Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man. He inspired many generations and many more to come. He had a unique and engaging personality that could captivate a room of the young and old and black or white and he is a historic figure of the civil rights movement.

HISTORY:
Martin Luther King, Jr ., was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin.

He was a 3rd generation pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and he attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen. In 1948 he received a B. A. degree from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated.

After 3 years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class and Martin Luther was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, Martin enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University and he completed his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and received his degree in 1955. While living in Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of intellectual and artistic attainments. With Coretta, he had Two sons and two daughters.

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King was always a strong worker for civil rights and he was now a prominent member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (NAACP, the leading organization of its kind in the nation) In December, 1955, King eagerly accepted the leadership of the first great African American nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott led by King lasted 382 days and on December 21, 1956, the Supreme Court of the United States had declared the laws requiring segregation on buses–unconstitutional. Because of King, blacks and whites now rode the buses as equals. King suffered greatly through this protest as the hate crimes of the evil white devils, fell upon him. During these days of boycott, he was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a gigantic leader against inequality in America.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. Using his faith and peace as his guide, the ideals for this organization he took from Christianity and its operational techniques from Gandhi.

In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action. During this time King also wrote five books as well as numerous articles. During this time, he also led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that finally brought him the attention of the entire world. King called this a coalition of conscience and inspired his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the Negro revolution. With this 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 and world famous speech of piece and hope, “l Have a Dream”.

King conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson and in his life he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times. But the good outweighed the bad and 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 whose very soul and words will give hope to countless people for years to come.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, King in a classy move, announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

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. On that day, the evil of bigotry, hate and racism won. But King’s death was no doubt a cry of freedom for blacks all over the world and in the US, his work did not fail. Many others followed his lead and took action and now we raise our children in a world where equality is much more common. There is still racism and there most likely always will be, but the hatred has lost and proof sits in the chair of the White House in the form of President Barack Obama.

We salute you Martin Luther King Jr. And as a dad, I proudly tell my children about you and what you did. I have a dream too!

(January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968)

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