On This Day In History: Dr Martin Luther King Was Born – On Jan 15, 1929

On January 15, 1929, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was born in Atlanta, Georgia.

King was twentieth-century America’s most compelling and effective civil rights leader.

After entering Morehouse College at age fifteen, King followed his father and grandfather into the Baptist ministry. He received a bachelor of divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951 and a Ph.D from Boston University in 1955.

King entered the civil rights movement in 1955. A young, newly married pastor of a Montgomery, Alabama church, he was asked to lead a bus boycott aimed at ending segregation of public transport in Montgomery. The boycott, initiated by Rosa Parks’ refusal to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger, lasted over a year and resulted in the desegregation of the city’s busses.

King advocated non-violent action as a means of lifting racial oppression. Jailed during an Alabama campaign to abolish segregated lunch counters, King delineated his philosophy of nonviolence in the now famous “Letter From the Birmingham Jail.”

On August 28, 1963, King participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he delivered his famous “I Have A Dream External” speech, to a crowd of 250,000. An eloquent call to action, the speech emphasized his belief that the movement would create a society in which character, rather than color, prevailed.

In December 1964, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

On April 4, 1968, while in Memphis, Tennessee supporting a strike by the city’s sanitation workers, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of his hotel. Just thirty-nine years old, he left a wife, Coretta Scott King, and four young children.