Martin Luther King, Jr., was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School, a segregated public school. He skipped ninth and twelfth grade, and entered Morehouse College at age fifteen without formally graduating from high school. He received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta that both his father and grandfather had graduated from. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, and two sons and two daughters were born.

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. During the boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was personally assaulted, but he emerged as a strong, black leader as the world had never seen. On December 21, 1956, the Supreme Court of the United States declared the laws requiring bus segregation unconstitutional.

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; He wrote five books and countless articles; He led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience; 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 nearly 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 a symbolic leader of American people, but a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When he learned of his selection, he announced that he would give the prize money (approx. $54,123.00) to the benefit of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march with striking garbage workers, he was tragically assassinated. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and Congressional Gold Medal in 2004; Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. national holiday in 1986.