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(Image is from http://memory.loc.gov/master/pnp/cph/3c20000/3c26000/3c26500/3c26559u.tif) Martin Luther King, Jr. was born January 15, 1929 in the family’s Atlanta middle-class home. He was the second child, but the first son of Michael King, Sr. and Alberta Christine Williams King. He was named after his father, but later, both father and son changed their name to Martin Luther after the German religious leader who launched the Protestant Reformation (Bruns 1). Before the legal age of six, Martin began school at the Yonge Street Elementary School in Atlanta. Soon, the teachers found out his real age so he was not permitted to continue and did not resume school until he turned six. After Yonge, he went to David T. Howard Elementary School. He also went to the Atlanta University Laboratory School and Booker T. Washington High School. Because he had such high scores on his college entrance exams, he skipped formal graduation at Washington and continued to Morehouse College at the age of fifteen. In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a degree in sociology. From there, he went to Crozer Theological Seminary. After graduating from Crozer, he went on to study at Boston University and Harvard University. In 1955, he was awarded a Ph.D. degree (King Center).
Martin’s father and grandfather were both ministers and “pioneers in the African American freedom movement of their day” (Mungazi 106). His grandfather, A.D. Williams, was one of the first leaders of the Georgia chapter of the NAACP and Martin’s father led the struggle for equal salary for black teachers along with Charles H. Houston (Mungazi 107).
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. joined the Christian ministry by being ordained February 1948 at the young age of nineteen at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA (King Center). He led different churches during his career. He was also one of the leading players in the entire Civil Rights Movement. He founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which led him to be apart of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where he made his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream.”
King was standing at the Lorraine Motel balcony in Memphis, TN on April 4, 1968, when he was shot. He had been Memphis for a sanitation workers’ protest against low wages (King Center). The shooter, James Earl Ray, was arrested in London almost two months later. He was sentenced to ninety-nine years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary (King Center).
Works Cited
"Biographical Outline of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." The King Center. 2004. 26 Nov 2007 <http://www.thekingcenter.com>.
Mungazi, Dickson. The Journey to the Promised Land: The African American Struggle for Development Since the Civil War. Westport, CT:
Praeger Publishers, 2001.
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