Martin Lurther King Jr

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Martin Luther King, Jr.Childhood and Family Background

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on 15 January 1929 in his maternal grandparents' large Victorian house on Auburn

Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the second of three children, and was first named Michael, after his father. Both

changed their names to Martin when the boy was still young.

King's paternal grandfather, James Albert King, had been a sharecropper near the small town of Stockbridge,

Georgia, outside Atlanta. Like most sharecroppers, he had worked hard and earned little. King, Sr. was the second of

ten children. He had left Stockbridge for Atlanta at the age of sixteen, with nothing but a sixth-grade education and a

pair of shoes.

In Atlanta he worked odd jobs and studied, and slowly developed a reputation as a preacher. While preaching at two

small churches outside of Atlanta, he met Alberta Christine Williams, his future wife, and King, Jr.'s mother. She was

a graduate of Atlanta's Spelman College, had attended the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and had returned to Atlanta

to teach. Her father, the Reverend Adam Daniel Williams, presided over Atlanta's well-established Ebenezer Baptist

Church.

When King, Sr. and Williams married, they moved into the Williams home on Auburn Avenue, the main street of

Atlanta's African American business district. After some time had passed, her father asked King, Sr. to serve as

assistant pastor at Ebenezer, which he did. When the senior pastor died of a heart attack in 1931, King, Sr. took over

his duties.

King, Jr. and his siblings were born into a financially secure middle-class family, and thus they received better

educations than the average child of their race; King's recognition of this undoubtedly influenced him in his decision

to live a life of social protest, extending the opportunities he had enjoyed to all blacks. In his father, King had a model

of courage: King, Sr. was involved in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People, or NAACP, and had led a successful campaign to equalize the salaries of white and black teachers in

Atlanta.

As a child, King's encounters with racial discrimination were mild but formative. The first significant one came when

he began school. White playmates of his were to attend a different elementary school from his, and, once the year

began, their parents no longer allowed King to come over and play. It was this instance of injustice that first led his

mother to explain to him the history of slavery and segregation.

When King was in high school, he attended an oratory contest in Valdosta, Georgia, where he took second prize. His

victory was soured, however, by the long bus ride back to Atlanta: the bus was segregated, and the black people had

to stand so that the white people could sit.

Thus King grew up in a family that encouraged him to notice and respond to injustices. Later in life, his father andmother would always continue to support King's choices, though they were forced at times to witness the tragic

consequences of those choices, including their son's premature death.

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Education

As a child King attended Atlanta Public Schools, first David T. Howard Elementary, then Booker T. Washington High School, where he was quarterback of the football team. In 1945, at the ageof fifteen, he entered Atlanta's Morehouse College. Subsequently he attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania and Boston University, where he earned hisPh.D. Because King lived a life informed by a complex intellectual understanding of the world,his educational influences deserve a place in his biography. A true picture of these, however, isdifficult to sketch, because, later in his life, both he and his advocates presented multipledifferent pictures of his development, in order to strengthen his symbolic value as a leader. Kingwas known to emphasize different influences, depending on his audience, focusing on whitetheologians and philosophers before white audiences, and black religious experience beforeblack audiences. Whether or not one influence was more decisive than another, it is clear that

both were highly formative.

At Morehouse College King was an unexceptional student, characterized by teachers as anunderachiever. Intellectually unsatisfied by what he perceived as narrow-mindedness in theblack southern Baptist church, he was not yet devoted to a life of service to God. He studiedsociology and considered going into either law or medicine. At Morehouse King first read theessay Civil Disobedience by the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, and wasreportedly quite moved by its emphasis of justice over law.

Also at Morehouse, King felt the influence of a friend of his father, the president of the school,Benjamin E. Mays. Mays began to reconcile King to the church. By the end of his time atMorehouse, King had decided that social action was his calling, and that religion was his best

means toward that end. He gave his first public sermon at the age of seventeen, and wasordained a minister and served as assistant pastor to his father at Ebenezer Church.

In September 1948 King began his studies at Crozer, where, unlike at Morehouse, he excelledas a student. Crozer was the first integrated school King attended; he soon became the school'sfirst African American student body president and later graduated at the top of his class. It washere that he awakened intellectually, reading voraciously, particularly in theology and secular philosophy; and it was here that he was exposed to currents of thought that guided his thinkingfor the rest of his life.

King read Plato, Aristotle, Luther, Locke, Kant, and Rousseau. Of especial influence wereHegel, from whom he took an understanding of the complexity of truth and history; Marx, who

greatly affected his view of capitalism; Walter Rauschenbusch, whose notion of a social gospel –a church responsible for seeking social justice –King adopted, and Reinhold Niebuhr, whosepessimistic view of the corrupting influence of organizations on individuals King kept in mindlater, as he gained prominence as a leader.

http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/civildisobedience/






At a lecture at Crozer by A.J. Muste, a well-known American pacifist, King received his firstexposure to the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, which he would later adapt and employ, but whichhe initially regarded with some skepticism. Indeed, well into King's first bouts of activism heshowed only a partial commitment to the philosophy of pacifism, carrying a gun during theMontgomery Bus Boycott. Whether King began to adhere to the principles of non-violence at

Crozer or a at a later point, however, the majority of his intellectual influences were in place bythe time he graduated from Crozer in 1951 as a Bachelor of Divinity.

King undertook the final stage of his formal education at Boston University, to which he had wona fellowship on the basis of his performance at Crozer. At BU King refined his conception of God, incorporating tenets of personalism, a theological doctrine that stressed the personalnature of God and one's relationship to God, as well as the sanctity of human personality as areflection of God's image. King's later rhetoric often incorporated these ideas. Although somecritics have argued that King's doctoral thesis, entitled A Comparison of the Concepts of God in

the Theology of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Weiman, contained plagiarized passages, Kingsuccessfully received his PhD in 1955.

One of the most important developments in King's life in Boston occurred outside theclassroom. In 1951 he met Coretta Scott, his future wife, a fellow Southerner who was studyingvoice at the New England Conservatory of Music. Initially Coretta had hesitations about beinginvolved with a minister, but King was forthright in his courtship; indeed, on their first date hetold her she had all the qualities he sought in a wife. They were married on 18 June 1953 byMartin Luther King, Sr., on the lawn of Coretta's family home in Marion, Alabama.

When King finished his coursework at BU, he took a post as the minister of Dexter AvenueBaptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It was an established church of well-educated middle-class blacks with a history of civil rights protest activity. At first King had mixed feelings aboutthe position and considered work elsewhere, possibly at a place in which he could teach as wellas preach. His salary was the highest black ministerial salary in town, however, and

Montgomery, as the old capital of the Confederacy and thus a bastion of racism, probablyseemed a suitable testing ground for a practitioner of a social gospel. At the end of 1955 Corettagave birth to a baby girl, Yolanda Denise, whose arrival may have contributed to the couple'sdecision to stay.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott

On 1 December 1955 a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a fullMontgomery bus. Bus company policy dictated that black passengers fill seats from the backand white passengers fill seats from the front. Where the sections met, blacks were expected toyield to whites. The racist atmosphere on buses was strengthened by the attitude of the all-white driving staff, which was known to harass black passengers verbally, and sometimesphysically.

Parks was a seamstress for the Montgomery Fair department store and a member of the localchapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), havingserved as its secretary in the 1940s. By her single unplanned act of defiance, she caused achain of events that concluded with a United States Supreme Court decision prohibiting bus

segregation and King's rise to national prominence.The driver whom Parks defied had her arrested, and she was released on $100 bond. Her connections to the NAACP and the black community in general meant that the case attractedinstant city-wide attention. She was arrested on a Thursday, and a group of community leadersmet immediately and planned a boycott for the following Monday. Meanwhile, the NAACPlawyers took on her court case, optimistic that they could ride the issue to the Supreme Court, inlight of their recent victory in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

The organizers of the boycott, who hailed from other black groups, such as the NAACP and theWomen's Political Council, met in the basement of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which Kinghad offered for that purpose. The group drafted three demands for the bus company: thatseating be available on a strictly first-come, first-served basis; that drivers conduct themselveswith greater civility to black passengers; and that black drivers be hired for predominately blackroutes. There was no call to integrate seating. To secure these demands, no African Americanswould ride the buses on Monday, 5 December.

And hardly any did; indeed, nearly 20,000 blacks supported the action, and because blacksconstituted the majority of the bus system's customers, many buses drove around empty.Because of the black community's eagerness to comply with the boycott –and because of thebus company's refusal to capitulate- community leaders held a second meeting on the afternoonof the boycott to plan an extended protest. The group named itself the MontgomeryImprovement Association, or MIA, and elected King its president. Though only twenty-six, heshowed great promise as a leader, and was enough of a newcomer to stand outside old local

political rivalries. From the beginning, and throughout the most trying, violent events of thelengthy boycott, King never failed to emphasize the protest's rootedness in Christian principles.Though they might be the victims of violence, black protestors would engage in no acts of violence themselves; they would "turn the other cheek." This set the tone for all of King'ssubsequent campaigns.



The boycott lasted a year, and changed the character of both King's life and the city of Montgomery. King became the target of numerous telephoned threats and a few actual acts of violence. His house was bombed; he was arrested under false pretenses; he was sued for various reasons; he became very well known.

One night early in the boycott he had a religious epiphany, which he described later: he had

come home from a meeting and his wife was asleep; the phone rang, and when he answered,another anonymous caller threatened his life. After that he could not sleep. He made somecoffee and sat in his kitchen. For a moment the path before him seemed aabsolutely impossible.Then, while praying aloud, he felt the presence of God, very suddenly and very intensely, as henever had before. King explained that this experience reconciled him to the danger of theboycott and the protest actions that followed.

Montgomery changed more slowly. To survive the boycott, the black community formed anetwork of carpools and informal taxi services. Some white employers were forced to transporttheir black employees themselves. Many blacks walked long distances to work each day. Theboycott quickly began to hurt the businesses of city storeowners, not to mention that of the buscompany itself, which was losing 65% of its income.

But instead of considering the demands of the MIA, whites attempted to end the boycott byother means, both unofficially, though a series of bombings of churches and private homes, andofficially, through the courts. Because the MIA compensated drivers who transported boycotters,the city sued it for running an illegal transit system. King was in court defending the MIA againstthe injunction when news arrived that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Rosa Parks, andhad made illegal the kind of bus segregation enforced in Montgomery.

This ended the boycott, and on 21 December 1956, over a year after Parks had refused torelinquish her seat, King joined Ralph Abernathy and other boycott leaders for a ride on the firstdesegregated bus. Violence continued in the wake of the boycott: more homes and churcheswere bombed, and some white people threw stones and shot bullets at buses. But however tenuous the victory was at the local level, it marked a national success for King and for thecause of African Americans as a whole.


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Assassination and Legacy

King's interest in a strike of black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in the spring of 1968 reflected his growing concern with economic issues. The workers wanted pay equal to thatof whites. Taking time out from planning sessions for the Poor People's March, King flew toMemphis on 28 March to participate in a rally of 6000 people. The presence of Black Panthersin the crowd, however, and the violence they initiated, led King to remove himself and hissupporters from the march that day.

King went back to Atlanta briefly for SCLC work, but returned to Memphis in time for a secondmarch, which he hoped would be peaceful. King had stayed at the Holiday Inn during his firstvisit, but, on account of criticism that those accommodations were lavish, and despite securityconsiderations, he checked into the Lorraine Motel in a black neighborhood closer to theprotests.

On the evening of 4 April, after a pre-dinner organizational meeting, King stepped onto thebalcony of his second floor motel room. He talked with friends on the ground below. After a fewmoments, a loud sound, like that of a firecracker, was heard, and King slammed against the wallbehind him. From the rooming-house across the way, a sniper had shot King in the neck andhead, and King died within the hour at St. Joseph's Hospital in Memphis.

The alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, was apprehended a month later in Heathrow Airport inLondon. He confessed to the killing, but retracted his confession after he had been imprisoned.There is much speculation that the FBI was involved in King's death.

Upon news of the assassination, riots erupted nation-wide. President Johnson declared 7 April anational day of mourning –but mourning in many places took the form of violence and arson. Thenumber of riots totaled 168; the number of arrests, 3000; the number of injuries, over 20,000;and the number of soldiers called in to restore order, 55,000.

Funeral services were held at Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, which held 750 of the 150,000people who appeared to pay their last respects. Robert, Ethel, and Jacqueline Kennedy visited

Atlanta, as did Richard Nixon. Burgeoning television star Bill Cosby came and spent time withKing's children. King was buried near his grandparents in the all-black South View Cemetery.

But King's death did not prevent the realization of his planned protests. Thousands of supporters came from miles around, flooding Memphis and making the sanitation workers' strikea success. That summer, the Poor People's March took place without King, though on a smaller scale than he had imagined. The SCLC and Coretta Scott King continued much of what Kinghad begun.



But King's major legacy was the pieces of federal legislation passed in 1964 and 1965. In hisfinal years, King had failed somewhat to engage the broad-based support he had earlier enjoyed: while the Christian socialist vision of his later period proved too radical to affect whitemainstream Americans, his non- violent tactics had remained too peaceful to satisfy the risingtide of black militancy. However, the fact remained that King, more than any other leader, had

been responsible for both the abstract and the concrete achievements of the Civil RightsMovement. King had dreamed and had acted.

Amercian minorities enjoyed an initial flurry of political empowerment in the late 1960s and early1970s, when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to affect local elections. However, after thisprogress started to slow, and has remained comparatively sluggish. The "white flight" from citiesto suburbs has left behind decaying neighborhoods with weak tax bases and de

factosegregated schools. Affirmative action programs have come under attack, especially byright-wing politicians. Celebrations of King often downplay his radical economic vision whilehighlighting his moments of upbeat –and unthreatening – liberal rhetoric. The irony of histreatment as a national hero was perhaps most evident in the establishment of the holidayhonoring him –effected as it was by the staunchly anti-communist Reagan Administration.


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Martin Lurther King Jr

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