Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on
January 15,
1929, in
Atlanta,
Georgia. He was the son of the
Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and
Alberta Williams King. King's father was born "Michael King", and Martin Luther King, Jr. was initially named "Michael King, Jr.", until 1935, when "his father changed both of their names to Martin to honor the German Protestant (
Martin Luther)."
[2] He had an older sister,
Willie Christine (
September 11,
1927) and a younger brother,
Alfred Daniel (
July 30,
1930 –
July 1,
1969). King sang with his church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie
Gone with the Wind. He entered
Morehouse College at age fifteen, skipping his ninth and twelfth high school grades without formally graduating. In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in
sociology, and enrolled in
Crozer Theological Seminary in
Chester,
Pennsylvania, and graduated with a
Bachelor of Divinity (B.D.) degree in 1951. In September 1951, King began doctoral studies in
systematic theology at
Boston University and received his
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) on
June 5,
1955[3]. In 1953, at age 24, King became pastor of the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery,
Alabama.
Civil rights activism, 1953–1968
Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955 At 11 am
December 1,
1955,
Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to comply with the
Jim Crow laws that required her to give up her seat to a white man. The
Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by
E. D. Nixon (head of the Montgomery
NAACP chapter and a member of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and led by King, soon followed. (In March 1955, a 15-year-old school girl,
Claudette Colvin, had to give up her seat, but King did not then become involved.
[4]) The boycott lasted for 385 days, the situation becoming so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States District Court ruling in
Browder v. Gayle that ended
racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
King was instrumental in the founding of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a group created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King continued to dominate the organization. In 1958, while signing copies of his book "Strive Toward Freedom" in a Harlem department store, he was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener by a deranged black woman,
Izola Curry, and narrowly escaped death.
The
FBI, under written directive from then Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy, began
wiretapping King in 1961. J.Edgar Hoover feared that
Communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, but when no such evidence emerged, the bureau used the incidental details caught on tape over six years in attempts to force King out of the preeminent leadership position.
King correctly recognized that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as
Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that made the
Civil Rights Movement the single most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.
King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent. King and the SCLC were instrumental in the unsuccessful
Albany Movement in
Albany,
Georgia, in 1961 and 1962, where divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts; in the
Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963; and in the protest in
St. Augustine,
Florida, in 1964. King and the SCLC joined forces with the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in
Selma,
Alabama, in December 1964, where SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months.
[6] March on Washington, 1963 Main article: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom