King MartinLuther

American clergyman and inspirational leader of the civil rights movement. A symbol of the struggle against black segregation in the American South, he won the Kennedy Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Galvanizing black Americans into action through his electrifying oratory skills, he rose to become a legend and national hero in his own time. Growing up in a pious, proud and progressive black community in segregated Atlanta, King was the son of Alberta and Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church. Living in a family of black Brahmins he never experienced poverty, yet he continuously heard his father preach from his pulpit, "I dont care how long I have to live with this system. I will never accept it." Kings rhetorical ability showed early. A pastors son of whom much was expected, he won an oratorical contest sponsored by the black Elks in 1944. Programmed from his early youth to follow in his fathers and grandfathers footsteps in the ministry, by his teens he was uncomfortable with the emotionalism of fundamental Baptist services and sought a more liberal perspective. Enrolling in Morehouse College in Atlanta, he vacillated between choosing a career as a doctor or a lawyer and a bitter seed was planted about his Baptist roots. "I wondered whether religion, with its emotionalism in Negro churches, could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying." With his spiritual perspective enhanced by the liberal theologians at Morehouse, he enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was one of 11 blacks in a student population of 90. Manifesting his innate sense of leadership, he became student body president and class valedictorian. He was ordained a minister in his fathers church in 1947. Upon applying to Boston University for graduate work, his professors wrote "His work is of the highest grade" and "He will probably become a big strong leader among his people." In 1955 at age 26, after refusing to be heir apparent to his fathers pulpit at Ebeneezer Baptist in Atlanta, Kings first position was at the prestigious Dexter Baptist Church at Montgomery, Alabama. When seamstress Rose Parks refused to move to the back of the bus on December 1st of that same year, King began his sermon to a church full of agitated supporters of her cause, four days after her courageous act. "You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression." Individual cheers gave way to a resounding din within the church walls and King walked into history that day as the delegated spokesman for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. When the Montgomery buses finally began to operate on a non-segregated basis 381 days later, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, giving him a sound base from which to operate his vast congregation of everyday soldiers for civil rights. His philosophy of passive resistance led to his frequent arrests and tours through the Bible Belt, where he became known as "Alabamas Modern Moses." The Southern student lunch counter sit-in of 1960, the Freedom Riders of 1961, marches in Birmingham, AL 1963, St. Augustine, FL 1964 and Selma, AL in 1965 put King in the national deadlines as a civil rights activist. His greatest coup was the March on Washington on 28 August 1963, where 200,000 people gathered to demand their civil rights and hear King make his famous speech, "I have a dream....." Read less