Martin Luther King Jr.

Do you have a dream?  Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream.  A dream that took and takes each individual to do their part for his dream to be successful.  Do you have any activism in you?  In my opinion, we all should.  

Martin Luther King Jr.was born January 15th, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia.  This son of Reverend Michael King and Alberta Williams was born a Baptist minister and civil rights leader.  Michael lived a block away from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his grandfather, Reverend Adam Daniel Williams served as a pastor since 1894.  King was also introduced to leaders of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP as a child.  Living during the depression era made him more aware of the economic inequalities.  His father was a model for him as he was a leader in campaigns against racial discrimination.  

 

 Martin Luther King Jr attended Atlanta's Morehouse College from 1944-1948.  He had a response to the postwar wave of antiblack violence with a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution that African Americans were "entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens." He also met every month at Atlanta's Emory University with the Intercollegiate Council, an interracial student discussion group.  In 1951 King started doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University's School of Theology.  There he met Coretta Scott King and married in 1953 in Marion, Alabama where Coretta's family lived.  In 1954 he became the Pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  Martin was apart of the Montgomery Improvement Association leaders that protested the arrest of NAACP Rosa Parks.  The Supreme Court outlawed Alabama bus segregation laws in the late 1956.  Martin Luther King Jr expanded the nonviolent civil rights movement throughout the south.  King became a advocate of Mohandas Gandhi's percepts of nonviolence.  He moved his wife and two kids to Atlanta so he could be close to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Headquarters which he was apart of.   There was a new student-led lunch counter sit-in movement that spread in 1960.  Martin Luther sent Ella Baker to North Carolina to organize students that started a protest there.  This all began the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  Martin Luther King Jr had been arrested and put in jail many of times but for a good cause as far as I am concerned.  However, he did not always achieve a victory.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at age 28 in 1963 at the Million Man March in Washington D.C had more than 200,00 attendees.  Named Times magazine's man of the year in 1963 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.  The protests had expanded to the north.  Selma, Alabama in 1965  had a series of voting rights protests.  Martin Luther King had been stoned in the Chicago suburb  when he led a march.  1966 he launched a campaign against poverty and other urban problems, moving into an apartment in the ghetto of Chicago.  Black militants turned away from the Gandhian percepts and toward the black nationalism of Malcolm X.  Martin Luther King addressed these issues in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? in 1967.  In Memphis, Tennessee he led thousands of sanitation workers in a strike in 1968.  Black youngeters threw rocks and looted the stores.  King went back a month later and was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.  The day before he addressed the audience with "But it doesn't matter with me now," "because I've been to the mountaintop and I've seen the promise land," "I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to that promised land."  Coretta Scott King continued to lead the successful effort to honor Martin Luther King Jr with a federal holiday on his birthday.  The first year of this celebration was in 1986.  

 

"The Negro will not be only truly free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive selfhood his own emancipation proclamation." 

"A riot is the language of the unheard."

"The time is always right to do what is right."

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence in our friends."

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."