Martin Luther King Jr. will be represented in these articles by, MLK. MLK was a clergyman and was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and was one of the principal leaders in the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was a movement to gain back full political, legal, and social rights for African Americans. MLK was also a prominent advocate of nonviolent protests.  MLKs challenges to segregation and racial discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s convinced many white Americans to support the cause in the United States. After his assassination in 1968, King became a symbol of protest in the struggle for racial justice.

  MLK was born in Atlanta, Georgia and was the eldest son ofMartin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. His father served as pastor of a large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which had been founded by Martin Luther King, Jr.s, maternal grandfather. King, Jr., was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18.

  King attended local segregated public schools, where he excelled. He entered nearby Morehouse College at age 15 and graduated with a bachelors degree in sociology in 1948. After graduating with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in 1951, he went to Boston University where he earned a doctoral degree in systematic theology in 1955.

  Kings public-speaking abilitieswhich would become renowned as his stature grew in the civil rights movementdeveloped slowly during his collegiate years. He won a second-place prize in a speech contest while an undergraduate at Morehouse, but received Cs in two public-speaking courses in his first year at Crozer. By the end of his third year at Crozer, however, professors were praising King for the powerful impression he made in public speeches and discussions.

  While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a music student and native of Alabama. They were married in 1953 and would have four children. In 1954 King accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a church with a well-educated congregation that had recently been led by a minister who had protested against segregation.                    Montgomerys black community had long standing grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on city buses.  White bus drivers treated the blacks rudely and sometimes cursed at them and trying to humiliate them by enforcing the segregation laws. By the end of the 1950s blacks in the area were planning to boycott.                                                                                                 On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a leading member of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was ordered by a bus driver to give up her seat to a white passenger. When she refused, she was arrested and taken to jail. Local leaders of the NAACP, especially Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the arrest of the popular and highly respected Parks was the event that could rally local blacks to a bus protest.                   Nixon also believed that a citywide protest should be led by someone who could unify the community. Unlike Nixon and other leaders in Montgomerys black community, the recently arrived King had no enemies. Furthermore, Nixon saw Kings public-speaking gifts as great assets in the battle for black civil rights in Montgomery. King was soon chosen as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that directed the bus boycott.              The Montgomery boyycott lasted for more than a year, demonstrating a new spirit of protest among Southern blacks. Kings serious demeanor and consistent appeal to Christian brotherhood and American idealism made a positive impression on whites outside the South. Incidents of violence against black protesters, including the bombing of Kings home, focused media attention on Montgomery. In February 1956 an attorney for the MIA filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction against Montgomerys segregated seating practices. The federal court ruled in favor of the MIA, ordering the citys buses to be desegregated, but the city government appealed the ruling to the United States Supreme Court. By the time the Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision in November 1956, King was a national figure. His memoir of the bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), provided a thoughtful account of that experience and further extended Kings national influence.

In 1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As SCLCs president, King became the organizations dominant personality and its primary intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the organizations fund-raising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with preaching engagements in Northern churches.                         SCLC sought to complement the NAACPs legal efforts to dismantle segregation through the courts, with King and other SCLC leaders encouraging the use of nonviolent direct action to protest discrimination. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts. The violent responses that direct action provoked from some whites eventually forced the federal government to confront the issues of injustice and racism in the South.                                    King made strategic alliances with Northern whites that later bolstered his success at influencing public opinion in the United States. Through Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights and peace activist, King forged connections to older radical activists, many of them Jewish, who provided money and advice about strategy. Kings closest adviser at times was Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist and former member of the American Communist Party. King also developed strong ties to leading white Protestant ministers in the North, with whom he shared theological and moral views.                                                                                                                           In 1959 King visited India and worked out more clearly his understanding of Gandhi's principle of nonviolent persuasion, called satyagraha, which King had determined to use as his main instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate in Montgomery to become copastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.                                King and other black leaders organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive protest in Washington, D.C., for jobs and civil rights. On August 28, 1963, King delivered a stirring address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. His I Have a Dream speech expressed the hopes of the civil rights movement in oratory as moving as any in American history: I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. [The sad part is that MLK was assassinated on  April 4, 1968 by a sniper. James Earl Ray was convicted with the murder that took place in Memphis Tennessee.]