Marthin Luther King

Martin Luther King was born on 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia (US). Originally named Michael, he was later renamed Martin, like his father, a Baptist minister. His mother, Alberta Williams King, was a schoolteacher. Young Martin had an older sister, Willie Christine, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King.

He entered Morehouse College in 1944 and forged a lifelong friendship with his teacher, Benjamin Mays. Together with his father's influence, it was partly his respect for Mays which led him to the Church. He was ordained in his last semester.

He graduated from Morehouse in 1948 and undertook postgraduate study first at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and then, in 1951, at Boston University's School of Theology. Once there he completed his dissertation which, it was later revealed, had been partially plagiarised, and won his doctorate in 1955. It was in Boston that he met his wife Coretta Scott, who he married in 1953.

In 1954, he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks was famously arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus.

Death

The Poor People’s Campaign was established in December 1967. SCLC lobbied the government to improve their efforts in combating poverty. On 3 April 1968, he arrived in Memphis, Tennessee to prepare for a march in support of striking sanitation workers.

The following day, he was shot dead on his hotel balcony. The President, Lyndon B. Johnson, called for a national day of mourning.

At his funeral, King's old friend Benjamin Mays delivered the eulogy: "Martin Luther King Jr. believed in a united America. He believed that the walls of separation brought on by legal and de facto segregation, and discrimination based on race and colour, could be eradicated. As he said in his Washington Monument address: ‘I have a dream’.”

most of the evidence points to a single shooter, James Earl Ray.

Quote “I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.”

― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have A Dream

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