Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King, Jr., born Jan. 15, 1929, was an African American minister, civil rights activist, and American hero. He was assassinated April 4, 1968. King was known for his non-violent resistance methods and his pursuit of civil rights for African Americans.

About Martin Luther King

Born in Atlanta Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr., left high school at 15 to attend Morehouse College, and after graduating attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He married Coretta Scott in 1953 and became a minster in Montgomery Alabama.

After learning about Mahatma Gandhi, King traveled to India to learn more about Gandhi’s practice of non-violent resistance, and became convinced that he had found the best way of ending discrimination against blacks in America. He returned to the US and began teaching non-violent resistance techniques to the Civil Rights movement.

Starting in Montgomery Alabama, and slowly spreading across the country, Martin Luther King Jr helped to change hearts and minds in America, and racial segregation was challenged and defeated in court, culminating with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1963, in front of 250,000 people who had marched to Washington DC to support the Civil Rights Movement, King delivered one of the most famous speeches in American history, referred to as the 'I Have A Dream' speech.

For his civil rights work there were several attempts on his life, but King continued speaking out, and began to include ending the Vietnam War as one of his goals. In the evening of April 4, 1968 he was shot in the head while standing on his hotel balcony and died soon after in the hospital.

His assassination led to riots across the US and eventually James Earl Ray was convicted of his murder. The riots soon ended, and the people King had trained in his non-violent resistance methods took over the fight for equality in America.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill making January 20 a Federal Holiday honoring King, although it was not until 2000 that all the states officially began observing the holiday.

Martin Luther King Jr., did more to ensure the civil equality and rights of Americans than nearly any politician in American history, and his non-violent resistance methods earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

At the culmination of the Civil Rights movements March on Washington DC in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr gave one of the most famous speeches in American History. Referred to as the 'I Have A Dream Speech', the speech, before over 200,000 supporters, served to educate the country on racial abuse and the need for equality.

• ''In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'''
• ''It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.''
• ''The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people. For many of our white brothers as evidenced by their presence here today have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
• ''I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.''
• ''I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.''
• ''I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.''
• ''This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.''
• ''Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.''
• ''Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!''

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