Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
- Smithsonian Channel - MLK's Last Speech
- The History Learning Site - Biography of Martin Luther King
- HistoryNet - Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Spartacus Educational - Biography of Martin Luther King
- Temple University Sites - American Icons - Martin Luther King Jr. and the Myth of John Henry by Suet Yuk (Rainie) Au Yeung
- National Archives - Findings on MLK Assassination
- Stanford University - The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute - Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- The Nobel Prize - Martin Luther King Jr.
- Bill of Rights Institute - Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
- Louisiana State University - Libraries - Martin Luther King, Jr.
- BlackPast.org - Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Westminster Abbey - Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Encyclopedia of Alabama - Martin Luther King, Jr.
- United States History - Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- University of Kentucky - Martin Luther King Center - Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Original name:
- Michael King, Jr.
- Awards And Honors:
- Grammy Award (1970)
- Nobel Prize (1964)
- Notable Works:
- “I Have A Dream”
- Notable Family Members:
- spouse Coretta Scott King
Recent News
What did Martin Luther King, Jr., do?
What is Martin Luther King, Jr., known for?
Who did Martin Luther King, Jr., influence and in what ways?
What was Martin Luther King’s family life like?
How did Martin Luther King, Jr., die?
Martin Luther King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee) was a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement’s success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted nonviolent tactics, such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Early years
King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition of the Southern Black ministry: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated, and King’s father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,” the bustling “Black Wall Street,” home to some of the country’s largest and most prosperous Black businesses and Black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a loving extended family.
This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing the prejudices then common in the South. He never forgot the time when, at about age six, one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents’ permission, the 12-year-old King attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.
![Martin Luther King, Jr.](https://cdn.britannica.com/18/1918-131-6A4D8AB6/Martin-Luther-King-Jr.jpg)
In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut; it was his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. “Negroes and whites go [to] the same church,” he noted in a letter to his parents. “I never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” This summer experience in the North only deepened King’s growing hatred of racial segregation.
At Morehouse, King favoured studies in medicine and law, but these were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as his father had urged. King’s mentor at Morehouse was the college president, Benjamin Mays, a social gospel activist whose rich oratory and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King’s father. Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the African American community of complacency in the face of oppression, and he prodded the Black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was not lost on the teenage King. He graduated from Morehouse in 1948.
King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president of Crozer’s student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, “The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation.” From Crozer, King went to Boston University, where, in seeking a firm foundation for his own theological and ethical inclinations, he studied man’s relationship to God and received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.”