KING, MARTIN LUTHER, JR. (1929–1968), was a Baptist minister and civil rights leader. The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, Martin Luther King, Jr., was born into a middle-class black family in Atlanta, Georgia. As an adolescent, King grew concerned about racial and economic inequality in American society. Sociology classes at Morehouse College taught him to view racism and poverty as related aspects of social evil, and reading Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849) convinced him that resistance to an unjust system was a moral duty. At Morehouse, King decided to become a minister, and after graduation he enrolled at Crozier Theological Seminary to study divinity. There he acquired from Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) the conviction that the Christian churches have an obligation to work for social justice. In Mohandas Gandhi's practice of nonviolent resistance he discovered a tactic for transforming Christian love from a merely personal to a social ethic.
King's interest in theology, philosophy, and social ethics led him to enter the graduate program at Boston University School of Theology, where he earned a Ph.D. degree and developed his own philosophical position based upon the tenet that "only personality—finite and infinite—is ultimately real." In Boston, he met and courted Coretta Scott, and in 1953 they were wed. A year later, King accepted a call to be pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Chosen by E. D. Nixon, president of the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to lead a boycott of the city's segregated buses, he gained national recognition when the boycott resulted in a Supreme Court decision that declared laws requiring segregated seating on buses unconstitutional.
Following the Montgomery bus boycott, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to coordinate scattered civil rights activities and local organizations. Operating primarily through the black churches, the SCLC mounted successive attacks against segregation in the early 1960s. Public demonstrations, especially in the South, dramatized for the nation the violence of white segregationists in contrast to the nonviolence of black demonstrators. Although immediate gains at the local level were often minimal, King's strategy drew national attention to the racial problem, awakened moral concern in many, pressured the federal government to act, and helped gain passage of legislation protecting the rights of blacks to vote and desegregating public accommodations. As the most eloquent speaker of the movement, King moved thousands to commit themselves to civil rights as both a moral and a political issue. For his nonviolent activism, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Against the arguments of militants, King maintained that nonviolence was the only practical and moral means for African Americans to achieve equality. Violence would bring only more violence; nonviolence might convert the racist's conscience. Linking the cause of African Americans to the struggle for independence of colonized peoples worldwide, King opposed the Vietnam War and condemned international violence.
While organizing a "poor people's campaign" to persuade Congress to take action on poverty, King accepted an invitation to participate in marches for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. There, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated. Considered a modern prophet by many, King ranks with Gandhi as a major ethical leader of the twentieth century.
Bibliography
Works by King
The best introduction to King's own version of his goals and values is Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York, 1958), which contains a chapter explaining his intellectual development in the midst of an eyewitness description of the bus boycott. Strength to Love (New York, 1963) is a collection of sermons. Why We Can't Wait (New York, 1964) includes "Letter from Birmingham Jail," one of King's most cogent justifications of his philosophy of nonviolent direct action. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York, 1967) outlines his detailed program for social justice in the United States.
Works About King
Of the many biographical sketches, the best critical treatment is David L. Lewis's King: A Biography, 2d ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1978). Stephen B. Oates's biography, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York, 1982), is factually more complete but lacks interpretive analysis. Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile, edited by C. Eric Lincoln (New York, 1970), is a collection of insightful evaluations of King and his role in the civil rights movement. John Ansbro's Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1982) is a valuable explication of King's thought.
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