Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born at home on Tuesday, January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. His parents were Martin Luther, Sr. and Alberta King. He was born into a world where segregation was the law. Where his boyhood best friend, who was white, wasn't allowed to play with him once they started school. Where black people went to separate bathrooms, drank from separate water fountains, couldn't eat in "white's only" restaurants, and had to give up their seats on buses if a white person wanted it. Martin was a very intelligent boy. He was able to enter Morehouse College at 15 simply on the strength of his scores on the college entrance exam taken during his junior year in High School (he skipped 9th and 12th grades). In 1948, aged 19, after graduating from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts, Martin was ordained as a minister at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where his father and grandfather were ministers. Martin felt that his calling was to the Christian ministry and so he entered Crozer Theological Seminary. It was while he was at Crozer that he came into contact with the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi had tried to free India from British rule by means of a "peaceful revolution". Martin also read some of Henry David Thoreau's writings. Thoreau stated that "If enough people would follow their conscience and disobey unjust laws that there would be a peaceful revolution". Martin graduated from Crozer with a Bachelor of Divinity in 1951. While he was at college, he met Coretta Scott and on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' home in Marion, Alabama, they were married. They... ... middle of paper ... ...n had ever experienced. In 1968, Martin went to Memphis, Tennessee to help out the sanitation workers. They were protesting their deplorable wages and working conditions. One story says that two black workers were not allowed in the building with the white men while on break and when it started to rain they took shelter in one of the garbage trucks. The rain shorted out the mechanism that controlled the compactor and the men didn't have enough time to get out of the truck - they were crushed to death. On the morning of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assasinated by James Earl Ray. Ray would later be caught in London, England and on March 9, 1969, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. 3rd Monday in January - Martin Luther King Day

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