Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and the best-known leader of the civil rights movement, which from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s overturned legal racial segregation in the American South and won federal protection of Black voting rights. Drawing on Christian teaching and on Mahatma Gandhi's methods of nonviolent resistance, he led campaigns from the Montgomery bus boycott to the march from Selma, gave the "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, aged 39.

King was born on 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, into a family of Baptist preachers. His father, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, was originally named Michael King and changed both his own and his son's names to Martin Luther after a visit to Germany in 1934. Growing up in the segregated South, the young King experienced the humiliations of separate schools, shops and transport. He was a gifted student and entered Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, at fifteen, graduating in 1948.

He then studied at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he read widely in philosophy and theology, including Gandhi and the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, and graduated in 1951. He took a doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University in 1955. A university inquiry in 1991 found that parts of his dissertation had been plagiarised. In Boston he met Coretta Scott, a music student from Alabama; they married in 1953 and had four children.

In 1954 King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. On 1 December 1955 Rosa Parks, a local activist, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. Black leaders called a boycott of the buses and chose the 26-year-old King to lead the new Montgomery Improvement Association. The boycott lasted 381 days. King's house was bombed and he was arrested, but the protest held together through car pools and walking, and it ended in December 1956 after the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The boycott made King a national figure and established nonviolent mass action as the movement's main method.

In 1957 he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a network of Black churches and ministers, and became its president. In 1958 he was stabbed and nearly killed at a book signing in Harlem in New York. The following year he travelled to India to study Gandhi's legacy, and in 1960 he moved back to Atlanta to work full-time for the SCLC and serve as co-pastor at Ebenezer with his father.

The early 1960s brought sit-ins by students, the Freedom Rides and a largely unsuccessful campaign against segregation in Albany, Georgia, in 1961–1962. In the spring of 1963 King and the SCLC turned to Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most rigidly segregated cities in the country. Arrested for defying a court injunction, he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail, a defence of civil disobedience addressed to white clergymen who had urged patience. When the police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor, turned fire hoses and police dogs on marching children and teenagers, the images shocked the nation and the world, and local businesses agreed to desegregate. President John F. Kennedy soon proposed a major civil rights bill.

On 28 August 1963 about 250,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Speaking from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., a century after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, King delivered the speech in which he described his dream of a nation where his children would be judged by their character rather than the colour of their skin. Weeks later, a bomb at a Birmingham church killed four Black girls. The Civil Rights Act, outlawing segregation in public places and discrimination in employment, was passed in July 1964 under President Lyndon B. Johnson. In December that year King, aged 35, received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, then its youngest recipient.

Across much of the South, Black citizens were still kept from voting by literacy tests, intimidation and violence. In early 1965 the SCLC joined local activists and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Selma, Alabama. On 7 March, a day that became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers beat marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. After a federal court allowed it, King led a march of thousands from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, later that month. In August Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which within a few years transformed Black voter registration in the South.

From 1966 King increasingly addressed poverty and segregation in the North. A campaign for open housing in Chicago met violent white crowds and won only limited concessions. Younger activists calling for Black Power questioned his commitment to nonviolence and integration. On 4 April 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, he publicly condemned the Vietnam War, linking it to poverty and militarism at home. The speech cost him the support of Johnson and of much of the press and some civil rights allies. He then began planning a Poor People's Campaign to bring poor Americans of all races to Washington to demand jobs and income.

Throughout these years the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover treated King as a threat. It wiretapped his phones and hotel rooms, with approval from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, tried to link him to communism and in 1964 sent him an anonymous letter that appeared to urge him to kill himself.

In March 1968 King went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking Black sanitation workers. On 3 April he gave a speech in which he said he might not get to the promised land with his listeners. The next evening, 4 April 1968, he was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Riots broke out in more than a hundred American cities. James Earl Ray, an escaped prisoner, pleaded guilty to the killing in 1969 and was sentenced to 99 years; he later recanted, and some members of King's family came to believe he had not acted alone, although a Justice Department review in 2000 found no reliable evidence of a conspiracy. The Fair Housing Act was passed days after his death.

King became the central figure of America's memory of the civil rights movement. A federal holiday in his honour was created in 1983 and first observed in 1986, and a memorial to him opened in Washington in 2011. His speeches and writings, and his insistence that unjust laws could be resisted without violence, have influenced protest movements far beyond the United States. Historians also emphasise that he was one leader of a broad movement built by thousands of local organisers, and that in his last years he was a far more radical and less popular critic of American society than his later image suggests.