Martin Luther King

Martin luther king Jr. (January 15 1929-april 4 1968) was born Michael luther king but later had his name changed to Martin .His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the ebenezer Bapist church in atlanta ,serving from 1914 to 1931;his father has served from then until the prsent and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co pastor .Martin luther attended segregated public schools in gergia ,graduating from high school at the age of fifteen;he recieved the B.A. degree in 1948 from MOrehouse college ,a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated .After three years of theological Seminary in pennyslavania where hw was elected president of predominantily white senior class, he was awrded the B.D. in1951.With felowship won at crozer,he enrolled in graduates studies at boston University,completung his residency for the doctrate in 1953 and recieving the degree in 1955.In Boston he met Coretta Scott a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attaintment.Two sons and daugher were born into the family .
In1954 ,Martin Luther King accepted the pastrole of the dexter Avenue Baptist church
in Montogornery ,Albana .Always a string worker for civil right for member of his race ,king was
by this time a member of the executive committe of the national association for the Advancement of coloured people,the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.