MLK Born: America's Voice for Justice and Equality

Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 years old when Rosa Parks was arrested and he was chosen to lead the Montgomery bus boycott. He'd been pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for exactly one year. He was new in town, which is partly why the other ministers picked him: he hadn't made enough enemies yet. The boycott lasted 381 days. It worked. Born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, King was the son and grandson of Baptist preachers. He entered Morehouse College at fifteen, was ordained at eighteen, and earned his doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University at 25. His dissertation borrowed heavily from other scholars, a fact that surfaced decades after his death and complicated his academic legacy without diminishing his moral one. Over the next thirteen years, he was arrested 30 times. His home in Montgomery was bombed in 1956, with his wife and infant daughter inside. In 1958, he was stabbed in the chest by a mentally ill woman named Izola Ware Curry at a book signing in Harlem. The blade lodged next to his aorta. His surgeon later told him that a sneeze would have killed him. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover surveilled him constantly, tapped his phones, and sent him an anonymous letter in 1964 that appeared to suggest he should kill himself. The Birmingham campaign in 1963, where police turned fire hoses and dogs on children, produced images that shocked the nation and the world. His "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in August 1963 reached an audience of 250,000 in person and millions on television. He was 35 when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, one of the youngest recipients in the award's history. He spent his final years expanding his focus from racial segregation to poverty and the Vietnam War, positions that alienated former allies and cost him political support. He was 39 when James Earl Ray shot him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He had gone to Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike.