Born in Atlanta in 1929, Martin Luther King
attended segregated schools in Georgia, graduating high school at
age fifteen. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as
pastors at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. After earning
his BA from Morehouse College in 1948, King spent three years
studying at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. At
Crozer King won a fellowship and enrolled in graduate studies at
Boston University where he met and married Coretta Scott and
graduated in 1955. Always a strong worker for civil rights, in 1955
King accepted leadership of the first black nonviolent
demonstration in the U.S.—a bus boycott lasting 382 days. King
faced jail, bombing, and abuse as a leader of the boycott, but
emerged as an irreplaceable leader in the movement. In 1957 King
was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, an organization formed to provide leadership for the
burgeoning civil rights movement. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail was a
manifesto of the black revolution, and over 250,000 people heard
his "I Have a Dream" speech during the march for civil rights in
Washington, D.C. At age 35 King became the youngest man to receive
the Nobel Peace Prize, turning over the $50,000 in prize money to
further civil rights work. In April of 1968, Martin Luther King was
assassinated while standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis.
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