King, Revd Martin Luther, Jr.

King, Revd Martin Luther, Jr. (b. 15 Jan. 1929, d. 4 Apr. 1968). US civil rights leader Born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister, he graduated at Morehouse College, Atlanta, and went on to take Ph.D. in systematic theology at Boston University. In his studies he was much influenced by the thinking of Gandhi and Reinhold Niebuhr. In 1954 he was appointed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and at once became involved in the local campaigns of the civil rights movement. He became leader of the bus protest which began in Montgomery on 1 December 1955 and which lasted over a year, during which time his home was bombed. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, operating from Atlanta from 1960, he became a national leader for civil rights. Imprisoned in Birmingham along with hundreds of others for taking part in a protest march, he wrote his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, in which he justified his exposure of civil rights issues.

King was released in time for the March on Washington of 28 August 1963, when the inspirational orator spoke from the Lincoln Memorial (‘I have a dream’) to a crowd of over 200,000. Public support after Kennedy's assassination, and a rising tide of national sympathy for King's cause, enabled President Johnson to achieve passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and continued to campaign in the south, leading a march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Here, blocked by state troopers, he knelt in prayer and withdrew, to the chagrin of his more militant Black Power movement colleagues, who were becoming alienated from King's integrationist message. In 1966 he moved north to tackle racism in Chicago, where he met the opposition of the powerful Mayor Daley. By 1967 he was campaigning against the Vietnam War and planning a Poor People's March on Washington. He was shot dead in Memphis, where he had come to support a sanitation workers' strike. To commemorate his ideals and his life, in 1986 the US Congress voted the third Monday of January as Martin Luther King Day.