also known as “Sweet Auburn” and “Black Wall Street”. Many prosperous black businessmen lived in this avenue, as well as there were many important churches in it. His parents were college educated; his dad was a pastor of the EbenezerBaptist Church in Atlanta. Martin Luther King attended segregated (to keep one group of people apart from another and treat them differently, especially because of race or sex) public schools in Georgia. He graduated from high school at 15 years of age and was accepted at Morehouse College. Before entering college, Martin spent a summer working at a tobacco farm in Connecticut where he was amazedwith the racial integration. He wrote home several letters where he commented; “I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere”, “Negroes and whites go to the same church”. It was the first time he spent so much time away from home and was shocked with the way he saw black and whites mixing peacefully. He spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester,Pennsylvania. There he learned about Mohandas Ghandi’s philosophy of “no violence”. Famous for his oratorical skills, Martin was elected president of the Crozer’s Student body, which was mostly composed of white students. He earned a bachelor on Divinity Degree in 1951, after this he was enrolled at Boston University where he completed his residence for the doctorate in 1953 receiving his degree in1955. While in Boston he met and married Coretta Scout and had 2 sons and 2 daughters. In 1954 he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. By this time he already was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which was a leading organization in the Nation.
King had been Dexter’s Baptist Church pastor for almost a year when a smallgroup of civil rights advocates decided to fight segregation by riding the city’s public transportation system along with the white people, following the footsteps of Rosa Parks an African American woman who had refused to give her seat on a bus to a white person. She was arrested for violating the city’s segregation laws. The protestors formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to boycottthe transportation system and chose Martin Luther King as their leader. For his first speech to the group, Martin wrote; “ We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient withanything less than freedom and justice”.
Although his home was bombed and his family threatened, Martin continued leading the organization and the boycott until the city’s buses were desegregated.
King was completely convinced that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. In 1957 he was elected president of the SouthernChristian Leadership Conference, this was an organization formed to provide new leadership for the civil rights movement. He managed this movement with organizational ideas he adopted from Christianity and the operational techniques he learned from Ghandi’s nonviolent doctrine. Between 1957 and 1968, he travelled over 6 million miles and spoke over 25,000 times. He managed to show up everywhere therewas injustice, protest, and action. In the mean time he wrote 5 books and hundreds of articles. He also led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama which caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called “a coalition of conscience” which inspired his “Letters from a Birmingham jail”, a manifesto of a Negro revolution. He was arrested more than 20 times, assaulted at least 4...