Martin Luther King, Jr., original name Michael King, Jr., (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Tennessee), Baptist minister and social activist who led the in the from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement’s success in ending the legal of in the South and other parts of the United States.
King rose to national prominence as head of the, which promoted, such as the massive (1963), to achieve. He was awarded the in 1964. Early yearsKing came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition of the Southern black ministry: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated, and King’s father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the prestigious in. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,” the bustling “black Wall Street,” home to some of the country’s largest and most prosperous black businesses and black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a loving.This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing the then common in.
Martin Luther King Day Join Education World this January as we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. We have articles, lesson ideas, books, activities, and much more - all to help you meet your holiday needs. 1929 15 January Michael King, later known as Martin Luther King, Jr., is born at 501 Auburn Ave. In Atlanta, Georgia. Major King Events Chronology: 1929-1968 The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute.
He never forgot the time when, at about age six, one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal while attending a parade without his parents’ permission, the 12-year-old King attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window. In 1944, at age 15, King entered in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut; it was his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. “Negroes and whites go to the same church,” he noted in a letter to his parents.
“I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” This summer experience in the North only deepened King’s growing hatred of. Get unlimited access to all of Britannica’s trusted content.At Morehouse, King favoured studies in medicine and law, but these were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as his father had urged. King’s mentor at Morehouse was the college, a social gospel activist whose rich oratory and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King’s father. Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the of in the face of oppression, and he prodded the black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was not lost on the teenage King. He graduated from Morehouse in 1948.
King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with ’s philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president of Crozer’s student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, “The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular in such a position is in itself no mean recommendation.” From Crozer, King went to, where, in seeking a firm foundation for his own theological and inclinations, he studied man’s relationship to God and received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the of God in the Thinking of and Henry Nelson Wieman.”.