Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, into the family of a Baptist minister. He grew up in the South under legally mandated racial segregation, and as a youth was already fervent about religion and public affairs, following in his forebears' footsteps toward the ministry. The contrast between his family's faith and the reality of the South formed the initial ground of his later devotion to the cause of civil rights.

He studied successively at Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary, and earned a doctorate in theology at Boston University. During his studies he explored the nonviolent ideas of figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, gradually establishing civil disobedience and moral appeal as the core methods of his action. His academic training and religious questioning prepared him intellectually for the public role that lay ahead.

In 1955 he led a bus boycott lasting about a year in Montgomery, Alabama, and thereby grew from a local minister into a national civil rights leader. He then helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, coordinating nonviolent struggles across the South and gathering scattered demands into an organized movement.

In 1963 he delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington, a landmark moment of the civil rights movement; the following year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In this period the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were enacted one after another, and the movement he led was widely regarded as one of the important driving forces behind them.

In his later years he broadened his focus to issues such as economic inequality and opposition to the Vietnam War, launching the Poor People's Campaign, and thereby bore more controversy and pressure. In 1968, while supporting a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, he was assassinated at just thirty-nine; when the news broke, many places fell into grief and turmoil.

Martin Luther King Jr. spent his life persistently confronting the difficult questions of race and justice by nonviolent means. However posterity judges him, he is widely seen as one of the most important symbols of the twentieth-century civil rights movement; the United States established a holiday in his honour, and his words on equality and nonviolence continue to influence social movements around the world.