Baptist Minister, Humanitarian and Civil Rights Activist (1929-1968)

Martin Luther King Jr became a civil rights activist early in his career and led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president.

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a seminal event in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. It was a political and social protest against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit

system of Montgomery, Alabama.

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With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia (the Albany Movement), and helped organize the 1963 non violent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history.

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The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history and called for civil and economic rights for African Americans.

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On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through non violence. In 1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year he and SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include poverty and speak against the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam".

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In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting.

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King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington State was also renamed for him. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

Source: Wikipedia

Images: Believed to be in the Public Domain or used with permission

Speeches

Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking against the Vietnam War,

St. Paul Campus, University of Minnesota, April 1967

Photo: Minnesota Historical Society/Flickr • Licensed for reuse under CC BY-SA 2.0