Martin Luther King, Jr

American civil rights leader

• Born: January 15, 1929
• Birthplace: Atlanta, Georgia
• Died: April 4, 1968
• Place of death: Memphis, Tennessee

As founding president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King spearheaded the nonviolent movement that led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. His work was so profound that his name and messages have become synonymous with civil rights in the United States.

Early Life

Martin Luther King, Jr., was the second child of the Reverend Michael Luther and Alberta Williams King. He was originally named Michael Luther King, Jr., but after the death of his paternal grandfather in 1933, King’s father changed their first name to Martin to honor the grandfather’s insistence that he had originally given that name to his son in the days when birth certificates were rare for Black people. Nevertheless, King was known as M. L. or Mike throughout his childhood. In 1931, King’s father became pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, only a block away from the house where King was born.

King’s father was both a minister and a bold advocate of racial equality. His mother was the daughter of the Reverend Adam Daniel Williams, who had preceded King’s father as pastor of Ebenezer and had established it as one of Atlanta’s most influential Black churches. Both of King’s parents believed in nonviolent resistance to racial discrimination. He grew up under the strong influence of the church and this family tradition of independence.

King was a small boy, but vigorously athletic and intellectually curious. He enjoyed competitive games as well as words and ideas. Intrigued by the influence of his father and other ministers over their congregations, young King dreamed of being a great speaker. Lerone Bennett noted,

To form words into sentences, to fling them out on the waves of air in a crescendo of sound, to watch people weep, shout, respond: this fascinated young Martin. . . . The idea of using words as weapons of defense and offense was thus early implanted and seems to have grown in King as naturally as a flower.

King excelled as a student and was able to skip two grades at Booker T. Washington High School and to enter Morehouse College in 1944 at age fifteen. At first he intended to study medicine, but religion and philosophy increasingly appealed to him as the influence of Morehouse president Benjamin E. Mays and George D. Kelsey of the religion department grew. Mays, a strong advocate of Christian nonviolence, sensed in King a profound talent in this area. In 1947, King was ordained a Baptist minister, and after graduation the following year he entered theological studies at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.

During his studies at Crozer and later in a doctoral program at Boston University (1951–54), King deepened his knowledge of the great ideas of the past. Especially influential on his formative mind were the Social Gospel concept of Walter Rauschenbusch, the realist theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, and above all, the nonviolent reformism of Mahatma Gandhi. In Gandhi, King found the key to synthesizing his Christian faith, his passion for helping oppressed people, and his sense of realism sharpened by Niebuhrian theology. King later wrote,

Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. . . . It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform.

King realized that nonviolence could not be applied in the United States exactly the way Gandhi had used it in India, but throughout his career King was devoted to the nonviolent method. In his mind, Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (force of truth) and ahimsa (active love) were similar to the Christian idea of agape, or unselfish love.

In Boston, King experienced love of another kind. In 1952, he met Coretta Scott, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. They were married at her home in Marion, Alabama, by King’s father the following year. Neither wanted to return to the segregated South, but in 1954, while King was finishing his doctoral dissertation on the concepts of God in the thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, he received a call to pastor the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Their acceptance marked a major turning point in their own lives, as well as in American history.

By then King was twenty-five years old and still rather small at five feet seven inches. With brown skin, a strong build, large pensive eyes, and a slow, articulate speaking style, he was an unusually well-educated young minister anxious to begin his first pastorate. As the Kings moved to the city that had once been the capital of the Confederacy, they believed that God was leading them into an important future.

Life’s Work

King quickly established himself as a hardworking pastor who guided his middle-class congregation into public service. He encouraged his parishioners to help the needy and to be active in organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Montgomery was a rigidly segregated city with thousands of Black people living on mere subsistence wages and barred from mainstream social life. The United States Supreme Court decision of 1954, requiring integration of public schools, had hardly touched the city, and most Black people apparently had little hope that their lives would ever improve.

An unexpected event in late 1955, however, changed the situation and drew King into his first significant civil rights activism. On December 1, Rosa Parks, a local Black seamstress, was ordered by a bus driver to yield her seat to a White man. She refused, and her arrest triggered a 381-day bus boycott that led to a US Supreme Court decision declaring the segregated transit system unconstitutional. King became the principal leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which administered the boycott, as thousands of local Black people cooperated in an effective nonviolent response to legally sanctioned segregation.

Quickly, the “Montgomery way” became a model for other southern cities: Tallahassee, Mobile, Nashville, Birmingham, and others. In January, 1957, King, his close friend Ralph Abernathy, and about two dozen other Black ministers and laypersons met at the Ebenezer Baptist Church to form a movement across the South. Subsequent meetings in New Orleans and Montgomery led to the formal creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which King used as the organizational arm of his movement.

From this point onward, King’s life was bound up with the southern nonviolent movement. Its driving force was the heightened confidence of thousands of Blacks and their White supporters, but King was its symbol and spokesperson. He suffered greatly in the process. In 1958, while promoting his first book, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), an account of the Montgomery boycott, he was stabbed by a Black woman. He was frequently arrested and berated by detractors as an “outside agitator” as he led various campaigns across the South. By early 1960, he had left his pastorate in Montgomery to become copastor (with his father) at the Ebenezer Baptist Church and to give his time more fully to the SCLC.

Not all of King’s efforts were successful. A campaign in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962 failed to desegregate that city. At times there were overt tensions between King’s SCLC and the more militant young people of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was created in the wake of the first significant sit-in, in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February, 1960. King supported the sit-in and freedom ride movements of the early 1960s and was the overarching hero and spiritual mentor of the young activists, but his style was more patient and gradualist than theirs.

King’s greatest successes occurred from 1963 to 1965. To offset the image of failure in Albany, the SCLC carefully planned a nonviolent confrontation in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963. As the industrial hub of the South, Birmingham was viewed as the key to desegregating the entire region. The campaign there was launched during the Easter shopping season to maximize its economic effects. As the so-called battle of Birmingham unfolded, King was arrested and wrote his famous Letter from Birmingham City Jail (1963), in which he articulated the principles of nonviolent resistance and countered the argument that he was an “outside agitator” with the affirmation that all people are bound “in an inextricable network of mutuality” and that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The Birmingham campaign was an important victory. Nationally televised scenes of police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor’s forces using fire hoses and trained dogs to attack nonviolent demonstrators stirred the public conscience. The Kennedy administration was moved to take an overt stand on behalf of civil rights. President Kennedy strongly urged Congress to pass his comprehensive civil rights bill. That bill was still pending in August, 1963, when King and many others led a march by more than 200,000 people to Washington , DC. At the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, King delivered his most important speech, “I Have a Dream,” calling on the nation to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed ’that all men are created equal.’”

After the March on Washington, King reached the height of his influence. Violence returned to Birmingham in September when four Black girls were killed at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In November, Kennedy was assassinated. However, in July, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act that ended most legally sanctioned segregation in the United States. Later in 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Increasingly, he turned his attention to world peace and economic advancement.

In 1965, King led a major campaign in Selma, Alabama, to underscore the need for stronger voting rights provisions than those of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The result was the 1965 Voting Rights Act , which gave the federal government more power to enforce Blacks’ right to vote. Ironically, as these important laws went into effect, northern and western cities were erupting in violent riots. At the same time, the United States was becoming more deeply involved in the Vietnam War, and King was distressed by both of these trends. In 1966 and beyond, he attempted nonviolent campaigns in Chicago and other northern cities, but with less dramatic successes than those of Birmingham and Selma.

King’s opposition to the Vietnam War alienated him from some of his Black associates and many White supporters. Furthermore, it damaged his relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Johnson administration. Many observers have seen his last two years as a period of waning influence. Nevertheless, King continued to believe in nonviolent reform. In 1968, he was planning another march on Washington, this time to accentuate the plight of the poor of all races. In April he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a local sanitation workers’ strike. On the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, he was shot to death by James Earl Ray. King’s successor, Ralph Abernathy, carried through with the Poor People’s March on Washington in June. King was survived by Coretta and their four children: Yolanda Denise (Yoki), Martin Luther III (Marty), Dexter, and Bernice Albertine (Bunny). Soon, Coretta established the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta to carry on, like the SCLC, his work.

Significance

King embodied a number of historical trends to which he added his own unique contributions. He was the author of five major books and hundreds of articles and speeches. His principal accomplishment was to raise the hopes of Black Americans and to bind them in effective direct-action campaigns. Although he was the major spokesperson of the civil rights movement, he was modest about his contributions. Just before his death he declared in a sermon that he wanted to be remembered as a “drum major for justice.” The campaigns he led paved the way for legal changes that ended more than a century of racial segregation.

Above all, King espoused nonviolence. That theme runs through his career and historical legacy. He left a decisive mark on American and world history. His dream of a peaceful world has inspired many individuals and movements. In 1983, Congress passed a law designating the third Monday in January a national holiday in his honor.

Bibliography

Abernathy, Donzaleigh. Partners to History: Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, and the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Crown, 2003. Print.

Ansbro, John J. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1982. Print.

Bennett, Lerone, Jr. What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1964. Rev. ed. New York: Johnson, 1976. Print.

Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Print.

Brauer, Carl M. John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Print.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a Personal Portrait. New York: William Morrow, 1986. Print.

Garrow, David J.. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Print.

King, Coretta Scott. My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. Print.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. Print.

“Martin Luther King, Jr.” NAACP, 2022, naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/martin-luther-king-jr. Accessed 7 Jun. 2022.

Peake, Thomas R. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the 1980s. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Print.