Michael King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. His father changed both their names to Martin Luther, after the German reformer. He entered Morehouse College at fifteen. He received his doctorate in theology from Boston University at twenty-five. He became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, at twenty-six. [1]
He was twenty-six years old when Rosa Parks was arrested. The Montgomery Improvement Association elected him to lead the boycott because he was new in town — he had made no enemies yet. He discovered, in leading it, that he had been born to do nothing else. [1]
Over the next thirteen years he was arrested thirty times. His house was bombed. He was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener by a mentally ill woman — the blade stopped a fraction from his aorta. The FBI surveilled him, wiretapped his phones, and sent him an anonymous letter suggesting he kill himself. [1]
He did not stop.
He went to Birmingham and filled the jails with singing children. He stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and told a quarter million people about a dream. He went to Selma and knelt on a bridge. He won the Nobel Peace Prize at thirty-five — the youngest recipient at the time. [1]
In his last years he turned against the Vietnam War and toward economic justice, alienating allies who told him to stay in his lane. He did not stay in his lane. He said: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” [1]
On April 4, 1968, he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was there to support striking sanitation workers — Black men who carried signs reading “I Am A Man.” A bullet fired by James Earl Ray struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. He was thirty-nine years old. [1]
The night before, he had told a crowd: “I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” [1]
Photo: Rowland Scherman / Restoration: Adam Cuerden. NARA 542015.
Bibliography
[1] Wikipedia. “Martin Luther King Jr.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.