Martin+Luther+King+Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. Growing up in Atlanta, King attended [|Booker T.Washington High School]. He skipped ninth and twelfth grade and entered Morehouse College at age fifteen without formally graduating from high school. In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology, and enrolled in [|Crozer Theological Seminary] in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951.

In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old school girl, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in compliance with the [|Jim Crow laws]. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; [|Edgar Nixon] and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became 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.

King is perhaps most famous for his "I Have a Dream" speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee in support of the black sanitary public works employees, represented by [|AFSCME] Local 1733, who had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. At 6:01 p.m., April 4, 1968, a shot rang out as King stood on the motel's second floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. After emergency chest surgery, King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only thirty-nine years old, he had the heart of a sixty-year-old man, perhaps a result of the stress of thirteen years in the civil rights movement

The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 100 cities. Presidential nominee Robert Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King's death. He gave a short speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and asking them to continue King's idea of non-violence.