Martin Luther King Jr. was born January 15, 1929 as Michael Luther King Jr. but later changed is name to Martin. He attended segregated schools in Georgia, and he graduated at age fifteen. He received the B.A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, the same college his grandfather and father both graduated from. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott. They had two sons and two daughters. In 1954 Marin Luther King became a pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. By this time he was already the member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.He was the leader of the bus boycott that lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956 blacks and whites both rode the buses as equals. King was arrested because he was part of the boycott, his house was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse but he still emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank. In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. In the time being of 1957 and 1968 King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest and action.In those eleven years he wrote five books and many articles. He led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama that had the attention of the entire world. Because of his “I have a dream” speech he was awarded five honorary degrees, was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963 and became a world figure. At the age of 35, he was the youngest man to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The money he received was turned over to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. This was $54,123. On the evening of April 4, 1968 while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee where he was lead to a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of the city, he was assassinated.
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