Martin Luther King Jr. ｜ A Crusader For Liberation ｜ Biography.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister and leading activist during the 20th century civil rights movement. He was born Michael Luther King Jr. on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta and later changed his name to Martin. King grew up steeped in religion and activism. His father was a reverend at Ebenezer Baptist Church and a local NAACP leader. A talented student, King skipped two grades in high school and entered Morehouse College at age 15. King was skeptical about Christianity as a boy but later embraced his faith and entered the seminary. While earning a doctorate at Boston University, King met aspiring singer Coretta Scott. They married in 1953 and had four children, Yolanda, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice. King established himself as a rising star in the civil rights movement. After Rosa Parks' arrest in Alabama in December 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, the NAACP chose King to lead the Montgomery bus boycotts. The protests ultimately led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision which outlawed segregation on public buses in Alabama. With civil rights demonstrations emerging all over the country, King helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to unite them. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, King advocated non-violent protests like boycotts and sit-ins. King's experience, passion for the cause, and position in the community gave him the credentials to become a leader in the 381-day boycott of the city buses. On December 20, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregated buses to be unconstitutional. This was a major victory for the civil rights cause and proved King's non-violent methods of King was now the national face of the civil rights cause. He was jailed over 20 times, was once stabbed in the chest, his house was bombed, and he suffered relentless personal attacks on himself and his family. One day I was crying profusely and mom picked us up from school and asked me, well, what's wrong? And I said, well, the kids said daddy's a jailbird. And she explained to me why he was going to jail, that he was really going to jail to make this world a better place for all of God's children. Well, the next day I came back to school with almost a new attitude, being proud of what my father was doing. It was the spirit of love that he exhibited that transformed a lot of lives. We still have the attitude of love. Used to say, I love everybody. I'm every man's brother. You may not love me, but that's your issue, not mine. Dr. King inspired thousands of people through his eloquence and through his fearlessness, especially after his home was firebombed with his wife. They showed through their courage that they were prepared to give their lives to the cause of freedom. This was the home of Martin Luther King Jr. and his young family from 1954 until 1960. Martin Luther King pretty much said you had to do two things in order to be free. You have to forgive everybody for everything they've ever done to you. And number two, you have to lose your fear of death. He was over at Ralph Abernathy's church and taking up a collection the night the house was bombed, September 30th, 1956. Mary Lucy Williams and Mrs. King were in the living room. The baby, Yolanda, was in the master bedroom sleeping. And all of a sudden, Mrs. King hears a noise out front, so they ran down the hallway. That blast went off seconds later, and Dr. King said he didn't take a full breath from the time he left that church and got here and found out that his family was not hurt. But in the meantime, three to five hundred angry black people are here. They have guns and knives and sticks and hoes and shovels and pitchforks. Amid that angry crowd that could have exploded any minute, this young preacher who was a very, very special human being came home. And it didn't take him any words to calm those people down. All he did was raise his hand, and it was kind of like, peace, be still. Told his people to go home. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword, and we have to love our white brothers and sisters even though they're not loving us back. Go home, he said, God will take care of us. And that's exactly what the people did. Martin asked us to be calm in the midst of all of the turmoil that was going on. That was one of the greatest opportunities that he took advantage of. Tell your people not to flare up. Don't fight. We're all right. My family's not hurt. And people did. King worked tirelessly to promote the cause he so strongly believed in. And from 1957 through 1968, he traveled over six million miles, delivered 2,500 speeches, wrote five books, and dozens of articles. His hard work and ability to communicate earned him such respect that he earned the year of President John F. Kennedy, who personally met with King. Of all the speeches King delivered, none has stood the test of time like his famous I Have a Dream speech, symbolically delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 in front of 250,000 people, both black and white. King had become such a force in America that he was named Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1963, a nice achievement indeed. But it paled in comparison when in 1964, he became the youngest man ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't American. He was deeply American. And what's striking to me is that he had more confidence and faith in American democracy, in the Constitution, and in the principles of fairness and opportunity than nearly all of his critics. King put his life on the line for many of his protests. A 1965 march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, turned violent when police viciously attacked the protesters in a conflict dubbed Bloody Sunday. Ever determined, King led another Selma demonstration two days later. When the marchers reached a bridge blocked by state troopers, they simply knelt down in prayer. King and other leaders persisted, launching a third march days later under the protection of the Alabama National Guard and other marshals ordered by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The power of King's activism compelled Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As the Vietnam War intensified, King focused his movement on what he saw as the three major evils of racism, poverty, and militarism. By 1968, King had made many enemies and recognized he might not live to see the fruits of his labor. While in Memphis, to lead a protest march defending the rights of striking garbage workers in April of 1968, King delivered a rousing speech titled, I've been to the mountaintop. It would be his last. Standing on the balcony of his second floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, King was shot and killed by James Earl Ray. King's assassination, however, could not erase his progress or his legacy. We were watching, all of us, the evening news when it flashed across the screen on April 4th, 1968, that he had been shot. As we went through the procession, there were so many thoughts that were going through my mind with all the emotions, gosh, what are we going to do now? It was hard, but one of the things that I remember most prominently were the number of people that came into Atlanta, the thousands that came to pay respect. You know, when you see all of these people, you begin to start evaluating, wow, well maybe what our father was doing is really very, very significant. In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed a proclamation declaring the third Monday of every January, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a public holiday to celebrate the man and what he stood for. The modern civil rights era of Martin Luther King is of vital importance, not just in history, but for today because it shows America tackling a problem that nobody really thought it could handle and it did that by an extraordinary collection of new heroes coming to the fore to move America forward in freedom. Here we are threatened again in America and we always will be with very difficult political problems ahead for our economy and the world ahead of us and here's an example from the 1950s and 1960s of how America rose to just such a challenge, even though most people thought we couldn't do it. The hardest thing to include when you're trying to do succinct stories are the small stories of people who are not well-known historical figures but who made a critical difference. The crippled lady with polio who was a cook in St. Augustine, Florida who came forward when everyone else was too scared to march for freedom because they'd been getting beaten so badly on the streets of St. Augustine, Florida, our oldest city in America, founded 1565, but it was very violently segregated and Dr. King's people could not find marchers. Well, this lady, Georgia Reed, stood up in the kitchen and said, I will lead the march on my crutches, but you have to take me home to change out of this cooking uniform because if I'm going to jail, I'm going in my Sunday best. There are lots of people like that and stories that add up to the cumulative Birmingham March or Freedom Summer or the Selma March or things that some people aren't familiar with as great historical turning points. The moments wouldn't have happened without the smaller foot soldiers.