He was born Micheal Luther King Jr. but later changed his name to Martin Luther King. He was born January 15 1929 and died April 1968. He attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen. He received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, 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 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman and had two sons and two daughters that were born into the family. In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now starting civil rights movement.
The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action!! Meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In 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". 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 voters! He directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream"! He conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson! He was arrested up to twenty times and assaulted at least four times! He was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure!
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
