Martin Luther King Jr Biography Essay

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929, and was the middle child of Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. His father, Michael King Sr., was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church at the time of Martin’s birth ("Martin Luther King Jr. Biography"). At birth, Martin Luther King Jr’s name was actually Michael, like his father, but they both changed their names later in their lives ("Martin Luther King Jr.- Biography."). They changed their names to Martin because they were inspired by Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation leader.

Martin and his siblings, Willie Christine and Alfred Daniel Williams, grew up in a Christian home where his parents tried to shield him from racism but did not succeed. He entered the public schooling system when he was five and attended Booker T. Washington High School. In high school, he skipped the ninth and eleventh grade and entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at the age 15.

All through his adolescence, King was uncomfortable displaying his religious beliefs and this caused him to turn away from following his father into the ministry field. He didn’t decide to follow his father until he took a bible class in his junior

year of college. Martin cruised through his first two years of college as an unmotivated student but ended up graduating with a sociology degree from Morehouse College in 1948. Then, he enrolled in the liberal Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania where he graduated valedictorian and was elected the student body President.
During his last semester in college, Martin continued to rebel by being involved in alcohol and white women. He was also influenced by Morehouse College President, Benjamin E. Mays. Mays was an outspoken supporter of racial equality and encouraged King to use Christianity as a force for social change ("Martin Luther King Jr. Biography.").
After considering many impressive colleges he was accepted to, including Yale, King chose to attend Boston College to obtain his doctorate. This is where he met his wife, Coretta Scott, who was a singer and musician. They got married in June 1953 and later had four kids. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama in 1954 while he was still working on his dissertation. In 1955, he completed his Ph.D. at the age of twenty-five.
On the night of Rosa Parks’ arrest, the local NAACP chapter met with Martin and chose him to be the leader of a city-wide bus boycott. He was chosen for the job due to his young age and the fact that he was new to the community with few enemies. The boycott in Montgomery, Alabama lasted 382 days before the United States ordered the city to integrate its bus system ("Martin Luther King Jr.- Biography."). It started on December 5, 1955, the day Rosa Parks’ court hearings began and lasted until December 20, 1956. This boycott allowed King to emerge as a prominent national leader of the American civil rights movement.
After this accomplishment, they realized a national organization to help with the efforts was needed. This lead to the construction of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 among King, Ralph Abernathy, and sixty other ministers and civil rights activists ("Martin Luther King Jr. Biography."). King's role in this gave him a tremendous national leadership title. The first thing the SCLS did was give the African American population a voice by sponsoring many mass meetings to register voters. While involved in the SCLC, King gave many speeches to the public about race-related issues.
In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Gandhi's birthplace in India. Gandhi was King’s inspiration to lead non-violent protests instead of being a violent activist (Berkin). This trip affected him deeply throughout the rest of his leading days and even throughout the rest of his life.
Through the years, King gained national attention and began to inspire many demonstrations such as the Greensboro sit-ins. In 1963, King organized a demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama, where entire families attended ("Martin Luther King Jr. Biography."). During this demonstration, Martin and many of his supporters were arrested, but they still followed their non-violent protest ways. By the end of this demonstration, they already planned one to occur in the nation’s capital, where they would ask for peaceful change. It was at the capitol where King gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech. In this speech, he spoke about not only equality for African Americans but for all races.
At the age of thirty-five, King was the youngest individual to ever receive a Nobel Peace Prize. Once he received this information, he announced that he was going to turn the money over to improve the civil rights movement ("Martin Luther King Jr.-Biography.").
By 1968, the wear of the demonstrations started to get to King.

He was arrested upwards of twenty times, assaulted at least four times, awarded five honorary degrees, named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963 and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks, but also a world figure in the matter of thirteen years ("Martin Luther King Jr. - Biography."). On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King Jr was fatally shot at the age of thirty-nine. King Was in Memphis to support a peaceful march for sanitation workers and was shot on the balcony of his hotel room at around six o’clock at night ("The Martin Luther King Assassination."). James Earl Ray was believed to be the murderer and confessed to it on March 10, 1969, to avoid the death

penalty.
After King’s assassination, a shock wave of grief and rage rolled across the nation. Even long after King’s death, his legacy lives on with a national holiday, public places named after him, and a memorial in Washington, D.C.