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Martin Luther King, Jr.  (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968)

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born Michael Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began to be a pastor and then his father was also a pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. From 1960 until his father death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools, graduating from high school when he was fifteen. Martin Luther King graduated from Morehouse College in 1948. He further received a Bachelor's of Divinity in 1951 and then a Ph.D. from Boston College in 1955. In Boston, he met and later married Coretta Scott. They had two sons and two daughters together.
In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by this time, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. Then, in December, 1955, he accepted the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar John in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was 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.
When he was thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

And on the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.