User:Mitinker/History project

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. at a press conference.

Martin Luther King Jr. was someone who made history. He was an African American Baptist minister. He was the main leader of the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1950's to 1960's. He was best known for his role in advancing civil rights and how he stressed nonviolence. He was an amazing speaker, that helped him win the support of millions of people, both black and white. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for leading nonviolent civil rights demonstrations. Even though he stressed nonviolence, he was often treated violently. White people that were racist threw rocks at him and some had bombed his home in Alabama. Violence is what ended his life when he was 39 years old. An assassin shot him in the face. He was rushed to a hospital where he received emergency surgery, but it was too late.

Early Life

King was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. he was the second oldest child of Alberta Williams King and Martin Luther King. He had an older brother and older sister. His father was a pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. His grandfather, A.D. Williams, had also been a pastor there. In high school he was so smart that he was able to skip both 9th and 12th grade. When Martin was 15 he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. King had became an admirer of Benjamin E. Mays. Mays was Morehouse's president and a well known scholar of black religion. Because of May's influence, King decided to become a minister.

The Early Civil Rights Movement

King started his civil rights activities with the protest of Montgomery's bus segregation in 1955. That was when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. To accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. He took his ideas from Christianity. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, wherever there was injustice, protest, and action. During that time King also wrote five books and many articles.

Later Years

In 1966 the SNCC leaders urged a aggressive response to the violence and began to use to slogan "black power". That one phrase troubled King and many white supporters. Many people thought the religious, nonviolent emphasis of the civil commitment to nonviolence, but the disagreements among civil rights longer spoke for the whole movement. In 1967 King became critical of American society. he believed that poverty was as great an evil as racism. King said true social justice will need redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. So King began to plan a Poor Peoples Campaign that would reunite poor people of all the races.