Martin Luther King Jr.

In the Atlanta home where he was born on January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. first knew the world through family, church, and the hard lines of segregation. He was born Michael King Jr., the second of three children of Michael King and Alberta King. His grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams, had been pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and his father later took that role, building the congregation with Alberta’s support. In 1934, after a Baptist World Alliance gathering that condemned racial animosity and unfair discrimination, King’s father returned from Germany and changed both his own name and his young son’s to Martin Luther King.

King grew up in a household steeped in the Bible and the Black church. He and his siblings read scripture aloud; his grandmother, Jennie, told vivid Bible stories after dinner. At the same time, childhood gave him early lessons in the cruelty of racism. A white playmate’s parents stopped the boys from playing together, telling King, “we are white, and you are colored.” His parents explained the history of slavery and racism in America, while also teaching him that his Christian duty was to love everyone. He also watched his father resist humiliation in daily life, refusing to accept being called “boy” by a police officer and leaving a shoe store rather than sit in the back.

Those early experiences helped shape the minister and activist who became one of the leading voices of the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his death in 1968. King advanced civil rights for people of color through nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other legalized discrimination, which most often affected African Americans. As a Black church leader, he participated in and led campaigns for voting rights, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights.

His public work placed him at the center of some of the best-known campaigns of the era. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. That same year, he stood among the leaders of the March on Washington and delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1965, he helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the Selma voting rights movement. These campaigns often met violent responses from segregationist authorities, yet the movement achieved major legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

King’s work also brought danger and surveillance. He was jailed several times. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered him a radical, and from 1963 King became an object of COINTELPRO. FBI agents investigated him, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him; in 1964, the bureau mailed him a threatening anonymous letter that he understood as an attempt to push him toward suicide. That same year, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In his final years, he widened his focus to include poverty and the Vietnam War.

In 1968, while planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People’s Campaign, King was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray was convicted of the assassination, which remains the subject of conspiracy theories, and King’s death led to riots in U.S. cities. He was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal; a federal holiday in his honor was first observed in 1986, and a memorial on the National Mall was dedicated in 2011. His words still carry force because they join moral urgency with practical courage: “If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”