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Martin Luther King Jr.
A pastor's son and trained theologian, King turned Christian conviction and Gandhian nonviolence into a mass movement that helped end legal segregation in the United States.
Personality
King combined a scholar's habits with a preacher's gift for language. Raised in a Baptist pastor's family, he studied at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, and his thinking kept developing: at first sceptical of pacifism, he came to embrace Gandhian nonviolence with encouragement from veteran activists such as Bayard Rustin. He led by building broad coalitions of churches, labour unions, peace groups and freedom movements abroad, and he was willing to take unpopular positions, as when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War in his 1967 address Beyond Vietnam.
Under pressure
King faced constant danger and pressure. During the Montgomery bus boycott his home was bombed, and in 1958 he was stabbed while signing books and needed surgery and months of recovery. He was arrested many times, often alongside Ralph Abernathy, and from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963 he wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail, a defence of nonviolent direct action. After 1965, as calls for Black Power grew and his own influence waned, he held to nonviolence and integration while acknowledging the frustrations the new movement expressed.
The arc
Born Michael King in his family's home on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta on 15 January 1929, he took the name Martin Luther King Jr. after his father adopted it. He became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery in 1954 and was drawn into leading the 1955 to 1956 bus boycott, then became president of the new Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. The Birmingham campaign and the March on Washington in 1963 were followed by the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 and a Chicago campaign in 1966. He was planning the Poor People's Campaign when he was killed in Memphis in April 1968.
Legacy
King is the defining figure of the American civil rights movement. His campaigns built the public support that carried the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Selma marches spurred the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His I Have a Dream speech and Letter from Birmingham Jail drew on the Bible and the Constitution to change public opinion, and they are still widely read and taught. He showed how nonviolent mass action rooted in religious conviction could change law, and a federal King holiday, first observed in 1986, honours him in the United States.
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