Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. led the American civil rights movement's non-violent campaign against legal segregation, and was assassinated at thirty-nine while turning towards poverty and the Vietnam War. Born in Atlanta in 1929 into a family of Baptist ministers, he entered Morehouse College at fifteen, was ordained at nineteen, and took a doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University in 1955, where he studied Gandhi's methods and personalist theology. Weeks after he took his first pastorate in Montgomery, Rosa Parks was arrested, and the local leadership chose the newcomer to front the bus boycott. It lasted 381 days, cost the transit system most of its revenue, and ended in 1956 when the Supreme Court struck the segregation ordinance down. He founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 to carry the method across the South. The strategy was to provoke a visible response. In Birmingham in 1963, images of police dogs and fire hoses turned against children forced a national reckoning; his Letter from Birmingham Jail, written on newspaper margins, answered clergy who called the campaign untimely. He spoke last at the March on Washington that August. The Civil Rights Act followed in 1964, the year he received the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Selma marches of 1965 produced the Voting Rights Act. The FBI wiretapped him, and in 1964 sent him a letter urging him to kill himself. His 1966 Chicago campaign against housing discrimination met white resistance as severe as anything in the South and achieved little. He broke with President Johnson over Vietnam in 1967, losing allies and much of his press. He was shot in Memphis on 4 April 1968, supporting a strike by sanitation workers.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 1968 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: activist, pastor, orator, civil_rights_leader
