Martin
Luther King, Jr., born at January 15, 1929. He attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating
from high school when he's 15 years old then received B. A.
degree in 1948 from Morehouse College. In 1951 he was awarded
the B.D. Then 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 then she gave birth to two sons and two daughters
were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King was, by
this time, a member of the executive committee of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Early
in December, 1955, he's ready 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 which lasted
382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the
United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring
segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as
equals. 
In 1957 he was elected president of the organization formed to provide new
leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The
ideals for this organization he took from Christianity, while its
operational techniques from Gandhi. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and
spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there
was injustice, protest, and action, meanwhile he wrote five
books as well as numerous articles. These years, he led a
massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention
of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of
conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a
manifesto of the Negro revolution, 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 upwards of 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 the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world
figure.At the age of thirty-five he was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize and announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance 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 in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it is called Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Following President George H. W. Bush's 1992 proclamation, the holiday is observed on the third Monday of January each year, near the time of King's birthday. On January 17, 2000, for the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all fifty U.S. states
Source: Wikipedia
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