Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Martin Luther King, Jr.
Born
January 15, 1929 Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Died
April 4, 1968 Memphis, Tennessee, USA

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"Martin Luther King" redirects here.

With his eyes ever riveted upon the glorious prize that he called the "Beloved Community," and with his heart consecrated to the realization of his "Dream" of racial equality, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968), lived his thirty-nine years of life so productively that he is today deemed by many as the greatest American-born leader of the entire twentieth century. Respectfully dubbed as "the century's most peaceful warrior," he is one of only three Americans whose birthdays are recognized as national holidays. And of these three, King is the lone black. In modern history, no other non-white individual's achievements are so widely renowned and acclaimed. No other non-white individual's speeches and writings are so vastly disseminated, studied, and referenced for quotations and research. According to King biographer, Stephen B. Oates: "In truth, King did more than any other leader in his generation to help make emancipation a political and social fact in the racially troubled South."

Introduction

From the halls of the highest scholasticism to the valleys of the deepest and most pragmatic activism, Dr. King combined the qualities that propelled him to world-figure-hero status during the course of his life. No other scholar-activist, except possibly Mahatma Gandhi, did as fine a job of descending from the lofty confines of the ivory tower and walking among the masses, meeting them at their level, giving voice to their yearnings, and exemplifying the common touch. Comfortable in his own skin and confident in the righteousness of his cause, King still grappled daily with the doubts, struggles, and temptations that inevitably burden all leaders. Again, Stephen B. Oates:

Like everybody, King had imperfections: he had hurts and insecurities, conflicts and contradictions, guilts and frailties, a good deal of anger, and he made mistakes. ...his achievements...were astounding for a man who was cut down at the age of only thirty-nine and who labored against staggering odds—not only the bastion of segregation that was the American South of his day, but the monstrously complex racial barriers of the urban North, a hateful FBI crusade against him, a lot of jealousy on the part of rival civil-rights leaders and organizations, and finally the Vietnam War and a vengeful Lyndon Johnson. King was all things to the American Negro movement—advocate, orator, field general, historian, fund raiser, and symbol. Though he longed to be a teacher and scholar on the university level, he became instead a master of direct-action protest, using it in imaginative and unprecedented ways to stimulate powerful federal legislation that radically altered Southern race relations.

And despite his flaws, he maintained an attitude of public-minded, self-sacrificial service, which was the hallmark of both his impressively enlightened Christian faith and his lifestyle of prayer, perseverance, and contemplation.

Before the end of his life, he had become the third black and the youngest person to ever receive the Nobel Peace Prize; he had established himself as the chief architect and premiere spokesperson for the Civil Rights Movement of 1955-1968, an authentically religious revival, the socio-political impact of which was unprecedented in human history; he had been jailed for a total of twenty-nine times, in the name of freedom and and justice; he had witnessed, first hand, the death of the wickedly racist Jim-Crow system of legal segregation in the South; and he had led the Civil Rights struggle on its march toward inspiring the United States of America to earnestly practice the truths found in the Bible, which stands as the cornerstone of its republican form of government. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter, in 1977, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. In 1986, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King Day was established in his honor. King's most influential and well-known public address is his world-renowned "I Have A Dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, on August 28, 1963.

Through intense study and masterfully systematic thought, King successfully merged his intimate knowledge of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, and other documents, with his strikingly insightful, biblical worldview, to ultimately forge within himself an undying love for America and a passion for its destiny. That passion fueled his vision and instilled his being with a flaming religious commitment. It was this committed life that made it possible for him to become both a sterling example of sacrificial leadership and a providential instrument of the most noble Judeo-Christian ideals.

Biography

Birth, Early Life, and Education

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on Saturday, January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, at 501 Auburn Avenue, the second child and the first son of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Mrs. Alberta Williams King. Reverend King—the boy's father—was pastor of black Atlanta's historical, influential, and pretigious Ebenezer Baptist Church. As such, the Rev. King was likewise a pillar in Atlanta's black middle class. He ruled his household with a fierceness not unlike that of an Old Testament patriarch, and he provided a lifestyle in which his children were disciplined, protected, and very well provided for. By the Reverend King's decree, his son (Martin Luther King, Jr.), during the course of his youth, went by the name "M.L." A strong and healthy newborn, M.L. had been preceded in birth by his sister, Willie Christine, and was followed by his brother, Alfred Daniel, or A.D. Within the context of his rearing, and because he was his father's son, the church was M.L.'s second home. It functioned as the hub around which the wheel of King family life rotated. And the sanctuary was located only three blocks away from the big house on Auburn Avenue. Having been slipped, by his parents, into grade school a year early, and having been bright and gifted enought to skip a number of grades along the way, M.L. entered Booker T. Washington High School in 1942, at the age of thirteen. Two years later, as an exceptional high school junior, he passed Morehouse College's entrance exam, graduated from Booker T. Washington after the eleventh grade, and, at the age of fifteen, enrolled in Morehouse. There, he was mentored by the school's president, civil rights veteran Dr. Benjamin Mays. King graduated in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology. Later he graduated as class valedictorian from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Boston University.

Marriage and Family Life

Following a whirlwind, sixteen-month courtship, Martin Luther King, Jr. married the lovely Ms. Coretta Scott, on June 18, 1953. King's father performed the wedding ceremony at the residence of Scotts' parents in Marion, Alabama.

Martin and Coretta Scott King are the parents of four children:

• Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama)
• Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama)
• Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia)
• Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia)

All four children have followed in their father's footsteps as civil rights activists, although their opinions differ on a number of controversial issues. Coretta Scott King passed away on January 30, 2006.

Career and Civil Rights Activism

The best way to understand the impact of King's thirteen-year crusade for freedom and justice is to divide his career into two periods—before the Selma, Alabama campaign and after it. The first period ignited with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of December 1955 and closed with the successful voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery, on March 25, 1965. The second period commenced with the January 1966 Chicago campaign for jobs and slum elimination and ended with the assassination of Dr. King on April 4, 1968, in Memphis. During the first period, King's belief in divine justice and his vision of a new Christian social order fueled his sublime oratory and his equally sublime courage. This resulted in a shared commitment to the concept of "noncooperation with evil," that swept the ranks of the Civil Rights Movement devotees. Through nonviolent, passive resistance, they protested the social evils and injustices of segregation and refused to obey and/or comply with unjust and immoral Jim Crow laws. The subsequent beatings, jailings, abuses, and violence that were heaped upon these protesters ultimately became the price they paid for unprecedented victories.

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Martin Luther King Jr., after his arrest in February of 1956, at the age of 27. He had been arrested during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The mug shot was found in July, 2004, during the cleaning out of a storage room at the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department. Someone had written "DEAD" twice on the picture, as well as 4-4-68, the date King was killed, though it is not known who wrote it.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

This campaign lasted from December 2, 1955 until December 21, 1956, and it culminated with the U. S. Supreme Court's declaration that Alabama's system of bus segregation was unconstitutional. On the heels of the courageous stand by Mrs. Rosa Parks and against the subsequent backlash of white hatred and violence, King's leadership had wrought a stunning triumph, as Montgomery blacks displayed bravery, conviction, solidarity, and noble adherence to Christian principles, and ultimately achieved their goal of desegregating the city's buses. And through this victory, King and his ecclesiastical colleagues elevated to new heights the historic role of the black clergyman as the leader in the quest for civil rights.

Birth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

In the aftermath of the victorious Montgomery effort, King recognized the need for a mass movement that would capitalize on the success. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was organized on August 7-8, 1959, and King was unanimously elected as SCLC president. This was an organization that brought a significantly different focus to the already established mix of the major civil-rights groups. According to Stephen B. Oates:

SCLC's main goal was to bring the Negro masses into the freedom struggle by expanding the "Montgomery way" across the South....SCLC's initial project was South-wide voter registration drive called the "Crusade for Citizenship," to commence on Lincoln's birthday, 1958, and to demonstrate once again that "a new Negro," determined to be free, had emerged in America.

King is perhaps most famous for his "I Have a Dream" speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Extending the Stride Toward Freedom

Along with his best friend, the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, Dr. King met with U.S Vice President Richard Nixon on June 13, 1957. A year later, on June 23, 1958, King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Lester Granger met with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The SCLC leader was ultimately repulsed by both Nixon and Eisenhower, and King finally gave up on the idea of working with either of them. From 1957-1959, King struggled to (1)keep the ranks of the Civil Rights Movement unified; (2)raise desperately needed funds; (3) systematize and disseminate the theory and practice of nonviolence; and (4) establish himself as an incisively competent author. Among other black leaders, there was jealousy of King and his popularity. But this was an issue in which the press did not take much interest. When King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, hit the stores, the SCLC leader's prestige skyrocketed as he proclaimed to the world: "To become the instrument of a great idea is a privilege that history gives only occasionally. Arnold Toynbee says in A Study of History, that it may be the Negro who will give the new spiritual dynamic to Western civilization that it so desperately needs to survive."

Dr. King was extolled by the Christian Century as the leader who had guided his people to unlock "the revolutionary resources of the gospel of Christ."

Following the September 20, 1958 stabbing attempt on his life by the demented Mrs. Izola Curry, King endeared himself, nationwide, to millions of both black and white Americans, when he forgave the woman and refused to press charges against her. Resigning from the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on November 29, 1959, the SCLC leader spent the next three years watching historic events unfolding in city after city throughout the South. In 1960, he returned to his native city of Atlanta and became copastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. From this platform, he sought to advance his SCLC and Civil Rights Movement agendas, while striving to ensure cooperation and harmony among the SCLC, the NAACP, and the National Urban League. In the meantime, scores of protesters increasingly joined in uttering the battle cry of "Remember the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King."

Throughout the year of 1960, King was encouraged by the startlingly pleasant development of student sit-in demonstrations across the South. With black students on numerous campuses now joining in the struggle, the SCLC president was delighted. And as the sit-ins spread, King boldly and unequivocally declared his tacit endorsement of their strategic courage in the quest to desegregate eating facilities in Southern cities. When the sit-ins broke out in Atlanta, King lent his voice to the local students' determination, as he penned for the nation at large a defense and an interpretation of the student activism: "A generation of young people has come out of decades of shadows to face naked state power; it has lost its fears, and experienced the majestic dignity of a directed struggle for its own liberation. These young people have connected up with their own history—the slave revolts, the incomplete revolution of the Civil War, the brotherhood of colonial colored men in Africa and Asia. They are an integral part of the history which is reshaping the world, replacing a dying order with a modern democracy."

On Wednesday, October 19, 1960, King was arrested along with 33 young people who were protesting segregation at the lunch counter of Rich's snack bar in an Atlanta department store. Although charges were dropped and the jailed students were all set free, the SCLC leader remained imprisoned. Through trumped-up charges and judicial chicanery, King was convicted of violating his probation regarding a minor traffic offense committed several months earlier, and he was sentenced to four months hard labor in Reidsville State Penitentiary, three hundred miles from Atlanta. The volatile combination of (1) widespread concern for King's safety; (2) public outrage over Georgia's flouting of legal procedure; and (3) the failure of President Dwight Eisenhower to intervene, catapulted the case to national proportions. It was only after the intercession by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy that the SCLC leader was released, on October 28. Throughout the black community across the nation, Kennedy's action was so widely publicized that historians generally agree this episode garnered crucial black votes for him and contributed substantially to his slender election victory some eight days later.

Throughout 1961, King witnessed and lauded the development of the method known as Freedom Rides, a technique launched across the South to confront and topple the practice of racially segregated interstate bus facilities. The practice of Freedom Riding proved to be a nightmarishly dangerous and deadly mission that elicited great sacrifice and bloodshed. Yet this was the reason that it was ultimately a spectacular success. "As it turned out, the Freedom Rides dealt a death blow to Jim Crow bus facilities. At (Attorney General) Robert Kennedy's request, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), that September, issued regulations ending segregated facilities in interstate bus stations; their regulations were to take effect on November 1, 1961." The victories achieved from the blood, sweat, and tears offered on the altars of sit-ins and Freedom Rides emboldened King to issue his clarion call for all Americans to join these black, white, brown, Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic students in a campaign to forever rid the nation of Jim Crow. Thus, the momentum of the years from 1961-1965 lifted King's influence to its zenith.

Through the Bible-based tactics of applied nonviolence (protest marches, sit-ins, and Freedom Rides), committed allegiance was educed from scores of blacks and sincere whites across the country. Support likewise came from the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Advancement took place, despite constant suffering, setbacks, and even notable failures such as at Albany, Georgia (1961-1962), where the movement was utterly and resoundingly defeated in its campaign to desegregate public parks, pools, lunch counters, and other facilities. Taking stock of their failure, King and his lieutenants concluded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had sided with the Albany segregationists. Despite blacks' repeated complaints regarding the violation of their civil rights, FBI agents had shown absolutely no interest whatsoever. In his statement to the press, the SCLC leader declared: "One of the greatest problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white Southerners who have been influenced by the mores of their community. To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation. Every time I saw FBI men in Albany, they were with the local police force." Incensed by these remarks, FBI officials—Director J. Edgar Hoover in particular—angrily determined to make King pay the full price for his "sinister audacity" to criticize them, the total accuracy of King's assessment notwithstanding.

Albany highlighted for King the rigidity and defensiveness of the white South, with regard to the race issue. The SCLC president grew so distressed that he seriously entertained thoughts of quitting the Civil Rights Movement. A tempting proposal came to him from Sol Hurok's agency, offering him the position of its chief, around-the-world lecturer, with a guranteed salary of $100,000/year. King grappled with the idea, finally told them no, and, with reawakened resolution, committed himself irrescissibly to the Movement.

From a procession of speeches and published articles during the late fall and early winter of 1962, King forged a new determination. From his conversations with Alabama's Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth—the head of SCLC's Birmingham auxiliary, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR)—the SCLC leader conceived a strategy whereby a victorious direct-action campaign in Birmingham would make up for the debacle in Albany and would break the back of legal segregation in Birmingham once and for all.

Letter From Birmingham Jail

The four-month span from February through May 1963 found King, Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, and others drawing nationwide attention to Birmingham, with their campaign to deracinate the cities stringent segregation policies and to expose to the world the viciousness and violence of this community's segregationists. Racism at lunch counters and in hiring practices was ugly enough. Now, added to the humiliation, was the brutality displayed by Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, whose officers unleashed dogs and firehoses upon the peaceful demonstrators. And King was resolved that in the streets of Birmingham, he and his people would awaken the moral conscience of America. In his own words:

We must say to our white brothers all over the South who try to keep us down: we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will match your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you. And yet we cannot, in all good conscience, obey your evil laws. Do to us what you will. Threaten our children and we will still love you....Say that we're too low, that we're too degraded, yet we will still love you. Bomb our homes and go to our churches early in the morning and bomb them, if you please, and we will still love you. We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. In winning the victory, we will not only win our freedom. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process.

Along with vast numbers of his supporters, including hundreds of schoolchildren, the SCLC leader was arrested and jailed. Notably, among King's supporters, the black clergy of Birmingham were nowhere to be found. And the white clergy had issued a strong statement entreating blacks to not support the demonstrations, and to, instead, press their case in the courts. That statement had been signed by eight white Christian and Jewish clergymen of Alabama. From his Birmingham jail cell, King penned a highly eloquent response that articulated his philosophy of civil disobedience:

You may well ask, 'Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored....History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily....We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

By mid-May, after three days of around-the-clock negotiations, the demonstraters and the white power structure came to agreements. All of the movement's demands were met. In front of a packed press conference, King and Shuttlesworth stated: "The city of Birmingham has reached an accord with its conscience. Birmingham may well offer for Twentieth Century America an example of progressive racial relations; and for all mankind a dawn of a new day."

Walk To Freedom With Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sixty-six days before the famed March On Washington, King was in Detroit, Michigan at the request of his ecclesiastical colleague, the Rev. C.L. Franklin. Franklin was part of an alliance that included the influential, local black millionaire, James Del Rio, and other members of the Detroit Council for Human Rights. These activists were determined to engineer a huge Kingian breakthrough in the North, and subsequently open up a new Northern front, by orchestrating a massive demonstration of support. As a thriving labor town for blacks, Detroit possessed a solid black middle class that had blossomed from the workforce of its automobile factories. Organized by the esteemed local newspaper journalist, Tony Brown, Detroit's "Walk to Freedom With Martin Luther King, Jr." ensued on January 23, 1963, along the city's Woodward Avenue. Marching in step with the SCLC president, a throng of some 250,000 - 500,000 people moved as one united wave of humanity. The march ended at Covall Hall Auditorium, where King took the stage, and, surrounded by a packed house of listeners, launched into the "I Have A Dream" address that he would also deliver sixty-six days later at the Lincoln Memorial. The July 29, 1963 edition of Business Week magazine praised the event as extraordinary. King was lauded as the incarnate messenger of nonviolence. And at the time of the Detroit march, he was ascending daily in his credibility, following the success of the Birmingham campaign. Media coverage of the Detroit march was lavish, once again reiterating the lesson King had learned from the Freedom Rides of the South: attaining authentic success in civil rights efforts mandated doing something dramatic enough to elicit national media attention. Of all the black leaders of his generation, none learned that lesson as well as the SCLC president had.

Behold The Dreamer, Who Can No Longer Wait

Arriving in Washington, D.C. on August 27, the day before the great march, King and Coretta entered their suite at the Willard Hotel, and the SCLC president began working on his speech. With support from Walter Fauntroy, Andrew Young, Wyatt T. Walker, and Ralph Abernathy, King toiled throughout the night. According to King biographer, Stephen B. Oates: "Two months ago, in Detroit, he had talked about his dream of a free and just America. But he doubted he could elucidate on that theme in only a few minutes. He elected instead to talk about how America had given the Negro a bad check, and what that meant in light of the Emancipation Proclamation." On August 28, 1963, before a throng of at least 250,000 people, the emotional power and prophetic ring of King's oratory uplifted the crowds, as the rally crescendoed to its conclusion. And he made the point that blacks could wait no longer—that the time of patiently waiting for America to do right by the black man was over:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now....Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all God's children.

The biblical phraseology did its work. Later, when asked about her recollection of the address, Coretta Scott King remarked, "At that moment, it seemed as if the Kingdom of God appeared. But it only lasted for a moment."

King's fame and celebrity were now at their peak. To the public, he was the symbol of a coalition of conscience on the civil-rights issue. But the white racial hostility was not gone, and on Sunday morning, September 15, Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was rocked by a bomb made of dynamite, that blasted into eternity four young girls—Denise McNair (age 11); and Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all age 14. At a joint funeral service for three of the girls, King gave the eulogy. Not one single member of Birmingham's white, city officialdom attended the service. The only whites present were a few courageous ministers. Sixty-eight days after the church bombing, on Friday, November 22, President John F. Kennedy was dead at Dallas' Parkland Hospital, the victim of a sniper's bullet. King joined the rest of the nation in a period of mournful soul searching, stating to Coretta and to Bernard Lee, "This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick nation. And I don't think I can survive either."

As the year of 1963 came to an end, the SCLC leader was riding the wave of unprecedented fame. He was now the first American black to ever win the honor of Time magazine's "Man Of The Year" award. He had displayed exemplary physical courage in the face of danger, and he had been borne to glory by on the wings of his "I Have A Dream" speech. Now he was at the center of a rising tide of civil-rights progress that was strongly impacting national and international opinion. The result was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a legislative hammer that empowered the national government to outlaw discrimination in publicly-owned facilities and to enforce the desegregation of public accomodations. And as the eventful year of 1964 came to a close, King placed the exclamation point at the end of it by becoming the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize, on December 10, in Oslo, Norway.

Campaigns In Selma and Chicago

The plans for "Project Alabama" were on the table by Christmas time 1964. The goal was the dramatization of the need for a federal voting-rights law that would put legal muscle behind the enfranchisement of blacks in the South. From January until March of 1965, the protest marches and demonstrations let Selma know that the SCLC leader and his followers were serious and were playing for keeps. During King's pilotage of the Selma Movement, the city received a visit from Malcolm X, who had flown in, addressed a gathering at Brown Chapel, given Coretta a message for King, and had then departed. Two weeks later, Malcolm X would be assassinated by blacks in New York City.

King's imprisonment in Selma, on February 1, 1965, had now drawn the national media as well as the attention of the Johnson White House, as blacks struggled to make the right to vote a reality for themselves and all Americans.

On Sunday, March 7, a procession from Selma to the State Capitol building in Montgomery commenced. King did not lead it himself, as he was in Atlanta. The marchers encountered state troopers who were armed with tear gas, billy clubs, bullwhips, and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. Using these weapons, the troopers attacked the defenseless, nonviolent demonstraters with such viciousness and wrath that by the end of the ordeal, seventy blacks had been hospitalized and an additional seventy treated for injuries. That night, the country was shaken by the news of this brutality in a way that it had never been shaken before, as a film clip of Selma's "Bloody Sunday" interrupted the broadcast of ABC Television's Sunday-night movie, Judgment at Nuremburg. The national outcry was deafening, and public opinion sided with the battered protesters. With a surge of public sympathy now shoring up his Selma Movement, King led a second march on Tuesday, March 9. The procession of 1,500 black and white protesters walked across the Pettus Bridge until it was stopped by a wall of highway patrol officers. The protesters were ordered to abort their march. King objected, but to no avail. The SCLC leader decided at that point to not move forward and force a confrontation. Instead, he led his followers in kneeling to pray and then, surprisingly, turning back. Angered by this decision were many of the young Black Power radicals who already viewed King as being too cautious and overly conservative. These radicals withdrew their moral support. Nevertheless, the nation was now aroused, as events in Selma sparked wide-scale outrage and resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And on March 25, King and some 25,000 of his followers concluded a four-day, victorious, Selma-to-Montgomery march, escorted by 800 federal troops. Among blacks, the SCLC president now enjoyed the status of a "new Moses," anointed by God to lead America on a modern-day Exodus to a new Canaan.

His moral authority, vision, clout, and credibility notwithstanding, King was unable to allay the impatience blacks now felt at the lack of greater substantive economic and social progress. Such frustration was the root of growing black militancy and the rising popularity of the Black Power Movement. With his Bible-based philosophy of nonviolence under ever-increasing attack, the SCLC leader searched for a way to meet the challenges of the ghetto and its concomitant despair. At the beginning of 1966, King and his forces embarked upon a drive against racial discrimination in Chicago, Illinois. Their chief target was to be segregation in housing. Tremendous media interest was generated by King's entry into Chicago. After a spring and a summer of protest and civil disobedience, the protesters and the city signed an agreement—a document which ultimately turned out to be essentially worthless. The impression remained that King's Chicago campaign ended up null and void, due to the opposition from the city's powerful mayor, Richard J. Daley, as well as due to the poorly understood complexities that characterized Northern racism.

Additional Challenges and the FBI's War Against King

In the North as well as in the South, Black Power enthusiasts were challenging and deriding King's thought and his methods. He therefore sought to broaden his appeal by including controversial issues beyond the realm of racial politics that were no less detrimental to black people's progress. These included his irrevocable opposition to the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War and his vision of a poor people's coalition that would embrace all races and would target economic problems such as poverty and unemployment. The SCLC president was hitting one ideological dead end after another, and he was now in search of theories and analyses that would be relevant to the deeper problems he was currently running up against. As he stated to journalist David Halberstam:

For years,...I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society—a revolution of values.

This challenge to remain relevant and at the cutting edges of the issues kept King under the relentless bombardment of pressure. The Anti-War Movement and the riots of 1967 only added to the philosophical and spiritual struggles. The SCLC leader sensed, excrutiatingly, that "Something else had to be found within the arsenal of nonviolence—a new approach that would salvage nonviolence as a tactic, as well as dramatize the need for jobs and economic advancement of the poor."

Excoriated by critics on the Left and the Right for his Anti-War stance, King strove to keep his sights on the plight of the poor. He was increasingly faced with the limitations of his own worldview, and yet he was committed to elevate and enhance his service to humanity.

"In a 'Christian Sermon on Peace,' aired over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Christmas Eve (1967) and delivered in person at Ebenezer Baptist Church, King called for a total reconstruction of society for the benefit of white and colored peoples the world over. Human life, he warned, could not survive unless human beings went beyond class, tribe, race, and nation, and developed a world perspective."

Meanwhile, the FBI stepped up its persecution of the SCLC leader. There were contracts on his life, with assassination threats from the Klan and other hate groups that had him pinpointed for violence. But King found the strength to persevere, and he stayed his course. He envisioned a massive Washington, D.C. campaign that would flood the nation's capital with an army of its poor and unemployed. "White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be changed without radical changes in the structure of our society—changes that would redistribute economic and political power and that would end poverty, racism, and war."

King's Assassination and Its Aftermath

The Lorraine Motel, where Rev. King was assassinated, now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum

Martin Luther King's tomb, located on the grounds of the King Center

King's plans for the Poor People's March were interrupted in the spring of 1968 by a trip that he made to Memphis, Tennessee, to show support for a strike by that city's sanitation workers. was assassinated at 6:01 p.m. April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Friends inside the motel room heard the shots and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the throat. He was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 60 cities. Five days later, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the slain civil rights leader. A gathering of 300,000 people attended his funeral that same day. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey attended on behalf of LBJ, who was meeting with several advisors and cabinet officers on the Vietnam War in Camp David. Also, there were fears he might be hit with protests and abuses over the war.

Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969 (though he recanted this confession three days later). Later, Ray would be sentenced to a 99-year prison term.

On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray took a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty.

Ray fired Foreman as his attorney (from then on derisively calling him "Percy Fourflusher") claiming that a man he met in Montreal, Canada with the alias "Raoul" was involved, as was his brother Johnny, but not himself, further asserting that although he didn't "personally shoot Dr. King," he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it," hinting at a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.

On June 10, 1977, shortly after Ray had testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he did not shoot King, he and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee. They were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison. More years were then added to his sentence for attempting to escape from the penitentiary.

Allegations of Conspiracy

Some have speculated that Ray had been used as a "patsy" similar to the way that alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have been. Some of the claims used to support this assertion are:

• Ray's confession was given under pressure and he had been threatened with death penalty.
• Ray was a small-time thief and burglar, and had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon.
• The weapon that Ray is believed to have used in the assassination (a Remington Gamemaster Model 760 .30-'06 caliber rifle) had only two of Ray's fingerprints on it.
• According to several fellow prison inmates, Ray had never expressed any political or racial opinions of any kind, casting doubt on Ray's purported motive for committing the crime.
• The rooming-house bathroom from which Ray is said to have fired the fatal shots did not have any of his fingerprints at all.
• Ray was believed to have been an average marksman, and it is claimed by many that Ray had not fired a rifle since his discharge from the United States Army in the late-1940s.

Many suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point out the two separate ballistic tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster had neither conclusively proved Ray had been the killer nor that it had even been the murder weapon. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house, not from the rooming house itself, shrubbery which had been suddenly and inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination. Also, Ray's petty criminal history had been one of colossal and repeated ineptitude; he'd been quickly and easily apprehended each time he committed an offense, behavior in sharp contrast to his actions shortly before and after the shooting; he'd easily managed to secure several different pieces of legitimate identification, using the names and personal data of living men who all coincidentally looked like and were of about the same age and physical build as Ray; he spent large sums of cash and traveled overseas without being apprehended at any border crossing, even though he had been a wanted fugitive. According to Ray, all of this had been accomplished with the aid of the still unidentified "Raoul." Investigative reporter Louis Lomax had also discovered the Missouri Department of Corrections, shortly after Ray's April 1967 prison escape, had sent the incorrect set of fingerprints to the FBI and had failed to notice or correct this error. Lomax had been publishing a series of investigative stories on the King assassination for the North American Newspaper Alliance, stories challenging the official view of the case, and had been reportedly pressured by the FBI to halt his investigation.

According to a former Pemiscot County, Missouri deputy sheriff, Jim Green, who claimed to have been part of an FBI-led conspiracy to kill King, Ray had been targeted as the patsy for the King assassination shortly before his April 1967 prison escape and had been tracked by the Bureau during his year as a fugitive. After several trips to and from Canada and Mexico during this time, Ray had gone to Memphis after agreeing to participate (allegedly controlled by his mysterious benefactor "Raoul" who reportedly had weeks before while in Birmingham, Alabama ordered Ray to purchase the Remington Gamemaster rifle) in what he was told was a major bank robbery while King was in town—since city police resources would be dedicated toward maintaining security for King and his entourage, the intended bank heist would be much simpler than usual. Green (who, like Ray, had asserted that FBI assistant director Cartha DeLoach headed the assassination plot) had claimed Ray had been ordered to stay in the rooming house and as a diversion for the purported bank heist, to then hold up a small diner near the rooming house at approximately 6:00 p.m. on April 4. King was shot a minute later by a sniper hidden in the shrubbery near the rooming house. Meanwhile, according to Green, two men, one of them allegedly a Memphis police detective, were waiting to ambush and kill Ray, while Ray was on his way to the planned diner holdup and then plant the Remington rifle in the trunk of Ray's pale yellow (not white) 1966 Ford Mustang, effectively framing a dead man. However, moments before the assassination, Ray had apparently suspected a setup and instead quickly left town in his Mustang, heading for Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta police found Ray's abandoned Mustang six days after King had been shot.

Recent Developments

In 1997, Martin Luther King's son Dexter King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a trial.

In 1999, Coretta Scott King, King's widow (and a civil rights leader herself), along with the rest of King's family, won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that "governmental agencies were parties" to the assassination plot. William Pepper represented the King family in the trial.

In 2000, the Department of Justice completed the investigation about Jowers' claims, but did not find evidence to support the allegations about conspiracy. The investigation report recommends no further investigation unless some new reliable facts are presented.

Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted:

"The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. [And] within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. ... I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray."

King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. He is supported by King assassination author Gerald Posner.

On April 6, 2002, the New York Times reported a church minister, Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson, - not James Earl Ray - assassinated Rev Martin Luther King Jr. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way."

Legacy, Awards, and Achievements

From the Gallery of 20th century martyrs at Westminster Abbey- Mother Elizabeth of Russia, Rev. Martin Luther King, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer

File:MLKJr KC TroostWall.PNG

A mural in Kansas City, Missouri commemorating King's activism

King is one of the most widely revered figures in American history. For example, a 2005 televised call-in poll identified King as the third greatest American, following Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln. Even posthumous accusations of marital infidelity, and academic plagiarism have not seriously damaged his public reputation but merely reinforced the image of a very human hero and leader. It is true that King's movement faltered in the latter stages, after the great legislative victories were won by 1965 (The Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act). But even the sharp attacks by more militant blacks, (See Black Power Movement), and even such prominent critics as Muslim leader Malcolm X, have not diminished his stature.

On the international scene, King's legacy included influences on the Black Consciousness Movement and Civil Rights Movements in South Africa. King's work was cited by and served as an inspiration for another black Nobel Peace prize winner who fought for racial justice in that country, Albert Lutuli.

King's wife, Coretta Scott King, followed her husband's footsteps and was active in matters of social justice and civil rights until her death in 2006. The same year Martin Luther King was assassinated, Mrs. King established the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to preserving his legacy and the work of championing nonviolent conflict resolution and tolerance worldwide. His son, Dexter King, currently serves as the Center's president and CEO. Daughter Yolanda King is a motivational speaker, author and founder of Higher Ground Productions, an organization specializing in diversity training.

King's name and legacy have often been invoked since his death as people have begun to debate where he would have stood on various modern political issues were he alive today. For example, there is some debate even within the King family as to where he would have stood on gay rights issues. Although King's widow Coretta has said publicly that she believes her husband would have supported gay rights, his daughter Bernice believes he would have been opposed to them. The King Center lists homophobia as an evil that must be opposed.

In 1980, King's boyhood home in Atlanta and several other nearby buildings were declared as the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. At the White House Rose Garden on November 2, 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King. It was observed for the first time on January 20, 1986 and is called Martin Luther King Day. It is observed on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King's birthday. In January 17, 2000, for the first time, Martin Luther King Day was officially observed in all 50 U.S. states. This is one of three federal holidays dedicated to an individual American. The only one dedicated to an African American.

Many U.S. cities have officially renamed one of their streets to honor King. King County, Washington rededicated its name in honor of King in 1986. The city government center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is the only city hall in the United States to be named in honor of King.

In 1998, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity was authorized by the United States Congress to establish a foundation to manage fund raising and design of a Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial. [1] King was a prominent member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans. King will be the first African American honored with his own memorial in the National Mall area and the second non-President to be commemorated in such a way. The King Memorial will be administered by the National Park Service.

King is one of the ten 20th-century martyrs from across the world who are depicted in statues above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, London.

There are a few interesting stories on King in Hamilton Jordan's book, No Such Thing As A Bad Day.

Besides winning the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, in 1965 the American Jewish Committee presented King with the American Liberties Medallion for his "exceptional advancement of the principles of human liberty." Reverend King said in his acceptance remarks, "Freedom is one thing. You have it all or you are not free."

In 1966, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America awarded Dr. King the Margaret Sanger Award for "his courageous resistance to bigotry and his lifelong dedication to the advancement of social justice and human dignity."

In 1977, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded posthumously to King by Jimmy Carter.

King is the second most admired person in the 20th century, according to a Gallup poll.

King was voted 6th in the Person of the Century poll by TIME.

King was elected the third Greatest American of all time by the American public in a contest conducted by the Discovery Channel and AOL.

Authorship Issues

Beginning in the 1980s, questions have been raised regarding the authorship of King's dissertation, other papers, and his speeches. (Though not widely known during his lifetime, most of his published writings during his civil rights career were ghostwritten, or at least heavily adapted from his speeches).^{[citation needed]} Concerns about his doctoral dissertation at Boston University led to a formal inquiry by university officials, which concluded that approximately a third of it had been plagiarized from a paper written by an earlier graduate student, but it was decided not to revoke his degree, as the paper still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." Such uncredited "textual appropriation," as King scholar Clayborne Carson has labeled it, was apparently a habit of King's begun earlier in his academic career. It is also a feature of many of his speeches, which borrowed heavily from those of other preachers and white radio evangelists. While some have criticized King for his plagiarism, Keith Miller has argued that the practice falls within the tradition of African-American folk preaching, and should not necessarily be labeled plagiarism. However, as Theodore Pappas points out in his book Plagiarism and the Culture War, King in fact took a class on scholarly standards and plagiarism at Boston University.^{[citation needed]}

Quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr.

• The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.

• A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man's social conditions. Religion deals with both Earth and Heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane, but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God, but to integrate men with men and each man with himself. This means, at bottom, that the Christian gospel is a two-way road. On the one hand, it seeks to change the souls of men and thereby unite them with God; on the other hand, it seeks to change the environmental conditions of men so that the soul will have a chance after it is changed. Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see—an opiate of the people.

Books by Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958)
• The Measure of a Man (1959)
• Strength to Love (1963)
• Why We Can't Wait (1964)
• Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
• The Trumpet of Conscience (1968)
• A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986)
• The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Martin Luther King Jr. and Clayborne Carson (1998)

King in Popular Culture

File:MartinLutherKingJr.Boondocks.png

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he was shown on the January 15, 2006 episode of The Boondocks.

• Several popular songs have been written about or reference King, most notably “Abraham, Martin & John” (1968) by Dion DiMucci, “Happy Birthday” (1980) by Stevie Wonder (released as part of Wonder's campaign to make Martin Luther King Day a national holiday), and "Long Way To Go" By Gwen Stefani and Andre 3000 which also has extracts from his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, as well as Rage Against the Machine's "Renegades of Funk" and "Wake Up", and also "Thug Holiday" by Trick Daddy, who suggests the need for new books of the Bible - named Martin, Malcolm, and Farrakhan. Public Enemy released a song on their album Apocalypse '91...The Enemy Strikes Black titled "By the Time I Get to Arizona", dealing with opposition to observing Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday.
• The band U2 wrote 2 songs as a tribute to King and his work, "MLK" & "Pride (In the Name of Love)". However, the song "Pride (In the Name of Love)" contains a historical error, as the first line of the last verse (which references King's assassination) reads "Early morning, April 4/Shot rings out in the Memphis sky", whereas King was killed shortly after 6 p.m. - early evening. U2 vocalist Bono admits he "screwed up" when writing the lyrics and now performs the song live with the correction.
• King was featured in the January 20, 2005 installment of The Boondocks comic strip, in which young Michael Caesar imagines King enjoying his birthdays celebration by engaging in a number of modern hip hop dances. A year later, King was the central figure in the January 15, 2006 episode of The Boondocks television series, "The Return of the King". The animated program depicted a fantasy world in which King was not fatally shot, but instead went into a coma, and awoke thirty-two years after his shooting to find that his ideals of non-violence are met with disdain in the post-9/11 era. The episode was a theoretical look at what King would think of modern Black America.
• The difference in philosophy between King and the pre-hajj Malcolm X is part of the inspiration for the relationship between comic book characters Professor Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men and his rival Magneto.
• Speculative fiction author Harlan Ellison, who attended the march in Montgomery, Alabama, penned his experience in a short story entitled From Alabamy, With Hate.
• Fantagraphics Books published a series of graphic novels on the life and legacy of King by Canadian writer and comics artist Ho Che Anderson.
• In Futurama in a Wizard of Oz parody, Amy says to Leela that the Yellow Brick Road was renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard in 1975.
• In Everybody Hates Chris, Chris finds he can discuss King in every subject and pass except for Math.
• King was portrayed by Levar Burton in the 2001 film Ali
• King was the focus of the 1999 children's educational film Our Friend, Martin.

Coinage

Coin redesign advocates have asked that King's image be placed on the penny or dime. The penny will be permanently redesigned in 2010, and the current design will no longer be issued beyond 2008, but Abraham Lincoln will remain on the coin. A group of civil rights activists attempted unsuccessfully in 2000 to place his image on the half dollar. Beforehand, these same people also attempted several times to place King's image on the twenty dollar bill.^{[citation needed]}

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Abernathy, Ralph. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. ISBN 0-06-016192-2
• Beito, David and Beito, Linda Royster. T.R.M. Howard: Pragmatism over Strict Integrationist Ideology in the Mississippi Delta, 1942-1954 in Glenn Feldman, ed., Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004, 68-95. ISBN 0-8173-5134-5.
• Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America In the King Years, 1965-1968. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. ISBN 0-684-85712-X
• Parting the waters : America in the King years, 1954-1963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. ISBN 0-671-46097-8
• Pillar of fire : America in the King years, 1963-1965.: Simon & Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0-684-80819-6
• Chernus, Ira. American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, chapter 11. ISBN 1-57075-547-7
• Garrow, David J. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. ISBN 0-14-006486-9
• Kirk, John A., Martin Luther King, Jr. London: Pearson Longman, 2005. ISBN 0-582-41431-8
• Ayton, Mel, A Racial Crime: James Earl Ray And The Murder Of Martin Luther King Jr. Archebooks Publishing, 2005. ISBN 1595070753

External Links

• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project
• The King Center
• National Civil Rights Museum
• Martin Luther King Jr.'s FBI file
• Department of Justice investigation on King assassination
• Martin Luther King in New York
• The Seattle Times: Martin Luther King Jr.
• Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Peace
• About.com's Lesser Known Wise and Prophetic Words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Speeches of Martin Luther King
• Pamphlet on King and Socialism from the Socialist Party USA (PDF)
• "The MLK you don't see on TV" from FAIR
• The Martin Luther King Center (German)
• Black Leaders ... past and present.
• Works by Martin Luther King, Jr.. Project Gutenberg
• 1956 Comic Book: "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story"
• Kirk, John A. New Georgia Encyclopedia Short Biography
• Declassified document, FBI's letter urging him to commit suicide.
• Dyson, Michael Eric. No Small Dreams: The Radical Evolution of MLK's Last Years. LiP Magazine, January 2003
• Wise, Tim. Misreading the Dream: The Truth About Martin Luther King Jr. and Affirmative Action. LiP Magazine, January 2003
• Summary of plagiarism controversy
• Shelby County Register of Deeds documents on the Assassination Investigation

Video and Audio Material

• Video of "I Have a Dream" speech
• Video and Audio Archive of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Internet Archive: The New Negro, King interviewed by J. Waites Waring.
• RealAudio recording of the "I Have A Dream" speech at the History Channel's site
• Transcript, Audio, Video of King's "I Have A Dream" speech
• Transcript and Audio of King's "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech
• Google Video of "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech

Preceded by: –

SCLC President 1957-1968

Succeeded by: Ralph Abernathy

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Complete List | Laureates (1901–1925) | Laureates (1926–1950) | Laureates (1951–1975) |Laureates (1976–2000) | Laureates (2001-2025)

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