King, Martin Luther, Jr.

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(b. 15 January 1929; d. 4 April 1968) Major leader in civil rights and antiwar movements in twentieth century; advocated militant nonviolent social protest.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Martin Luther King, Sr., pastor of the city's Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta Christine Williams King, whose father had been pastor of the church for almost forty years, King, Jr., followed his father and grandfather in the Baptist ministry and became the leading spokesman for the civil rights movement.

Encouraged by his parents, who were a part of the city's black elite, young King skipped three grades through public schools, graduating from high school and entering Atlanta's Morehouse College at fifteen. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1947 and graduated from Morehouse in 1948, with a major in sociology. From 1948 to 1951, King studied at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. He was president of the student body in his senior year and class valedictorian at commencement. From 1951 to 1954, King was a graduate student in philosophical theology at Boston University. There he met Coretta Scott, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. They married in the summer of 1953. A year later, the Kings moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. In his first year there, King finished his dissertation and was awarded a Ph.D. by Boston University in June 1955. Many years after his death, scholars found that much of King's academic work, including his dissertation, was marred by plagiarism.

On December 1, 1955 an African-American seamstress, Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. In protest, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was organized, young Martin Luther King was drafted as its president, and the MIA spearheaded the Montgomery bus boycott, which was resolved by the desegregation of the city's buses in December 1956. By then, King had won national and international attention as an eloquent spokesman for militant nonviolent social protest. In 1957, with other Southern black clergymen, King sought to build on the success in Montgomery by organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He retold the story of the Montgomery bus boycott in Stride toward Freedom (1958), which explained his understanding of nonviolent resistance to injustice. On trips to Africa in 1957 and India in 1959, King identified the Civil Rights Movement with Third World struggles against colonialism and deepened his commitment to Gandhian nonviolent resistance.

In 1963 King and the SCLC went to the aid of the Birmingham, Alabama, movement to end segregation in that city. After his arrest there on Good Friday, April 12, King's famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" summarized the black community's grievances and the justification for his nonviolent protest for social change. On August 28 he gave his equally famous address, "I Have a Dream," at the March on Washington. For his efforts, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1963 and, in its 1964 New Year's issue, Time magazine featured him as its Man of the Year. After the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, King led major

campaigns in St. Augustine, Florida, and Selma, Alabama. The latter culminated in the Selma to Montgomery March and the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Days before signing the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he was increasing the number of United States troops in Vietnam from 50 thousand to 125 thousand. Hesitant to alienate Johnson as an important ally of the Civil Rights Movement, King called for peaceful negotiations between the South Vietnamese communist guerillas, the Vietcong (who were supported by North Vietnam), and the South Vietnamese government. In 1966 he supported the right of Julian Bond and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leaders to oppose the administration's pursuit of war in Vietnam. In April 1966 the SCLC's board of directors passed a resolution calling on the government to consider the wisdom of promptly withdrawing from Vietnam.

Beyond Vietnam, the Los Angeles Watts race riot in 1965, Stokely Carmichael's invoking of "black power" on the Meredith March in 1966, and the Detroit race riot in 1967 redirected King's attention to a broader range of issues. Early in 1967 King concluded that it was "time to break the silence." In a famous address at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, he called for relentless nonviolent protest against the war. King continued to cry out for economic and social justice at home and an end to the Vietnam War abroad. In March 1968, Lyndon Johnson shocked the nation by announcing he would not seek reelection. Many of King's admirers believed that his opposition to the war in Vietnam led to the abdication of a president whose military authority and personal hubris committed the nation to a war it could not win. On April 4, 1968 King was killed by an assassin's bullet as he prepared to lead demonstrations in support of city sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

Antiwar Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Jackson, Jesse Louis; 1968 Upheaval; Nonviolence; Peace Movements.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters, 1954–63. vol. 1 of America in the King Years. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire, 1963–65. vol. 2 of America in the King Years. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Carson, Clayborne, et al., eds. The Papers of Martin Luther King, 4 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

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

Ling, Peter J. Martin Luther King, Jr. London: Routledge, 2002.

Washington, James M., ed. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1986.

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