Martin Luther King biography

"I Have a Dream" zentangle by Steve Simon

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia.  His birth name was Michael, but he and his father both changed their names in honor of the Protestant reformer Martin Luther after a trip to Germany.  As a child, King sang in the choir and by high school his oratorical skill had already become apparent.
 
He attended Morehouse College, receiving a B.A. in sociology in 1948.  He then enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.  At Crozer he was elected president of his mostly white senior class before receiving a B.Div. degree in 1951.  King further studied systematic theology at Boston University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1955.
 
In Boston, King met Coretta Scott.  She was an intelligent and talented singer, attending the New England Conservatory of Music.  The couple married on June 18, 1953 in Coretta’s hometown of Heiberger, Alabama.  Scott would eventually sacrifice much of her own promising career in the support of her husband’s historic civil rights efforts.
 
In 1954, King received interest from three colleges in the north, offering teaching and administrative posts, and two churches in the north, interested in his ministerial services.  One church in the south, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama expressed interest.  Coretta and Martin had both been raised in the south and had endured the difficulties of southern segregation.  Nevertheless, they made the mutual decision to return to the south for Martin to accept the offer to be named pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.  The church is located diagonally across a square from the State Capitol from which Jefferson Davis had sworn the oath as President of the Confederacy.
 
In the year following his acceptance to the pastorate, Rosa Parks was arrested for defying racial segregation laws by refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery city bus.  King participated in the planning and execution of the Montgomery bus boycott that would follow in protest.  The turbulent boycott lasted 385 days, during which King was arrested and his home bombed.  The boycott ended with a judicial decision ending racial segregation on Montgomery public buses.  The events catapulted King into the spotlight as the best-known national civil rights figure.
 
In 1957, King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).  The group, led by King until his assassination, used nonviolent means to organize the energy of black churches in the battle for civil rights reform.  During the next eleven years, King wrote five books, spoke more than 2,500 times, survived a stabbing and other assaults, and was arrested more than two dozen times in the name of social justice.  He faced criticism not only from racist elements but also from militant blacks who did not agree with his nonviolent approach.  He was harassed by the FBI and investigated for communist sympathizing.
 
In April 1963, the SCLC launched Project C (‘C’ for confrontation) in Birmingham, Alabama.  The strategy was to use overwhelming nonviolent civil disobedience to protest racial segregation and economic injustice.  In an iconic moment of the Civil Rights Movement, Eugene “Bull” Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, ordered the use of high-pressure fire hoses and attack dogs against protesters.  The negative media images of the events, especially the brutality visited on child protesters, shocked the nation.  King, in the meantime, had been arrested an sent to prison from where he wrote the famous open letter known as “Letter from Birmingham Jail”.  It was a moral defense of the movement’s resistance to racism.  King wrote, “I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”  At the peak of Project C, more than 2,500 demonstrators were in jail at the same time.  Birmingham officials were forced to act, granting the movement’s organizers many of their desegregation demands.
 
The movement now had momentum.  King and the SCLC worked towards civil rights legislation as they planned the March on Washington.  On August 28, 1963, the march exceeded expectations as King delivered his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech.  With an estimated attendance of 250,000 protesters, it was to that point in history the largest such gathering in Washington, D.C. 
 
On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, originally recommended and promoted by President Kennedy before his assassination.  The law outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.  King was present at the signing and received the pen President Johnson used to sign the bill.  Later that year King was award the Nobel Peace Prize. At the age of thirty-five, he was the youngest man to receive the prize.  He pledged the $54,000 of prize money to be used for the movement.
 
The passage of the bill and receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize were certainly landmark achievements for King and the movement, but these did not, by any means, end the struggle for equality.  King spent the next four years of his life, prior to his assassination, continuing the battle. 
 
In February and March of 1965, King was integral in battling for voting rights denied black registrants through unjust means in Alabama.  For his efforts, King again landed in jail, not sixty days after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.  He would eventually lead the second and third marches over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in support of voting rights.  The last march finally succeeded in clearing the bridge and continuing for five days en route to the Montgomery State Capitol. 
 
Martin Luther King, Jr. studied and greatly respected Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance.  In 1959, King traveled to India to further study Gandhi's legacy.  The march from Selma to Montgomery has been compared by many to Gandhi’s March to the Sea and showed King’s deep reverence for the man he called “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” 
 
From the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, King delivered his “How Long, Not Long” speech after the march.  In the speech, he responded to the rhetorical question how long it would take for our society to be at peace by saying, “How long?  Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting.
 
In 1966, King participated in the leadership of the Chicago Freedom Movement that demanded a broad range of reforms including fair housing, education, and employment in that city.  King chose to “live in the very heart of the ghetto” to identify with their problems.  The movement is largely credited with bringing about the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
 
King had shown his opposition to the Vietnam War since his call to halt U.S. bombing of the North Vietnamese on August 12, 1965.  In 1966, King met the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh when he came to the U.S. to promote peace.  In their meeting, Hanh urged King to publicly denounce the war.  On April 4, 1967, King publicly declared his strong opposition in his antiwar speech at the Riverside Church in New York.  In the speech, King pointed out the need to speak out against “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today:  my own government.”  King knew his views would be unpopular and even counterproductive to some of his domestic efforts, but despite those misgivings, he resolved to be true to himself.  In his autobiography he wrote, “And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.”

In 1967, some time after King had delivered the speech at the Riverside Church, he nominated Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize.  The Norwegian Nobel Committee chose not to award the Nobel Peace Prize to anyone that year.
 
King next pivoted to another area of injustice—poverty.  In December 1967, King launched the Poor People’s Campaign.  He found it a grave injustice that in the wealthiest country in history, poverty could exist.  Seeking to benefit the poor of all races, King began to plan nonviolent protests again in Washington D.C. 
 
In March of that year, sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee went on strike after a malfunctioning truck crushed two garbage collectors to death.  King spoke to the strikers.  Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.”  King seemed to channel Douglass by saying, “Never forget that freedom is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor.  It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed.”
 
Two weeks after addressing the Memphis sanitation workers, King gave his final address at the Charles J. Mason Temple in Memphis.  In this last speech, King delivered his “I've Been to the Mountaintop” closing in which he seems to presage his own death.
 
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And 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. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
 
The following day, King was shot and killed by James Earl Ray outside his motel room.  The above composition is inspired by a Benjamin West painting entitled “Moses Shown the Promised Land.”  The angels from left to right are: William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Mahatma Gandhi.


​The following is a narration provided as audio to above video:

Promised Land

At the Mason Temple in Memphis Tennessee
He delivered a speech that shall go down in history

A booming oratory of imagery and metaphor
Making the case as he had many times before
Our nation had not honored its creed, he did contend
“Be true to what you said on paper,” he’d sternly recommend

A drum major for justice he knew the day would come
When all would drink from the well of prosperity, not just some
So the voices kept singing “We Shall Overcome.”
Fixing a steadfast gaze on just such a kingdom

A drum major for peace, the baton showed the way
Non-violently marching on, come what may
Humbly accepting that his own battle-wearied feet
Would not likely, this great journey complete

For the angels had granted him his righteous due
A reaffirming glimpse from a mountaintop view
Bending towards justice the path did traverse
To a paradise down the arc of the moral universe

In his last address the vision from the angels he did invoke
“I might not get there with you,” he prophetically spoke
“But I want you to know tonight,” he continued with willful command
“That we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

The fateful next day he met his untimely demise
That galvanizing baton would never again rise
But not before it had long blazed a visionary’s trail
Toward a righteous destiny mankind shall one day avail

And so I shall remember him as he hoped we all would
As a “drum major for righteousness” resting in eternal brotherhood

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