LUTHER MARTIN 1748-1826

Luther Martin 1748-1826

Luther Martin 1748-1826

Luther Martin

The son and grandson of prominent African American ministers, each of whom bequeathed a legacy of activism in the cause of black civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, was the most influential leader of the American civil rights movement (Bill, 2008). By the end of his brief life he had also emerged as an unsparing critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and a champion of America's poor of all colors. Throughout his life, King remained committed to nonviolent direct action as a means of effecting social change (Branch, 1988).

King graduated from Atlanta's Morehouse College in 1948, the same year he was ordained as a Baptist minister. He then attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (1948-1951) and Boston University (1951-1955), where he earned a Ph.D. in systematic theology. King ended his student years convinced of the wisdom and possibility of racial integration through nonviolence and determined to undertake an activist ministry.

He began that ministry in 1954 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he moved with his wife, Coretta Scott, whom he had married the year before. When blacks in Montgomery began boycotting the city's segregated buses in December 1955, King—an eloquent preacher and a relative newcomer with no enemies—was chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, which directed what soon became a mass movement. The boycott culminated in the Supreme Court decision declaring bus segregation unconstitutional, propelling King into national and international prominence, a prominence enhanced by his recounting of the movement in Stride toward Freedom (1958).

In 1957 King and other black clergymen formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president, King led the SCLC in two highly visible and successful civil rights campaigns in Birmingham (1963) and Selma (1965), Alabama. ...