Page 18 - IAV Digital Magazine #562

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as
the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the
1963 March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legisla- tion as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in
Atlanta, Georgia, the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a pas- tor, and Alberta Williams King, a for- mer schoolteacher.
Along with his older sister Christine and
younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams, he grew up in the city’s Sweet Auburn neigh- borhood, then home to some of the most prominent and pros- perous African Americans in the country.
A gifted student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was admitted
to Morehouse College, the alma mater of both his father and mater- nal grandfather, where he studied medicine and law.
Although he had not intended to follow in his father’s footsteps by joining the ministry, he changed his mind under the mentorship of Morehouse’s presi- dent, Dr. Benjamin Mays, an influential theologian and outspo- ken advocate for racial equality. After graduat- ing in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree, won a presti- gious fellowship and was elected president of his predominantly white senior class.
The Kings had four
children: Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King and Bernice Albertine King.
The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the
landmark Brown v. Board of
Education decision of 1954.
On December 1,
1955, Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boy- cott that would contin- ue for 381 days.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners. They chose Martin Luther King Jr. as the protest’s leader and official spokesman.
By the time
the Supreme
Court ruled segregat- ed seating on public buses unconstitutional in November 1956, King—heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin—had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational pro- ponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.
King had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that January.
On September 20, 1958, Izola Ware Curry walked into a Harlem department store where King was signing books and asked, “Are you Martin Luther King?” When he replied “yes,” she stabbed him in the chest with a knife. King survived, and the attempted assassina- tion only reinforced his dedication to nonviolence: “The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence if necessary social change is peacefully to take place.”
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine