Martin Luther King
Michael Luther King, later changed his name to Martin, was born in 1929 and was a very bright student who studied in a segregated school in Georgia. He graduated at the age of 15 and received a B.A. degree from Morehouse College. He also attended Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Correta Scott, they later had two sons’ and two daughters’. Martin’s grandfather had begun the family’s long tenure as pastors, for him and his father had been pastors.
In 1954, Martin accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He later became a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He then in 1955 accepted the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States. This lead to him tackling the bus boycott. It lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, blacks and whites rode the buses equally. During these days of boycott, Martin was arrested, his home was bombed, he was personally abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for civil rights movement. He made a system of breaking unjust laws but obeying just laws that were appropriate. He also used techniques from Gandhi (non-violent). In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, Martin traveled over six million miles and spoke over hundreds of times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action, meanwhile he wrote five books as well as many articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham in Alabama that caught the attention of the entire world. He later planned drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes so that they could vote and also directed the peaceful march in Washington D.C.
He was arrested more than twenty times and assaulted at least four times, he was awarded five honorary degrees, was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963 and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure. At the age of thirty five, Martin was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. He announced that he would give away the prize money for the civil rights movement. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis in Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Martin Luther King was a brilliant and clever man, who had led many peaceful strikes with no violence in mind. He had always strived for the peace of Black Americans and to stop the segregation rule. He successfully achieved some of his goals, but unluckily for such a man like him, he had later been assassinated...
Written and Edited by Khaider6
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