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Biography
Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received 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 study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 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.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Selected Bibliography
Adams, Russell, Great Negroes Past and Present, pp. 106-107. Chicago, Afro-Am Publishing Co., 1963.
Bennett, Lerone, Jr., What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chicago, Johnson, 1964.
I Have a Dream: The Story of Martin Luther King in Text and Pictures. New York, Time Life Books, 1968.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Measure of a Man. Philadelphia. The Christian Education Press, 1959. Two devotional addresses.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Strength to Love. New York, Harper & Row, 1963. Sixteen sermons and one essay entitled "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence."
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York, Harper, 1958.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience. New York, Harper & Row, 1968.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? New York, Harper & Row, 1967.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Why We Can't Wait. New York, Harper & Row, 1963.
"Man of the Year", Time, 83 (January 3, 1964) 13-16; 25-27.
"Martin Luther King, Jr.", in Current Biography Yearbook 1965, ed. by Charles Moritz, pp. 220-223. New York, H.W. Wilson.
Reddick, Lawrence D., Crusader without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York, Harper, 1959.
From Nobel Lectures, Peace 1951-1970, Editor Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972
Young King inspired by time in Conn., work on farm
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Martin Luther King Jr. could hardly believe his eyes when he left the segregated South as a teenage college student to work on a tobacco farm in Connecticut."On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see," he wrote his father in June 1944. "After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to."
The slain civil rights leader, whose birthday is observed Monday as a federal holiday, spent that summer working in a tobacco field in the Hartford suburb of Simsbury. That experience would influence his decision to become a minister and heighten his resentment of segregation.
"It's clear that this little town, it made a huge impact on his life," said John Conard-Malley, a Simsbury High School senior who did a documentary with other students on King's experiences in Connecticut. "It's possibly the biggest thing, one of the most important things, people don't know about Martin Luther King's life."
Until then, King was thinking of other professions such as becoming a lawyer, Conard-Malley said. But after his fellow Morehouse College students at the tobacco farm elected him their religious leader, he decided to become a minister.
In his later application to Crozer Theological Seminary King wrote that he made the decision that summer "when I felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape."
"Perhaps if he hadn't come to Connecticut, hadn't picked tobacco up here, hadn't felt like a free person, hadn't felt what life was like without segregation and been elected the religious minister, he may not have become such a leader in the civil rights movement," Conard-Malley said.
Nicole Byer, a junior at Simsbury High School who narrates the documentary, noted that King was roughly the same age as the students who produced the documentary. Such early experiences can have a profound influence on young people, she said.
"Everything right now influences us," Byer said. "Any small experience can change the direction of what we do right now."
In a letter to his mother three days after he wrote his father, King marveled over a trip he took to Hartford.
"I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford," King wrote. "And we went to the largest shows there."
He wrote a week earlier of going to the same church in Simsbury as white people. His new calling as a religious leader was emerging, too.
"I have to speak on some text every Sunday to 107 boys. We really have good meetings," he wrote.
William Duschaneck, an 88-year-old Simsbury resident interviewed by the students, said he played baseball with King in town. King was a strong pitcher, though the future preacher of nonviolence never drilled a batter, he said.
"He was a good ballplayer. He beat us a couple times," Duschanek told The Associated Press, laughing. "It was interesting to hear him talk. He had a nice voice. He talked about God and so forth."
King described the work on the tobacco farm as easy.
"I have a job in the kitchen so I get better food than any of the boys and more. I get as much as I want," he wrote to his mother.
In a speech in Hartford in 1959, King recalled how hot it was working on the tobacco field and how he looked forward to relaxing on weekends in Hartford.
Byer says King and other students often worked in temperatures that reached 100 degrees or higher. The students, who were earning money to pay for college, made about $4 per day, Byer said. They lived in a dormitory built at the edge of the tobacco field.
King was nicknamed "Tweed" by his friends because he often wore a tweed suit to church, said Alexis Kellam, whose late father, Ennis Proctor, worked with King that summer in Connecticut.
King's friends teased him that the hot sun in the tobacco fields caused him to preach, his sister, Christine Farris, told The AP.
In her book "Through It All: Reflections on My Life, My Family, and My Faith," Ferris wrote that her brother underwent a "metamorphosis" as a result of his time in Connecticut.
"That was quite an experience," Farris said.
King's widow, Coretta Scott King, wrote in her memoir, "My Life With Martin Luther King Jr." that her husband talked of the exhilarating sense of freedom he felt in Connecticut that summer.
That taste of freedom ended as King returned home. When he got to Washington, he had to ride the rest of the way to Atlanta in a segregated train.
"After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation," King wrote in his autobiography. "I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect."
Clayborne Carson, a history professor and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, said King's time in Connecticut played a role in his decision to become a minister and in influencing his views about segregation. He said shortly before King came to Connecticut that summer, a bus driver ordered him to give up his seat for a white passenger on the way to Atlanta.
"These experiences came fairly close to each other," Carson said. "I think the two things together sharpened his sense of resentment about segregation in the South."
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I have been think about some of the things my mom did to make me happy when I was little. When she woke me for school this is what she said.
" I was up so tiptoe early that the flowers were all pearly as they waited in there places for the son to dry there faces." This gives me a wonderful feeling when I think about my mom . She passed away June 25, 2010.
What are some of the things your mom is doing are did in the pass to make you smile?
Jean Thomas / Johnny Thomas wife
