Martin Luther King
Martin Luther
King, Jr., (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an
American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and
leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He
is best known for his role in the advancement of civil
rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs.
He
was born Michael King, but his father changed his name in honor of the German reformer Martin Luther. A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights
activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus
Boycott and helped
found the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an
unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and organized
nonviolent protests in Birmingham,
Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news
coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March
on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he
established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history.
On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality
through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC helped
to organize the Selma to
Montgomery marches and
the following year, he took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In the
final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include poverty and speak against the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal
allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam".
In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington,
D.C., to be called the Poor People's
Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis,
Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many
U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing
King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for
decades after the shooting. The jury of a 1999 civil trial found Loyd Jowers to
be complicit in a conspiracy against King. The ruling has since been
discredited and a sister of Jowers admitted that he had fabricated the story so
he could make $300,000 from selling the story, and she in turn corroborated his
story in order to get some money to pay her income tax.King was posthumously awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom and
the Congressional
Gold Medal. Martin Luther
King, Daywas established as a holiday in numerous cities and
states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal
holiday in 1986. Hundreds
of streets in the U.S.
have been renamed in his honor. In addition, a county was rededicated in his honor. A memorial statue on the National Mall was opened to the public in 2011.
