The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is a civil rights legend.

In the mid-1950s, King

led the movement to end segregation and counter prejudice in the United States through
the means of peaceful protest. His speeches—some of the most iconic of the 20th
century—had a profound effect on the national consciousness. Through his leadership,
the civil rights movement opened doors to education and employment that had long
been closed to Black America.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King
for his commitment to equal rights and justice for all. Observed for the first time on
January 20, 1986, it’s called Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In January 2000, Martin
Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all 50 U.S. states. Here’s what you need
to know about King’s extraordinary life.
Early life
Though King's name is known worldwide, many may not realize that he was born
Michael King, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. His father, Michael King,
was a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. During a trip to Germany, King,
Sr. was so impressed by the history of Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther that
he changed not only his own name, but also five-year-old Michael’s.
His brilliance was noted early, as he was accepted into Morehouse College, a
historically Black school in Atlanta, at age 15. By the summer before his last year of
college, King knew he was destined to continue the family profession of pastoral work
and decided to enter the ministry. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Morehouse at
age 19, and then enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania,
graduating with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. He earned a doctorate in
systematic theology from Boston University in 1955.
King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her
hometown of Heiberger, Alabama. They became the parents of four children: Yolanda
King (1955–2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (b. 1961), and
Bernice King (b. 1963).
Becoming a civil rights leader
In 1954, when he was 25 years old, Dr. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In March 1955, Claudette Colvin—a 15-
year-old Black schoolgirl in Montgomery—refused to give up her bus seat to a white
man, which was a violation of Jim Crow laws, local laws in the southern United States
that enforced racial segregation.
King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that
looked into the case. The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) briefly considered using Colvin's case to challenge the
segregation laws, but decided that because she was so young—and had become
pregnant—her case would attract too much negative attention.
Nine months later on December 1, 1955, a similar incident occurred when a seamstress
named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. The two
incidents led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which was urged and planned by the
President of the Alabama Chapter of the NAACP, E.D. Nixon, and led by King. The
boycott lasted for 385 days.
King’s prominent and outspoken role in the boycott led to numerous threats against his
life, and his house was firebombed. He was arrested during the campaign, which
concluded with a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle (in which
Colvin was a plaintiff) that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses.
King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known
spokesman of the civil rights movement.
Fighting for change through nonviolent protest
From the early days of the Montgomery boycott, King had often referred to India’s
Mahatma Gandhi as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”
In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil
rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to harness the
organizing power of Black churches to conduct nonviolent protests to ultimately
achieve civil rights reform. The group was part of what was called “The Big Five” of
civil rights organizations, which included the NAACP, the National Urban League, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress on Racial Equality.
Through his connections with the Big Five civil rights groups, overwhelming support
from Black America and with the support of prominent individual well-wishers, King’s
skill and effectiveness grew exponentially. He organized and led marches for Blacks'
right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights.
On August 28, 1963, The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom became the
pinnacle of King’s national and international influence. Before a crowd of 250,000
people, he delivered the legendary “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial. That speech, along with many others that King delivered, has had a lasting
influence on world rhetoric.
In 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights and social justice
activism. Most of the rights King organized protests around were successfully enacted
into law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights
Act.
Ultimately, King was driven to focus on social and economic justice in the United
States. He had traveled to Memphis, Tennessee in early April 1968 to help organize a
sanitation workers’ strike, and on the night of April 3, he delivered the legendary “I've
Been to the Mountaintop" speech, in which he compared the strike to the long struggle
for human freedom and the battle for economic justice, using the New Testament's
Parable of the Good Samaritan to stress the need for people to get involved.
Assassination
But King would not live to realize that vision. The next day, April 4, 1968, King was
gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by James Earl Ray, a
small-time criminal who had escaped the year before from a maximum-security prison.
Ray was charged and convicted of the murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison on
March 10, 1969. But Ray changed his mind after three days in jail, claiming he was not
guilty and had been framed. He spent the rest of his life fighting unsuccessfully for a
trial, despite the ultimate support of some members of the King family and the
Reverend Jesse Jackson.