Martin Luther King Jr

Michael King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Baptist preacher Michael King Sr. and former schoolteacher Alberta Williams King. After a 1934 trip to Berlin, his father changed both their names to Martin Luther in honor of the German reformer. King skipped the ninth and twelfth grades, entered Morehouse College at fifteen, and earned his bachelor's degree in sociology in 1948, a Bachelor of Divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, and a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955.

In 1953 he married Coretta Scott; they had four children. Called as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954, he led the 381-day bus boycott that began with Rosa Parks's arrest in December 1955 and ended with the Supreme Court ruling Alabama's segregated bus laws unconstitutional. In 1957 he co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was elected its first president.

King led the Birmingham campaign in 1963, wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail, and on August 28 of that year delivered his I Have a Dream address to roughly 250,000 marchers at the Lincoln Memorial. Time named him Man of the Year, and in 1964, at thirty-five, he became the youngest man at that point to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He helped secure the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, marched from Selma to Montgomery, opposed the Vietnam War in his 1967 Riverside Church speech, and launched the Poor People's Campaign.

He was assassinated by James Earl Ray on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, at age thirty-nine, while supporting striking sanitation workers.

The name Martin comes from the Latin Martinus, derived from Mars, the Roman god of war, with the sense warlike or dedicated to Mars. It is a masculine name carried by saints and reformers across centuries, well suited to a preacher whose nonviolent struggle reshaped a nation.